[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: The apple 2, the PC, and the clones
Supertimer opined:
What has really driven
innovation and an explosion in the PC market that has driven
Apple down below 10% market share in recent years has
absolutely nothing to do with business. It is the home market.
Yup, the market that Apple had, could have kept, but ignored.
I agree with your first sentance, but your second is nonsense. While
Apple had a presence in the home, don't forget that the home is where
the cheap computers ruled: Commodore, Atari, and where TI, Coleco, and
Radio Shack sought to rule.
Commodore and Atari lost the home market, but not to Apple. The home
market was lost to the PC, and it was in the days of the 386 that it was
lost.
The PC captured the home market when the "clones" did what IBM tried to
do with the Junior. A machine that allowed you to bring home your work
and finish it off in the surroundings of your family, and also offered
great color and sound for games. Once the VGA and SoundBlaster was
there, the PC was a game machine as well as a productivity box. And ID
is the company that saw that and took off on it.
The strange thing is, that the Tandys, Compaqs and Dells of the day took
exta hardware to be the great game machine that the IIgs could have
been, if it only had two things: software, and more speed.
It started several years ago when AMD became a player in the
PC market. Lesser CPU manufacturers like Cyrix and IDT and
Rise had come and gone but when AMD introduced the K6-2,
decent sub-$1000 PCs with good gaming capabilities became
available and the home market exploded.
You're off by about 10 years here.
Once this happened,
Intel had to re-evaluate its strategy and competitive pricing
between the two has kept PC prices low. But the K6-2 was
only the beginning. When the Athlon was released and climbed
to 1Ghz and the Pentium III could not match it, AMD and Intel
started to battle it out for the speed crown and the home user
benefitted. Powerful computers sparked advanced gaming
which fueled development of powerful graphics cards.
The PC is where it is today because of the HOME users NOT
corporate America.
Exactly. But it took IBM creating a great corporate machine (386 PC plus
VGA) to give a base to create a great home machine.
After all, why do you need an Athlon
XP 2200+ or a Pentium IV 2.5Ghz to access Outlook, Excel,
Word, and Powerpoint when really a 200Mhz Pentium could
do (and slower in some companies).
The home market is the driving force of PC technological
innovation and Apple really missed the boat when it failed to
deliver an affordable yet powerful home computer.
The IIgs was that machine, but it didn't have the needed productivity
and game software to make it.
Roy