Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

May 24

There's so much in sheer volume of press being thrown at Apple that between Time, NewsWeek, MacWeek, ZDnet, Forbes, and BusinessWeek that an entire month could be spent focusing on the popular press' efforts to buy into the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. But as I noted last week, the only ones of interrest to me - are the ones that are getting a ton of the MacJihad's backlash crap thrown into their lap. You know the style of journalism that I'm talking about - the one's that don't just regurgitate what Apple's PR sheets say as some kind of sell-out pablum that wouldn't know critical journalism if it came out on the magazine rack and bit them squarely on the ass. Well, the one's that seem to be most dubious with the MacJihad set - and the most even handed and suspicious of what is really going on - are the financial publications. Well fast on the heels of the Forbes piece, comes BusinessWeek with so many good points that have been echoed here - and evidence on how bad things actually have become - that it makes Bush and his thousand look conservative by all estimates. What I'm foreshadowing, is that this week will highlight the big cluster busters that were present in the BuisnessWeek coverage, which would otherwise be lost in the margins of Steve Jobs' and his ominprecent soundbites and sidebar interviews. The bottem line? There's plenty of good dirt. So lets start shoveling with the state of the union concerning the developer community. It's no secret after the Intuit debacle that they're in deep doo-doo - but I had no idea what the firm figures were regarding that doo-doo. Well, here's the straight poop: in 1996, 70% of the software publishers out there were developing for the MacOS as well as Windows. That number has plummited faster than a clumsy tightrope walker to the bone-crushing depths of 20% today according to estimates of M.Murphy of "The Overpriced Stockletter fame" via BusinessWeek. This is great stuff, because it not only shows that the mainstays that have developed for Apple are loosing footing in the retail column - but that they have been running faster away from Apple than even my most conservative estimates. Not to be forgotten against this malestrom of a lifeboat drill, is how the remainder have fared sticking with Apple. Well, not too well. Intuit's losses were just the tip of the iceberg. About 6-9 months ago, Steve Jobs' was on stage talking about how the new Apple liked games. Yes no matter how obvious the entertainment software gap is between the PC and the Mac, the new warm and fuzzy not dying in the slightest Apple told covention goers that with the new "superior" MacQuake and Myst - that the entertainment community was securly behind Apple. Well, fast forward to today and what do we have to show for it? Well Quake, according to Barrett Alexander - director of business development for ID software via BusinessWeek, sold a grand total of 50 thousand copies since it's release last year to the Mac set. What an underwhelming number of sales to the rabid fanbase that was just itching to play games on their Mac! I thought that the new support shown to their dying platform was going to show the 90% of us Wintel users that they could be just as entertaining - and as lucritive - as any PC market. Guess not, because those numbers were so embarassing that ID isn't even bothering with a Quake II port - which is of course burining up the sales charts as we speak. But the point isn't that all work and no play makes Mac users a boring lot - it's that Steve is already coming up short in the results column behind his grand edicts of direction and focus. How much further he blurs the lines of reality will be crystal clear in the next few days.

