Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

November 15

Due to driving 600 miles and partaking of Turkey and other life-affirming things - this column is pretty damn late. Apologies, or deal with it. I'll let it sit till next Wednesday so everyone get's a peek at it.
Don Crabb - still pushing keyboards at MacWeek.com - is never one to mince small words. But whether his girth has anything to do with his vocabulary, it confirms what his associates denied. Apple is expereincing a slowdown at CompUSA, regardless of whether it's reflected in shipment units or not. However, he notes that Apple is spurring sales past the inital introductary spurt by offering new financing options, rebates, and sales bonuses. This he feels is GOOD - and that Apple should do more of this. I would obviously have to emphasise a contrarian view - and point out that this is VERY BAD. Here's why. First Apple's woes during the last two quarters of the calender year (4th and 1st for Apple), were due to channel loading. I've refered to this in the past - but here's how the tragedy actually played out step by step according to Gil Amelio in his last tome and testament - "My 500 days on the firing line". First - build a boatload of consumer Macs (aka: Performas and low-end Macs) that have low margins, and low sales opportunity in the face of real-hardcore Apple customers that want the high-end Macs for their graphic work and what-not. Of course, to do this would be to admit that low-cost PC's are making a killing on the open market providing an excuse for people to buy machines for the home that reflect what they use at work - but never mind this - Apple would never face such a stark - but true - picture of reality. Then - tell the sales people that the only way they can justify massive increases in bonuses is to sell as much as they can possibly load into retail warehouses, ignoring any data whatsoever that might suggest that these units are going to park on those very same retail warehouse shelves rather than getting into customer hands (otherwise known as sell-through). Have the salesmen ignore what the combination of two factors - overselling to retailers beyond demand - and what the consumer demand actually IS - and then hope to god that they will be able to get another cushey bonus for filling the warehouses the next quarter. Here's what happened. Nothing sold. The stores warehouses remained full. The sales force went back to sell more Apple computers to the retailers, and found that they weren't buying anything because consumer demand was too low for the low margin machines. So the sales force goes to the upper management and report that they need to spur an incentive program to move the units off the shelves otherwise the sales for the next quarter are utterly dead in the water - and Apple will face a massive write-off of inventory bloat on their own warehouse shelves because no-one bothered to tell the factory that nothing is moving down the line - because no one was looking into this possibility in the first place. So they get their sales breaks and offer rebates to retailers to pass on promotional incentives to move the units again. Problem is - it's too little too late. The incentives do move some numbers of units - but not enough to actually make a dent in the next quarter's sales to retailers - to or decrease Apple's inventory bloat. Worse - since the units in question are all low-margin machines rather than high-end/high-margin computers - the damn things are being sold at a loss after spending enough time depreciating in limbo and the fact that the "rebates" are blowing the actual production costs away (considering Apple's lean profits on a massive overhead - this isn't hard to picture in the slightest). The upshot? What they sell - is a loss on the balance sheet. The retailers are warry of buying more inventory and loosing warehouse space to a slow moving product that only sells when it's promoted beyond the norm, and Apple has a ton of unsold product - undelivered to retailers - that they have to write off as a loss. This is how Apple snatched the largest loss hit for two consecutive quarters less than 2 years ago during a time period when the rest of the industry was struggling to keep up with demand. Otherwise known as snagging defeat from the jaws of victory. Time travel to today. Apple has tons of iMacs taking up precious factory and inventory load from high-margin sellers like G3 laptops that people are fed-up waiting for - while seeing sell-through numbers decline as the retail warehouses fill up yet-again. Now we have to start another round of promotions to get them moving. Anyone see the pattern repeating itself here? This is NOT a good thing.

