Re: Woz is back!

[guenter@student.uni-kl.de (Marvin)]

rubywand@aol.com wrote:

:      Apple II was an accident. The world was dropped into Apple's lap and Apple handed it to the PC clone makers. Apple, Inc. is in a crack now because, rather than establish Apple II as the 'Standard' platform, corporate strategy has been to score in relatively small, high-profit markets. Well, the markets have dried up and most of the new opportunities seem to involve PC.

The greatest accident was to make the Apple II downwards compatible and to
stuff it with a lot of expensive application specific chips. This made the
computer more expensive than others but much better. But other machines
came out which were not so powerful and competed with the Apple II.
Furthermore, the educational and home market was not so large and finally
a clever marketing man got the idea to focus on the more lucrative
business market. Furthermore it was decided that backwards compatibility
and fancy hardware design was not really needed, so these losers killed
just that what makes the Apple II so unique. They locked the IIgs in their
cellar to die, presented a "mutated" stand-alone model and went out to
penetrate the more lucrative business market.

Unfortunately, the competition of the Big Blue and later the Unix machines
was a little to hard, so Apple became never established in the big-cash
markets. Tough luck, guys!

Apple desperately tried to regain their position in the education market
with the Macintosh line. The "cheap" Mac LC with the boon of 8-bit A2
emulation appeared in these days. They also tried to sell many of the
old black/white Macs by dropping the prices significantly. It was
obvious that the company was already in agony in these days, and a
cheap Low-cost Mac with 8-bit emulation was just not enough to regain
the confidence of the customers.

With the PowerMac, they finally managed to make something new. While
this was still no compatibility for old A2 users, they invested
money to get hardware compatibility for PC's. I guess the PowerMac is
the reason why Apple still "hangs on by its fingernails", but
the PC and the Unix machines are now standard and a PowerMac is just
a nice toy for a few people. But I think they got a break and can now
have a look at the changes in the market: 

- The PC is now the standard in the home market. The policy for home
  markets have always been to sell people the worst of the worst. Since
  a large advertisement campaign would be necessary to end that, Apple
  has no change to regain the home market easily.

- The business and (to some extent) the education markets are now
  trashing their PC's (Applause!) and convert to Unix workstations,
  mostly SUN's. Here may be a potential market for an Unix-compatible
  Super Apple II, but I think it must have more 'horsepower' than a
  gs with GNO/ME :).

- The old AppleII community still exists. While they represent only a
  small segment of the home and business markets, they are now
  matured to a segment with a lot of cash. I have considered the Apple
  II as an investition in the future. Many poor students who have had
  barely enough money for a new IIe card and who have pirated tons of
  software, are now graduated employees. They have enhanced their gs
  UP TO THE MAX and legalized much of their warez. It's important to
  keep the AppleLink of these persons alive! Don't scare them! If
  they convert platforms, they won't convert to a Mac. They will go PC!

These are the facts. The final decision must Apple make on their own! :)

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`The reason we don't sell billions and             __
billions of Guides,' continued Harl,      |\/| /\ |__||  | | |\  |
after wiping his mouth, `is the expense.  |  ||__||\  |  | | | \ |
What we do is we sell one Guide billions  |  ||  || \  \/  | |  \|
and billions of times. And we don't sell
to penniless hitch hikers. What a
stupid notion that was!'

Need Apple II gs software? Visit ftp.uni-kl.de...

Visit the Vogon hold at http://www.student.uni-kl.de/~guenter/vogon.html
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