May 25
The thing I love between the reality distortion field with the Steve Jobs factor, and the outright misconceptions and myths that are present with the MacJihad have to be the overt disparity between their claims and the reality of the situation that only seems to find it's way to the investment community - and the average computer user who is quite happy using a box with Windows 95 on it. One of the most boring, repetitive and just plain tired arguments that have even gone as far as Ralph Nadir and his air-bag baby killing ilk, is that Apple is the innovator - and everyone else didn't do anything but knock them off (even Xerox I suppose). Aside from recalling the efforts of the Apple Lisa which predated Apple's Mac, Visicorp, Digital Research's GEM, Commodore and GEOS, and anything else that drew windows since the Xerox Alto and Star - you only have to look at the massive gap in R&D that is present between Apple and Microsoft to wonder what the hell is the MacJihad smoking? It must be from the Ganja clubs in San Francisco because here's some tantalizing numbers from BusinessWeek to confir what is REALLY happening these days. The now well-pruned and otherwise brain-dead minds of Apple labs, the fine fellows who believe that floppys are just a luxury for the buget set comes a whopping 300 million dollar budget for their work this year. Now somewhere in there I suppose there's enough to make a 200 million dollar OS, but just how robust is that against the competition in Redmond Washington? Well lessie - perhaps the reason that NT is selling so well, and the reviews of Windows 98 are so favorable "could" have something to do with Microsoft's mere 2.4 BILLION dollar R&D budget. Hmmm! Me - notes - discrepency! Now just how "innovative" is Apple supposed to be in comparrision? After all - if Microsoft is just copying, then they must be doing one hell of a sloppy job to need all that money, just to knock someone else off with a budget so small. Could it be - that gosh gee-whiz - Microsoft actually develops and creates new products? Now whose spending money to be innovative in the grand scheme of things? Well I guess Apple really doesn't have to innovate very much - because it's really all about strategy. And according to BusinessWeek and Apple their new strategy is to push the Mac to the consumers by "capturing more than our share of newbies". Well - no sense actually making anything new or anything - let's just sell outdated crap to people who don't know any better. How innovative can you get? Let's just sucker some newbies and call it a thriving strategy for a business now mired in a marketplace that likes either a ton of new features that works with the majority of software out there - or at least get a VW under 1000 dollar one of those that at least has a floppy and can access the files that are carried to and fro, from work to home. What the heck. "We're innovative"! Well E.G. Galzer Tech analysis with Fortis Advisers via BusinessWeek doesn't seem to think so - and I would have to concur. Most people don't care about Blue-Retro-Jetson Macs, they just want to get work done with tools made by companies not on the rocks. But these last two points are best saved for another day.

May 26

I've looked over the Newsweek article and noted the gushing praise for design for it's new iMac. And yes I'd have to admit that it's the least ugliest Mac to come by in a few years in spite of the fact that all in one designs aren't exactly an easy sell even in Apple's own sales results for the 5200 PowerMac series. However, gross sales potential aside, many things stuck out as retro about the coverage as well as the design of this new Mac. If you're a collector of media, you may have in your posession - or at least seen - the premeire copies of MacWorld magazine as well as the initial issue of NeXTworld magazine. In both instances there's the wunderkind of the computer world - Steve Jobs - learing, leaning, or cradeling his offspring that puts the idea forward that this is his baby. Not that a ton of people worked on the project that would make a group photo look something like the pictures garnered after a Super Bowl win. But like the usual media coverage, everyone likes the quarterback, and the John Elway for this year is Steve Jobs - and don't you forget it. So true to this bit of cultural history, is Steve Jobs taking up a whole whopping page, breast-feeding his Aqua Marine technology. The rest of the fluff peice is devoted to talking about the design, the designers, and how it's poised to re-invigorate the computer market - much in the same way the identical pundits talked about how the world was just dying to get their hands on a workstation that was painted black, regardless of the featureset, the speed, and what the public was buying at the time anyway. Well, NeXT irony about the floppy situation aside, every point that would relevant to the average buyer was pretty much tossed out in favor of soundbites from the "cool" crowd. The NewsWeek coverage stands in stark contrast to BusinessWeek once again which notices the super-cool design as far as it took them to soundbite James Poyner of the Oppenheimer & CO. Quote - "Consumers aren't going to fall in love with a computer because of what it looks like - am I buying art, or a computer?". Good question James, because BusinessWeek then continues with the obvious NeXT parallels that I've pointed out time and time in the past. What's most disturbing to me about all this - is that it's indicative that the same retro philosophy behind the design of the iMac is walking hand in hand with the media exposure, the concept, and reason to push it as revolutionary. All if this is a re-run from at least 2 times in the last decade. And you know what? I don't even have to calculate how the market will respond - it's so deja-vu. The outcome later this year: the market will have a handful of rabid users buy it because they'll buy anything - including Newtons - because they have too much money, and then the rest of the public will yawn. The product is too expensive against the more widely used boxes out there - regardless of their speed - now selling for half the iMac's final price after taxes and manditory add-ons - and will even be in worse of a position come Xmas when the 650 dollar PC's (850 with monitor) debut. Following a massively misguided jugement call in inventory and production - Apple will take a massive monitary bath, tell Wall Street that they were too ahead of their time with the design, and then put a floppy into the damn thing and remarket it at a lower price too late to make people give a shit. They will then offer massive discounts on the remaining inventory and hope for the best after channel loading the hell out of it with advance orders - which will never move without serious bloodletting. Then they'll announce that they got it right - and claim other esoteric bits of hype regarding features into the limelight. None of this will be effective after everyone's finished buying their computers for the year, and the public will instead watch the latest generation of Intel, AMD, and Cyrix toys roll out for the next wave of sales. In the meantime, Apple's margins will sink futher into obscurity against a backdrop of voo-doo economics from Apple's quarterlys until there's a massive unpredicted loss in revenue when it all catches up with them ala 1996 and 1997 (ironic since those years were mired in the failure of the 5200 PowerMac, in spite of accolades). Problem is, this time they don't have the cash flow or even the war-chest to deal with it given their razor thin profit margins indicative of a VERY bad cash-flow position. Sometime around the following massive waves of layoffs to follow, all hell will break loose with several bizzare outcomes. They could get aquired for some of the remaining tech that is interresting like Quicktime etc. Or - they could switch gears and make Wintels (doubtful with Steve in charge). Between becoming a software company and falling into NeXTsoftware obsurity and irrelevance (like they could be any less relevant now), they could find themselves taking on water more than any layoffs or cut-backs could bilge-pump them into sustainability. That's when we probably see an Atari like implosion the likes of which Sunnyvale and Cuppertino hasn't seen since 1984. The last projected scenario is a repeat from earlier columns - but just chalk it up to emphasizing why this site is called the Apple Doomsday Clock.