November 16
Stop the damn GUI arguments. Most of what the Apple pundits think is history is nothing more than historical revisionism and it makes for a damn dull time on any BBBS. Here's why. First myth: Apple invented the GUI. Wrong. Xerox did. Some Mac supporters love to point out that the Alto didn't sell to anyone, which is true. Of course, what they forget to point out is that it's decendant - the Xerox Star - DID go up for sale in 1980. They even had a user group reunion recently. Was it affordable? No - it was between 5 grand and 15 grand. Second: The Mac was the first computer with a GUI sold - and if it wasn't for Apple - there wouldn't be a GUI for anyone. Wrong. Xerox did with the Star, and if real Apple supporters would actually read a book or look around at antique Apple's you'd notice that Apple also sold an overpriced flop called the Lisa which was Apple's first foray into GUI's. Wrong part 2 - everyone was working on GUI's including VisiCorp, Digital Research, Amiga Inc. (gobbled by Commodore), and yes - Microsoft (they panicked when Visicorp's GUI blew people away at an east-coast computer show and knew that DOS was a limited solution at best - particularly when the GUI was running on a bare-bones IBM PC). While most of these products came out within a year of the Mac - or in the Amiga's case - the same damn year - it shows that pretty much everyone involved with computers were playing with GUI's in some respect. This also reflects the fact that GUI's predated Xerox with some mainframe implimentations - a side note - but obviously it was being talked about and experimented with. Myth 3: Apple's GUI is the perfect one. Aside from X windows, NeXTstep, Windows 98, Windows NT, Linux window-ware, the Amiga OS, BeOS, Irix - and many more - I think there's a few people who could argue that there's plenty of neat shit out there other than the Mac OS. To claim the Mac OS as superior to everyone else's is an obvious, dull, and pompous opinion masquarading as fact - otherwise known as pure bullshit. These are the lame threads that erupt from time to time that do nothing than waste time and take forever to play out. The worst thing about all this mucking about arguing GUI nitpicks from the past is that it really stalls any decent arguments on where GUI's should be going. I mean sure this 60's/70's model executed in the 80's/90's is fine - but wouldn't it be great now that we have all this internet interconnected-ness if we threw the damn browser-specific model out for an OS config that's not just a series of applet-application add-ons? What if the way the GUI behaved was like the way the OS worked from the ground-up? Unix did it, and Windows 98 is pretty close if you like flat browser models. What about games? People complained for years that GUI's would just make people "play with their computers". I think obviously we all know that games are not things that are fun if you have to train on the damn interface. With that in mind I've for years thought SimCity 2000 represented a damn fine interface model for handling data and seeing how that data existed at a glance. I could go on endlessy with stuff like this - and it might create ideas for the rest of the industry. So why is the MacJihad debating about the past?

November 17

Apple centric app-publisher Quark, releases QuarkImmedia 1.5. What the hell is this product and why should you care? Well one things for certain - you probably haven't heard of the product - and you probably won't care about it if you did. Suffice it to say that's also probably the reason that it's been selling like a lead balloon. The product for those who don't know about minute' and trivial apps is one born of the increasing frustration and realization that Quark is a one horse wonder. Like many Mac publishers, their repatiore is about as limited as the niche audience that Apple's been marginally sucessful with. So in a fit of panic - the powers at be at Quark decided that they would take on other areas of the marketplace starting with Multimedia. Now aside from the fact that the multimedia industry as a whole has always had one foot in the gave of fad status, you have to pretty much rework your entire application model to actually provide tools that will produce something akin to a professional multimedia presentation. Dull surprise - QuarkXPress was kind of geared for 2D publishing only. Not multimedia. Whether it's the lame logic tree buttons, the lack of real scripting, or the total lack of quality output in video support, sound support, animation support, or even decently rendered fonts and graphic depths - there wasn't much on the table to compete with MacroMedia's product line - or justify it's 999.00 price tag for an add-on product to another 999.00 Quark app called XPress. The upshot? It bombed. I'd have to say right now that the people in the former Multimedia group at Quark pretty much were idiot savants doing absolute miracles with a product capable of producing total crap by in large. So now there's a new version - with a new price tag - that is supposed to change the face of multimedia AGAIN. Like most Apple enterprises, you don't have to reach too far to see how repetitiously dellusional this whole scenario is. It's even more pathetic to consider that Quark all-but killed off wholesale mFactory to try to compete rather than produce a real product. But then Apple did have pretty good luck doing the same thing to Power Computing.

