Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

September 7

Well the storm is now brewing rather nicely and waiting for the next funnel cloud to emerge and wipe out another victim. People are now hoarse from screaming how they'll abandon the mac if the anti-cloning trend continues. This is interresting because while even I have noted the loathesome behavior of the macjihad, and all of their purile insults of the majority of the world's users, there's one futher observation worth mentioning. They're spineless as well. How is it after over 10 years of endless bashing and hometown rooting that a foaming-at-the-mouth user-base suddenly turns redcoat and starts extolling the virtues of the wintel clone community? Could it be that these users are not as firmly commited to swallowing everything Apple says in their policy making decisions? Even when those decisions are made by the great savior Steve Jobs himself? Somehow I doubt it. It's more likely that these users are hoping to somehow pose some kind of cheap threat against a company that most of them don't even hold stock in. And that's the story really. If you want to have a voice in how a company runs it's business, you'd better pony up to the plate. Because in business there's only two people. The customers, and the owners.

September 8
It's interresting to note how the real world views personal computers, and how owners of personal computers view the world. It's much like the way one might view things from the eyes of a minority. For the rest of the world, personal computers may occupy perhaps 10 percent of their waking hours of thought. While for some computer users, the real-world only occupies conversly as much. This is even more apparent when you consider the macjihad since they occupy only 2.7 percent of the whole user base which means they take up a scant .27 of the general public's mindshare. Representing such a small percent of mindshare doesn't even make them a minority it makes them a fringe group. And you know how the public regards it's fringes. Granted some pop-culture is tuning to the internet as the new television as noticed by people as straight as Nielson, but the best visual example of what this all means, could be taken in a casual glance at the magazine racks at the 7-Eleven. While the rest of the weekly reading public glances at the covers of their favorites, all reporting this month about the death of Lady Di, one only has to notice how much the one cover of the Weekly World News carries it's headline, and how much it stands out from the rest. It reads, "Bat Boy captured". Perhaps that's why Apple is so noticable in the news these days.

September 9

There's a couple of new video standards that stand out as a testamony to the Wintel vs Apple strategies (lord knows I'm not going to use the VHS vs Betamax argument again). One of them, DVD, is pushing a cheap convenient quality of video that matches laser disks and is licensing that tech to as many manufacturers and movie companies as possible in order to, at the very least, to take some of the bulk out of buying and storing movies. The cost of the DVD disk makes it cheaper to make than a laser disk, and as such is much cheaper to purchase. It's taking off and the price of the players are coming down. The public has responded by obtaining these players in the millions. Another DVDesque standard has garnered some attention recently called Diva (sic). The difference is that you don't own movies, you "rent" them for 5 bucks and they self-destruct after 48 hours. The proposed benefit is that you don't have to return movies, you can throw them away. This is an interresting concept but I hardly doubt that the mass-buying public will want to add to the landfills something that is more expensive to "rent" than something that costs 3-4 times more to have for life, that doesn't pollute and will be cheaper to eventually rent-and return. The point of this massive seguey, is that the outcome of these two standards will be determined by how well it fits with the consumer. Not by how much the company that makes it thinks they have a great idea. This is the truth behind Apple and Microsoft's approach to the computer industry. In 1984 the Mac (and eventually the NeXT) was launched under the mindshare that "if you build it, they will come. Microsoft decided perhaps it was a better idea to make software and OS's for systems that people were already interrested in, and purchasing by the truckload. Those latter systems had the IBM logo on them. They were such a massive market-force that eventually other companies created their own boxes that worked the same way. Both Apple and Microsoft knew that making all boxes work easier would be a godsend to the public, since the public was having fits pretending to work like nerds with command-line prompts. But while Apple tried to fit the need with a new box, asking many to throw their current boxes away, Microsoft said "keep your boxes, buy our floppies and make it work better". The later not only made more sense, it allowed people to keep our landfills cleaner. Later on, Apple came back and said sure Windows is easy enough, but ours is neater. That's why it's more expensive than other new PC's. Again the public decided that one approach was more sane than the other particularly when there were so many other companies making the cheaper boxes. Now Apple wants you to buy only Apple boxes again and forget you ever saw cheaper Mac OS boxes. Guess which computer standard looks less like DVD and more like Diva? Guess which one will self-destruct and end up in landfills.

September 10

Keeping the standards thoughts going , other things to think about when you're establishing a market presence. Don't sound like you're desperate. There's nothing more desperate than those that foist their wares on late night tv infomercials. Those cheesey spots that are about as artful as commercials for 1-900 numbers hawking flotsam that even the retail community couldn't be conned into foisting on the general public. Less than 2 years ago during an evening writing and drinking binge in St. Louis, a town that invented the art of the drinking binge, what product did I see being hawked in the deadzone of commerical advertising? Apple computers. The last time something computer-related was pushed in the twilight zone of product placement, it was Phillip's CDi, and boy did that product tank. With omens like these who needs enemas?

September 11

Another day, another nail in the Apple coffin. This time the people that I hinted out last week as being the wrong people to piss-off, responded in kind. I'm talking of course about Motorola. After being denied a license to sell CHRP or OS8 for so long, they said so-long to Apple. What struck me as poigniant was the tone of the announcement as it was recorded on the realaudio stream broadcast by MSNBC. Man are they pissed. Yes everything was cordially worded, but you don't have to have a masters in communications to see the underlying tone. These people were ticked off that they would have to take a 95 million dollar write-off and take a beating in the stock market. Whether there's any future repercutions remains to be seen, but with the general public it's a major vote of no-confidence for Apple. I wonder how Steve will try to spin control this kind of incendary verbage.

September 12

Still camped out on the Motoroa fiasco. The thing that really makes you wonder about all this, is that the big M didn't complain publically about their perdicament anywhere near the level Power Computing did. In fact it's probably the biggest example of the squeeky wheel getting the grease within the last 5 years of computing history. The biggest lesson? If you own stock in a company about to be screwed by Apple, you stand to make 100 million if you bitch about it. If you keep mum, it's going to cost you an equal writeoff and a hard hit on your investment. This goes beyond what the user of the Star line of computers are getting write now. Out of the two of them, the Motorola clone camp will at least have 5 years of warrenty and service, and 1 year of tech support. This is interresting because Apple itself has put a halt to free tech support with their products. If this is a way Apple expects to stay competitive it's certainly not following the example of those that were stealing sales from under it's nose.

September 13

Looking back at the Apple charges of erroding profit margins and it's inability to compete with the real world of clones, it might help those who are looking to buy into a computer to critique what a couple of vendors offered to the end user in terms of service. Take IBM for example. I'm slapping this site together, not on a mac (as Steve Jobs would proport) but on a ThinkPad. This laptop has several things going for it besides a price tag that I could actually afford. Aside from the power/price curve, it also has free phone support-7 days a week, 24 hours a day, a big honkin warrenty, and for 75 bucks more insurance from theft/loss for 3 years. The last touch is nice because they will fed-ex me a replacement, and with my CD backup, instant replacement at the price-level that I paid. The upshot is that if someone nicks my laptop, I get a free upgrade for another 2 years. Now THAT'S competition! Apple on the other hand has a warrenty that has been jerking around it's customers so bad that those who were unlucky enough to actually purchase a 17 inch multimedia doomed-to-fail monitor has been left out in the cold more than once in it's purchase cycle. But don't take my word for it, check out MacWeek's editor and chief's own words in the online archieves. Combined with pay-per-call service shop with limited hours, and you've got at least one user nightmare waiting to happen. And this is the dream computer the macjihad are talking about? Wake me up when its all over.