May 27

Taking a breather from BusinessWeek observations - another Mac-friendly bites the bullet - and then the dust. Umax just took a bath from it's attempts to wrangle realistic sales of it's Mac Clones in light of the outragous licensing agreement which forced every other clone-builder out of the business. Well, in spite of the MacJihad's crowing about how the MacClone market was alive because of Umax's efforts - they can pretty much throw that argument into the nearest landfill because that's where the remaining inventory of Umax Mac clones are heading. Apart from the offical release that they will be exiting the Mac clone market, I particularly liked the quote provided via MacWeek from Jung-Huei, Umax's finance manager - "Almost everybody suffered losses from Making computers for Apple". This makes for a very interresting non-sequitor against the excuse provided from Steve Jobs about why Apple put the thumbscrews to the clone licenses in the first place. Almost a year ago Apple screwed every friend it had, under the guise of loosing money on lost Mac sales. Looks like those sales were really losses and what ever Apple can find to salvage out of the licenses are going to be marginal at best. But then Apple never lied to it's user base - or trumpted up excuses to justify it's bizzare logic before. Nah, not Apple - and certainly not Steve Jobs. Lord no!

May 28

Back to BusinessWeek and this time there's a tripple header relvealed in outright wierdness and jaded perspective by my favorite punching bag - Steve Jobs. This time it's in the form of an interview which reveals a lot of pure dellusion that I could have only hoped to hear from his lips at an Northern California bar. Well, try knocking this one back - from BusinessWeek's May 25th issue is this morrsel explaining what Apple is doing that Steve proports the rest of the industry is not doing. According to Jobs, "what the industry stopped doing is targeting the consumer PC sector of the market". Well, that "could" be true looking at how Apple thew the Apple II market to the free winds in the 80's and on numerous attempts tried to foist the Mac to the business sector with lamentable results. Unfortunately with modern sentaments from Steve about everyone else - he's coming up just a few gray-matter cells short of reality. I mean get-serious, what the hell are the sub 1 thousand dollar Wintels marketed to? Research labrotories for modeling weather dynamics? Christ Steve, get a clue! Granted they don't have mice with light-bulbs in them, or look like a reject from Pee Wee Herman's playhouse, but I somehow think that the market strategy is just a tad further along than the mere case design. I suppose Intel would also have to be targeting the business market with it's new line of low-budget, medium-horsepower, Pentiums that are heralding the sub 750 dollar PC's due out this fall. No what we're seeing is Steve trying to score historial revisonism in the present just as he did with the NeXT and it's "personal workstation" market. If the current climate treats your product like a leaper - than redefine the playing field to your own rules. But as we've seen for the last decade - the majority of the computing public isn't playing by his rules anymore - regardless of how pompous he can be in redefining it.