November 18

The San Jose Mercury News - otherwise known as the repository for spam from the MacJihad every time they open their word-processors - discovers that amongst the usual cadre of missing features from the iMac, it does include a decent portion of pain and suffering for the RSI set (otherwise known as repetetive motion syndrome). Cornell University's Dr. Allen Hedge points out that Apple is going for the "wow" factor than the comfort factor that would prevent dammage to people typing or using the mouse. In Apple's defense, I presume this is one of those fashionable ergonomic disasters that would make the iMac more appealing under the guise of "no pain, no gain". It will make things more fun for user group settings though because now - instead of merely trading info and tricks about their OS of choice - they can now trade health tips and doctor information on where to obtain the best treatment for their Apple inspired ailments.

November 19

After an almost endless sting of 80's legal muck-ups with other companies for trademark and patent infringement, Steve Jobs' has proven once again that Apple has turned back the clock for itself in more ways than one. Macweek.com reports that Apple is being sued by Imatech for infringement on it's Colorsynch technology. Suffice it to say that for a person who has suffered endless amounts of bullshit and myths from the Mac set on "all the wonderful things that Apple invented", this strikes an ironic nerve that is all to happy to be touched. People - Apple, like just about every other Silicon Valley (and Redmond Washington) firm has begged borrowed and stolen every damn thing that's on the shelf. From the Newton (stolen from GO computer's ideas pitched to them), to the Mac GUI, Apple has gotten itself in enough trouble that with a little digging you can find an endless string of out of court settlements attached to Apple's namesake (yes Xerox DID try to sue Apple FYI). Pre-press patents are the biggest minefield of all, because as Apple tries to reign in the madness of extensions, color-tables and everything else that is out of whack (and you thought DTP on the Mac was perfect?) with Apple DTP solutions by bundling them into the OS - they're going to run deeper and deeper into trouble from companies that have more to gain from a little lawsuit than from their active endevours in the DTP market. The DTP market - that hallowed ground of Apple's continual back-patting - isn't reallt that much a money earner. It's the prime reason why Adobe is the only real large scale company on the block (Quark is a gnat in comparison), and why Microsoft has ignored the market for so long. It's just not a very rich segment to obtain profits from. With a landscape this barren of profits - expect Apple to dance back into court soon.

November 20

Apple promises very soon to release another new version of Quicktime - this time with real-time streaming of media. Call me loopy - but didn't they promise this feature with 3.0 about a year or so ago? Suffice it to say that this inclusion might be the only thing that might save the floundering tech. Why is it floundering? Because many Wintel users have been loathe to adopt the product with AVI format's being entrenched, as well as the brutal truth that 3.0 compared to 2.X isn't very good across platforms. Whether it's the nitpick of the damn "register" window coming up for a product that's not available - or the fact that the robustness of the engine isn't very robust. To use an automotive anology - it's the Mustang II to the Mustang. And with the group running on near skeleton status as far as coders and developers, don't exepct this to change soon, since most of the staff was laid off in the great Apple R&D purge of early 1998.

November 21

During the T-Day trip that delayed this column I took notice on an alarming trend in colleges that has been pointed out periodically in the BBBS area from time to time. Students are being forced to buy Macs from Apple. But this time - it's personal - since one of my own cousins had to buy one of the damn things. And you know what? She wasn't happy about it. She was already proficient in Windows, and suffice it to say - she's probably going to find more Windows machines in her line of work once she graduates. What's really the kicker is that between the lame Apple centric contract that the univeristy sold the students out on, and the fact that the students have to suspend choice for a more expensive computer - it's just plain lazy of the institution to create a Mac-Centric model when it would be damn easy to port such operations to being multi-platform. Particularly when the platform being used is on it's last legs. I would warn in the strongest terms that if a university is restricting people to mere Apple's, you might want to investigate if any other parts of the campus are under commercial control. It's pathetic enough that students are paying outlandish rates for tuition on campuses that are turning into billboard colleges - but why raise the cost of tuition for the sake of selling out students on an OS emblazoned with fruit? Be afraid. Be very afraid.