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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1534
Apple: Back to Performa-Land?
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
January 14th 2003
The dead hand of John Sculley points from the grave, thinks Businessweek.
Too many cool products? Too many products, period? Not enough meat on the bones?
That's the view of Alex Salkever at Businessweek, who compares the ever-widening Apple
product line-up with the bloated product line initiated by the former, unlamented
Apple CEO John Sculley.
Salkever points to the different businesses Apple has gone into in the last few year.
Apple Retail. Web hosting. iCal on-line. A dizzying array of software offerings [not
even counting offshoot Filemaker Inc.]. Plus the product quadrant is well and truly
gone: there's now a new iMac alongside the old; an education/consumer eMac; and iPod.
What's more, the article claims, Jobs didn't address the Power Mac 'problem' in his
keynore [although he did on CNBC, saying Apple had "great desktop" products coming].
Power Macs, the pro market, are crucual to Apple's bottom line, the story says. And
with the emphasis on 'cool, sales may suffer, Salkever thinks.
He also writes about Apple's so-called education problem, where Apple sales have
fallen to 21%. Salkever also cites the 180 employees laid off by Apple in their last
fiscal quarter. His advice? Hang onto the "cash cows" of the Mac line-up. And don't
diversify your core business excessively.
Analysis: We would disagree with a lot of this. First, 180 employee redundancies is
miniscule compared with the savage executions wrought by Dell in Europe in 2002, and
the firing squads deployed by HP-Compaq in Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific
last year. Apple has been one major tech firm which hasn't resorted to large bundles
of pink slips.
Second, one coold blame Spindler or Amelio more readily for the ridiculous
proliferation of Performa and Power Mac models in the mid-1990s. Newton was the wrong
product at the wrong time, but Apple should have held onto that longer [one of Jobs'
errors]. The NIG [Not Invented Here] mentality does still persist, albeit only
partially, at Cupertino.
Third, Apple's products aren't so proliferate. And, Cube aside [which was simply
overpriced], they all sell either solidly or spectacularly. Apple Retail has come
good. Final Cut dominates its sector. Filemaker has a nice niche on Wintel and Mac.
XServe is doing stunningly well.
This all reminds me of an article Adam C. Engst wrote a long, long time ago in
Tidbits: namely, that Apple has to compete for 'shelf space'. This was in the days
where Apple shared racks with Wintel, granted. But while it clearly isn't possible for
Apple to cover every product segment, it's got an entry in most of the important ones;
ones that make money. And, broadly speaking, it's got the best product on the market
in many of those categories.
No, today's Apple line-up doesn't have the simplicity of the original product
quadrant. But are we heading back to Performa-land? No. No way.
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