May 29

Finally, we get to hear something about the logic behind Steve Jobs about his latest attempt to get rid of the floppy disk - a decade after his last feeble attempt with the NeXT. In the world according to Jobs "people aren't thinking clearly - hardly anybody backs up anyway - alot of software comes out on CD ROM". Well, I guess 2 out of three ain't bad - but isn't it nice of Steve to tell the public they're full of shit and this is the way things should be? Even better, he's telling everyone what they're doing in spite of what he assumes they're doing. Sure I'm not backing up my laptop onto floppies, but it's nice to take a file from work to home - or to another computer from time to time. Of course I only should really be giving half credit to the CD ROM idea since it's true that software does come out on CD ROM, several utilities of late have fit well onto floppies and the company I'm still with requires one to install it's CD ROM based offering. Oh well no sense looking around - it's official. All software comes out on CD ROM. Steve has spoken, and the rest of the market will just have to get used to his idea of reality. Pitty that reality has never quite gotten into his court because honestly, Steve doesn't use computers that much. His use of the NeXT was limited to e-mail and some basic word processing. That's half the reason that he uses an IBM ThinkPad now because he needs that version of NeXTmail running. Otherwise he's cut off from the only marginal software that he actually bothers to use. So what do you do when your CEO is a newbie to the product he builds? Suffer the indignity of buying expenive non-standard floppy drives and printers because they somehow don't fit how the world is supposed to work. Whether or not the rest of the world will agree has already got a decade of sales results tied into it, so I don't really need to beat this point into the ground any futher. The idiocy speaks for itself.

May 30

The last soundbite of the interview found in the pages of BusinessWeek is a doozy. Regarding Steve Jobs' public perception about Apple - quote - "they're seeing us win, by the customer reactions, by the sales, the profits, that we can run our business well". Good God! Is Steve looking at his own SEC numbers about his dwindling sales or anything these days? Somehow your average CEO might be expected to do at least this minor exercise in observation - but I suppose there's new rules to be applied to the title of "interm CEO". Certainly there's indications pointing otherwise. "Seeing us win", runs against the SEC publicly disclosed numbers that have been highlighted in the financial community about the dire marketshare, and the sales that are massively lower than even the previous disaster of a year- and the looming forecast of 50% sales overall compared with the preceeding year. The previous quarter sales blip is only noticed by people upgrading their current Macs - since no one is acutally leaving the Wintel camp. The profits aren't nearly as noticible as how pale they compare to their operating costs. And all of the above is supposed to indicate that Apple knows how to run it's business well? What the hell is going on here? Well, it's the same bizzare rah-rah logic that pervaded NeXT arround 1991 when the NeXTstation was introducted and they had all those "advance sales". Those "sales" were in fact upgrades to the otherwise intolerably slow NeXTcubes - and came in the form of motherboard purchases. Naturally this little factoid didn't become offically disclosed until more than a year later. It did make NeXT seem like they "might" have gotten their shit together - but it didn't fool the development community. Somhow I doubt the upgrade with the present less-than-niche conumer base is going to cause a stampede of developers back to the Apple camp as well. Lord knows the profits are so infantesimal that only a 3 digit profit will make anyone think that Apple's not on the rocks, but the MacJihad like bullshit and have been rambling on about the meager crap-pile so much that Steve has obviously taken notice - or is at least believing his own distortion field. Somehow I suspect that he's more or less engaging in his big lie marketing push to make sure everyone thinks Apple will be around a bit longer, and will scrape together more than 2 grand to buy his products. Since he's gotten Apple back into secrecy mode - with iMacs under non-disclosure agreements and hidden under blankets - the whole idea that people have noticed that Apple can run their business well is the big conundrum. I mean how is an endless parade of joy-joy PR releases supposed to make them seem successful when the SEC disclosed sales numbers are burried in the pages of Wall Street anylists? Well, obviously they not supposed to be indicating the truth about their fiscal situation, since they've already mentioned that their new target focus is "newbies" and the "consumer" niche. Why bother selling to educated consumers that ask too many questions? Certainly, I just fell out of the demographics, but where does that leave Apple's future customer base? Squarely in the sucker catagory.