Linked by Aaron Vegh on Wed 5th May 2004 19:37 UTC
Is there no larger contingent of armchair corporate CEOs than Apple fanatics? Let's examine the so-called wealth of opinion out there and see how it measures up.
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Apple is doing a classic shift to a high-end niche market in response to the rising quality of commodity products.
they have clearly taken the decision that they will not compete with low-end vendors (i think Steve Jobs said this in a conference call recently), so where can they go?
come on, this is old buisness school stuff: when commodity products improve, the high-end products must shift themselves up-market to maintain a differentiation.
this is why it was so important for Apple to trumpet things like 64-bit computers. they help them move higher up and further apart from those less expensive (but pretty darn good) Dells.
when Dells go 64-bits, Apple will have to think of somethign else to move up-market again. etc. it is neverending.
the problem (read "The Innovator's Dilemma") is traditionaly that consumers will stop moving upward with the high end vendor. they'll switch down to something that is still cheap, and has gotten pretty darn good.
even today ... how many choose Dells and how many choose a dual G5?