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... then look at Sony: http://www.macopinion.com/columns/macskeptic/02/06/07/index.html ....................... SonyStyle.... Sony is a huge company with fingers in all sorts of pies. They have their own music publishing division, they make movies, they make home entertainment equipment like televisions and stereos, VCRs, car stereos, PDA (the PalmOS based Clie), digital cameras, camcorders, photo printers, DVD players, satellite receivers, PVRs, home theatre systems, Walkmen, Diskmen, MiniDisk, MemoryStick and of course, computers and peripherals and the Playstation series of game systems. Notice something about this - Sony makes every part of the digital hub. Don't think people should play games on their computer? No problem - buy a Playstation. Sony gets you either way. Play some music published by Sony Music on your Walkman. (...) But here's the thing: Sony has the ability to do something Apple simply cannot - they can actually build not only a digital hub - but provide a complete set of integrated home entertainment components. Moreover, they have the market presence which gets people (yes, even Mac owners) to come in and look. Apple has been opening Apple stores in the US, but Sony has had Sony Stores all over Canada for years. Sony was one of the first companies (yes, ahead of Apple) to use Firewire on their computers. Why? Because they make camcorders. If you want to edit DV on a laptop, until Apple caught up, you had one choice: Sony. They created their own logo for it: iLink, and promoted it as if it were their own idea because they knew that the customer who is buying a camcorder just doesn't care who invented the technology - they just want to edit a movie and get it onto tape. While we've been obsessing with Microsoft (who doesn't make computers) and Dell (whose hardware is at best average), we missed companies like Sony, Acer and others who actually are serious competition to Apple. This sort of 'getting hit by the train while looking the wrong way' happens a lot in the Mac community. ....................... ---> jab | commie | http://commie.oy.com "Less is moo." --- The Holy Mad Cow
