When Mac sales dropped off in 1985, Bill Gates personally wrote John Sculley suggesting that he license the Macintosh design to companies like Apollo, DEC and Wang, and establish the software as the industry standard. Apple declined, and Microsoft published Windows. Sculley was enraged, and eventually filed suit. After five years, Apple lost, but not before severely damaging its relationship with Microsoft (which accounted for 2/3 of all Mac software sales).
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Member since:2006-01-06
Apple seems to be cautiously shifting strategies from niche to commodity market, now that they're on x86 processors with a UNIX OS ... pretty industry standard. It's interesting that MS dropped VB macro support in Excel for Mac just recently, or else it would have been too easy for many businesses to adopt Macs over Dells in droves.
Edited 2006-08-26 16:14
Member since:2006-07-04
"It's interesting that MS dropped VB macro support in Excel for Mac just recently, or else it would have been too easy for many businesses to adopt Macs over Dells in droves."
Well, it's still possible, in theory, as Mac Excel still supports VBA, and there's no release date for the next version. I read some MacBU blogs a couple weeks ago, and there's still an outside chance that VBA support will continue, but it's very slim. It depends on how great the demand is; apparently, porting the Mac VBA to intel is hard as hell, and the current thinking is that the effort wouldn't be worth it because the demand for VBA on Mac is so small. The effort would also delay the release of the next version of Mac Office, and many Mac users are looking forward to the next version since it'll be a universal binary; and 98% of those users don't care about VBA and wouldn't want any delays due to VBA (I got the 98% figure because I read that less thatn 2% of Mac users use VBA).
Note that since Mac Office98, the object models for Mac Office and Win Office have diverged so macros aren't 100% compatible between the two, and this has gotten worse as time has gone on and the suites have added features unique to themselves.
Member since:2005-11-10
"I don't think it shows that anti competitive practices were what did it for MS. Certainly the IBM compatibility issue was very important and gave legitimacy to the PC"
Nice strawman,but if you look at the actual marketshare of the PC by the late 80s, it is well over 70%. Guess what? MS licensing for DOS was such that if you as a manufacturer wanted to sell DOS on any of your computers, every other PC that you sell as a company had to have a copy of DOS. They were strong arming OEMs first with DOS, and then showelling Windows down every body's throats. That is indeed quit the keen business model, it is however not an approach that deserves my respect.
You can put graphs that have nothing to do with the actual licensing of DOS all you want, next I recommend you also show how the average temperature for each of those years clearly proves that MS was doing nothing uncompetitive.
Edited 2006-08-26 17:38
Member since:2006-04-21
Member since:
2005-10-12
'Revisionist bullshit' is a bit impolite, but its true that the argument has little merit. Go to:
http://www.pegasus3d.com/total_share.html
Go to the years 1982-1989, a little down the page. These are absolute numbers shipped. There is also, a bit further down, a chart of market share.
I don't think it shows that anti competitive practices were what did it for MS. Certainly the IBM compatibility issue was very important and gave legitimacy to the PC.
But you still have to ask about Apple management: how on earth did they expect to meet global demand under their business model? You can see from the chart that they never got much over 10% with the Mac, and that was in the nineties. They couldn't, and must have known they couldn't, supply the level of demand shown in the charts all by themselves. If they did not expect to meet global demand themselves, and if they wouldn't let anyone else help them, then what did they expect to happen? Were people to give up and do without computers?
What in fact happened is that they bought PCs. As they were bound to. As we would have done. You were General Motors in those days. If you had ordered what you needed from Apple, they couldn't have supplied you.
The same thing, by the way, has happened all through Apple's history. They just run out of supply. As evidently they are doing right now.
The business model is not necessarily a problem if you are bound and determined to be a niche player. But people should realise that the niche status is the result of a strategic choice made by the company. It is not mainly due either to anti-competitive machinations by others, or to idiocy on the part of buyers. It is intrinsic to a business model which prevented them from supplying more than a tiny fraction of demand.
Edited 2006-08-26 14:50