Why Apple Can’t Afford A Mistake…

I think Apple’s main mistake in the mid 80s was allowing Steve Jobs to leave. When he left, the company was seemingly in bad shape. However, less than two years later they were on top again because of desktop publishing. This was an initiative that Jobs spearheaded. It just took time for it to bear fruit.

Apple’s current success is due to a lot of synergy between products they have been making for the past ten years. By letting Jobs go, they became adrift and stopped having his vision to invest in technology development that will come together in the future.

Forget the mountain. 

Apple is a computer company and is ranked against other computer companies.  Now 4th in size, closing in on Gateway to be #3.

Take a hard look at what really matters to the Mac faithful, or even the newbie user.  It’s a good design, quality parts and local support from an actual Apple employee.

It’s also Apple selling at a fair price and investing part of those revenues into R & D - for hardware and software.  It’s surprising the industry with new ideas and products, like the ipod, iTunes and the iPhone.

All the neat things that make Apple what it is would probably fall by the wayside if Apple was to focus on climbing that mountain - like the level of customer service they offer.

And let’s face it - why is it important to outdo MS?  Right now Apple is very profitable, they have sufficient cash in the bank to hold them through a downturn in the economy, and their market cap is about twice what Dell’s is.  Name a hardware company that is close to Apple in these areas.

Microsoft Vista has been nothing short of disastrous

That’s a ridiculous overstatement.  But less so than this one:

Apple has the potential to unseat Microsoft from atop the mountain that once could not be climbed.

Sorry, but this is all utter delusion.  I’m glad Apple is doing well, but after 10 years of steady growth and the media constantly fellating Steve Jobs and his products, their OS market share is still <6?.  They’ve got a LONG way to go, and whether or not it’s a good thing if they do get there eventually is a highly debatable point.

“For the Mac to win, Microsoft has to lose” sentiment is an old, tired, beaten battlecry, folks. It no longer holds true these days.

I know that is the current zeitgeist, for that is what Steve Jobs spake that fateful MacWorld, but if i am honest and lay my reputation such as it isn’t on the line here, I believe that.

Not that Apple can or should wish to conquer the entire personal computer ecosystem. Those who require hardware flexibility above that which Apple offers are not served by Apple’s products. Duh. But Apple will to some extent improve its reach in the computer markets as more people realise that their specific hardware choice is not as integral to their computing happiness as the component vendors have trained them to think.

An apple that formed a monopoly would inevitably lose the qualities that make Apple worth watching closely, as we with hundreds of comments on this site (losers, i call us, collectively) can avow. Those qualities come down to competing: striving to create products that compete on their merit in a market sadly lacking in that ethos. This is why the iPhone is exciting, it’s a fundamentally Apple-like foray into territory unknown but strangely reminiscent of the Microsoft universe we loathe if we know anything about it.

It is fundamentally against that universe or weltanschauung that Apple is competing. For every mind infested with the joy of purchasing on merit alone, or merit and ethics, Microsoft loses. For every person who discovers the wider, more exciting world of open source-based competitive *nixiness, who realises what can be achieved through high quality compliance to open standards, that is a loss for Microsoft and its thought control.

My experience over the last 37 months, since I Switched (thanks coconut battery), has been an eye-opening exploration of this Other Realm, to appreciate quite how anticompetitive the basic scheme of Microsoft’s functioning is, how many improvements and how much diversity and progress could be achieved in the antithetic industry where competition actually happens. Apple has not always acted to help this, but we have recently seen its support of open standards growing impressively. We can only hope it continues to improve. For now, open standards support benefits apple as much as everyone else. When/if apple becomes too successful, that will change.

My dearest wish for the computer industry is that we can find an alternative to Microsoft as the dominant force controlling the way computers are sold and information is shared. Apple is making some progress here, but cannot take us all the way because past a certain point it become the vengeful tyrant, the enemy of us all, monopolism, Microsoft.

I’m seeing lots of new users to the Mac. Especially college students with MacBooks. A large majority seem very impressed ... especially if they’ve lugged a Windows laptop for the past year or so with their weight and battery issues.