On Wed, 29 May 1996, Bill Hutten wrote:
> What is wrong with you anyway?
Well, since I more or less stopped being an ethical nihilist (too easy;
hence philosophically uninteresting), I started being an
operating-systems nihilist and devil-advocating apologist for the overall
goodness of the Wintel monopoly. Interestingly enough, on the Internet
the latter seems to piss off more people than the former :)
> Do you just pull these ideas out of thin
> air? fuuggggg....
Yes. Well, that and the Associated Press newsfeed that comes packaged as
the Winnipeg Free Press each morning here. Apple is, by the way,
cancelling _half_ of their models next year and "concentrating on the
Internet" (thus advancing their business plans all the way to what they
should have been doing in 1993, which is still an improvement over living
in 1989 forever). Given the fact that (i) Apple's hardware no longer
appears to be as reliable as third-tier PC clones circa 1990; (ii)
Apple's own clones are beating the crap out of them, price/quality-wise,
or so anecdotal evidence suggests; and (iii) there is no longer any such
thing as "paying extra for a premium-quality computer", now that Intel
has monopolized the motherboard business and Dell and Gateway are selling
precisely the same high-end guts as everybody else; it seems that Apple
should just go ahead and cancel the other half of their models. They
should also license the hell out of all the wacky speculative technology
they aren't ever going to bring to market themselves in a coherent way,
and just put their full resources into their brand-name OS, which is the
only thing about Apple that anybody can seriously defend anymore
(personally, I think it's at best cute and at worst drastically
underfeatured, but as you said, let's not start that again).
> Apple is an $11 billion/year company that sold approx 1.3 _million_
> PowerPCs in the last 3 months.....they have _no_ long-term debt, access to
> about $1 billion in cash, ...
If things were that simple, the stock wouldn't be sitting at half the
value it was a year ago. And if the stock was seriously _undervalued_ at
the moment (i.e., if the company wasn't in fact as stagnant and
dysfunctional as the price suggests), somebody would have bought them out
in a flash.
Or take an entirely independent argument: it's always going to cost
Apple more to build hardware than your average PC company. The margins
on PCs below the top-of-the-line sucker-bait are extremely low.
Therefore, Apple machines are always going to have to cost somewhat
more. The only reason for paying more for hardware is added value of
some kind. The only "added value" that Apple has to offer is their OS --
and that same value is now being added by Power Computing, which is
selling cheaper machines with better service. This looks like a pretty
airtight argument for cancelling all Apple hardware.
> "buying whatever comes from companies that don't treat them with open
contempt"
>
> .....that would be......uhhhh, _Microsoft_ ?
Yes. Although I think the early history of Apple is better characterized
as "total indifference and ignorance" of the business market, rather than
"open contempt"; the latter term may be partly a result of my confusing
Apple-user-culture with Apple-corporate-culture. But I don't think it's
totally false, either (e.g., dumb little things like never getting
impact printing to work at decent speeds on the Mac -- to which you're
about to say, "Who cares? Laser printing is much better!" Which is true,
unless you actually run a business and have to produce multiple-copy
invoices. Which I wouldn't have thought of, but then I don't run an
$11 billion/year computer company.)
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu