Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

August 31

Well it would appear that the scene is still ugly around the license camp. Motorola is being denied it's ability to put out the computers that they displayed to rave reviews at the expo. Besides the obvious jerking around for their customer base about the license to OS8, now they are being hit with denials on the hardware license as well. This is very interresting. I don't think it's been standard practice for - say - Compaq to screw Intel, but this is the message that is being sent by the current bru-ha-ha. At least I don't know how happy Motorola, a company that prides itself in being able to keep it's customers happy on the order of HP or IBM to suddenly send people down the street to get OS8 at full price - or to say "never mind" to everyone who may have placed advance orders for CHRP machines. I do know that unless Apple has started making Power PC processors themselves, or has found another person capable of making these chips - that payback could be one helluva bitch.

September 1
Labor day, and the sounds of people giving birth must only pale in comparison to Power Computing's tirades about it's current state. With tantrums about being a Windows PC builder, to the screams going up from it's ejected CEO, you'd think they were delivering a bowling ball. Obviously Apple didn't think they would have to deal with this much damage control when they decided to cut the cord. Can't wait to see the stretch marks from this one. Oh stop whining. I'm sure you've run a metaphor into the ground yourself from time to time. What a bunch of crybabies.

September 2

Looks like Apple was worrying about Power Computing after all. They just ate them for 100 million dollars. Of course this is the first sign of the apocolypse as far as clone vendors are concerned, but I'm curious how this will affect the bottem line of a struggling Apple. After all, they've only picked up 26 million from all the licensing fees since they even started cloning. If this is the first of the settlements, then it's going to be one hell of an expensive blood-bath when it's all over. I mean screw the customers who are the real victims, lord knows Apple has already, this is gonna cost some real money. Heaven help them if someone decides to start a breach of trust suit against them, or if the user community does something resembling class-action. The later speculation is less-than-probable because this would go against the usual behavior of your run of the mill dupes.

September 3

It's small wonder that the CEO of Power Computing - ahem the EX-CEO - would be wailing like a banshee that it's game over for Apple with their buyout of his alma-mater. Of course Apple is doing spin control by saying that the margins were not equitable to survivability or the advancement of the platform wasn't happening fast enough. The arguments of both parties have equal points in this love-fest. Looking at the latest reports on MSNBC, you notice that while sales of the mac for this year have been falling faster than an edsel pushed off the top of the empire state building, the percentage of those Mac OS computers were nearly half by the clone builders. Fine, if there's more new users coming into the fold. According to Apple however, these users were 99% previous Apple users. Meaning that what little marketshare and sales they had, were vanishing faster than your average spotted owl. Power Computing contends that they did in fact have more non-apple users in the mix than this, but if there's one thing you have to give the ex-CEO credit for, is his ability to judge what the long range view means to Apple. His last job was Dell computers. Steve Jobs' last gig was NeXT. Now whose strategy sounds more sane? I'll give you a hint. One of those companies is still in business and making a healthy profit.

September 4

Before the votes come in whether Apple has staved off the enevitable for another few years or whether they just pulled their own plug, let's take a look what the single vendor approach has been doing for the current installed base of users. Take NASA for example. These guys are into everything that has zeros and one's in front of them. That means that if it computes, they've given it a test drive. Until recently there were two groups of people, each chugging away at their favorite flavor of computers. Then reality set in. The government is pretty wild about having more than one vendor supplying technology to their field troops. If one vendor goes belly-up, at least another can fill it's place in the supply chain. Where the concept of "redundant systems" was pratically re-invented into a religion, Nasa is pretty tight about such matters. When it came time to pick a single operating system and platform as the most compatable with their interrests, Apple seemed more than a little risky. Hardly anyone else made them. So over the period of months, NASA has been trying to get the few MacJihad memebers in their ranks to let go of their damn computers and laptops and get with the program. The only thing that prevented a total shut-out, was probably the fact that a few others DID in fact make Mac OS complient boxes for them to use. Now that this is no longer the case, it's probably a safe bet that you'll be seeing more Thinkpads more often exclusively at the Houston space center and secured to the walls of the space station they're building. As far as Apple having a space-age customer supporting their endevours in the future for PR value it's Apollo 13 all over again.

September 5

It's interresting. A while ago, I started tracking the various BBS's and watched the predictability of the MacJihad to gang bang any newsite that runs a story that says the slightest negative thing about Apple. Now with the Power Computing scenario being railed within MacWeek, and Ziff Davis' website, these zelots are a hard find indeed. In fact, I've gotten at least one letter in response to my own website saying that even as a mac user, even he too thinks Apple is blundering beyond long-term survivability. There's something scary when you realize that you may be more on target in your predictions than in your wildest fantasies. I expected to be harangued exclusively by the Jihad, now they're agreeing with me! Perhaps I should buy a lottery ticket.

September 6

Not all the columns that I read are in yet, probably because of the Labor Day thing. I'll be very interrested to see if anyone actually buys the crap Apple is defending itself with. So far the predominent verbage follows my back to 1985 observations weeks ago. I'll chalk it up to blind optimism as to why it took them so long to catch-up. After all they get PAID to do this. Speaking of blindness, I've not seen anything resembling Steve Jobs' usual red-herring announcements that he uses to distract the public from his usual blunders. When NeXT was struggling to match annual sales figures of computers, with what Apple shipped in a day, he would say that he's cornered the market of "personal workstations" or some such fabricated market. I'm guessing before the press jumps too much over this latest blunder, we'll see something along the lines of "apple succeeds in refocusing OS efforts" after buying back the last clone vendor's license. I'll be waiting and reporting when it happens. Probably laughing my ass off.