>
>There is no longer any money in (desktop) hardware. ..
>I was shocked this afternoon to discover that a
>dealer here in town is selling 16-meg SIMMs for around $200 CDN (!), and
>1-gig drives for maybe $260.
I don't understand your worldview. You are saying low prices <==>
manufacturers and retailers cannot make any money.
Therefore, WalMart and Taiwain do not exist -- ?
>
>(Are there _any_ remaining technical advantages in Sys7.5 over Win95?
sure. you might as well assert NT is not 'technically better' than 7.5.2.
Copland will be mor robust than all.
>It's been a long time since I heard anti-Windows arguments that didn't
>boil down to either taste or morality. Not that these are bad reasons,
>but the Microsoft product I've had the most contact with is Word, which
>frankly kicks the technical crap out of WordPerfect
A small point, this is not true. Certainly on the mac versions, Word is a
technical joke and WP is reasonably clean. On the PC versions, I would
suggest WP is a more 'robust, professional' product whereas W has 'more
bells and whistles'. photosop vs corel draw, to exaggerate.
Certainly, you could not say W hands-down kicks the crap out of WP, IMHO.
>.. There is just no
>place for Apple to add value to hardware -- except in niches where the PPC
>outperforms the Pentium (e.g. Photoshop, evidently).
>
Apples various niches are pretty big. 'the design industry' is not
trivial. Is your statement above like saying "pht .. BMW, the only thing
THEY'LL ever do is sell cars to upper-middle-class yuppies .. as if BMW
will ever be a real company like GM". What's the point .. that Microsoft
is a 1000 times bigger than apple and always will be? So what?
>Solution: dump the hardware, port MacOS to Intel, and go after vertical
>markets like NeXTstep and OS/2 have managed to do (successfully, or so
>they claim). I'll bet this happens inside of 2 years, although they
>should have done it by last year.
>
etc.
It's just very hard to predict. Sure, they might do that. Sure, they
might do something else. Copland might be so good everything will change.
Someone might buy apple tomorrow. CHRP may or may not change everything.
those cheap 'internet computers' may change everything. Someone may write
a better graphical front end to linux that changes everything. A killer
ap on one or the other pkatform may come along. Your solution above is
neither definitive nor obvious, particularly necessary nor inevitble.
>> So couldn't you say the same about Apple's *devalued* stock? How come the
>> Netscape
>> investors are dumb, but the ones who dumped Apple are smart?
>
>We know how Apple ought to be making money
1, business is just not that simple
>(selling computers at a
>profit),
2, not necessarily, and many companies that have done so have hopelessly failed
> and can tell that they aren't currently doing it.
3, regular peons like you, I or everyday investors are clueless as to whats
really going on inside any big public company
>(Btw, why did the joyless and irritating "Mission: Impossible" have much
>more prominent Netscape product-placement than Apple product-placement?
>The TV commercials make it look like a fairly cozy Apple co-promotional
>deal.)
What do you mean by 'fairly cozy' ? If you weren't aware of this, there
are numerous feature-film product placement agencies, which you can easily
find in the yellow pages in NY, LA and Chicago - just like ad agencies.
You telephone one and say 'what do you have coming up?' 'oh, Lethal Gun 4,
ok, I'm calling from BSB, we do Wendy's' 'OK so we can have Mel-n-Steve
having Wendy's wrappers on their desk in the 49th minute of the film, and
how much would that be' 'OK, $150,000 and $450,000 extra to mention it in
Wedny's print ads, $750,000 for the TV spots, good Ill get back to you'
Youll notice SGI in 'twister', just as one of hundreds of examples.
As for netscape, i may be mistaken but didnt they actually change the
animated 'N' logo to somethign else ? I thought I remembered noticing
that.
>
>--
>Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu
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