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Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson - trapped inside a living hell of their machinations in marketing. And next door to one of the better eateries in Palo-Alto, Coppla's (of Francis Ford fame). Ask for the seafood pasta!
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Monday, February 17, 2003
Apple to retailers: "Try and stop us!"
Apple - Great adventures in retailing.
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You don't have to be a masochist to sell Apple computers through independent retail stores - but, boy does it help. For most of the last decade there's been no end of grief in the Apple sales channel.
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Some of this has been touched on by my own former readers from a previous writing project - The Apple Doomsday Clock - but the whole thing sort-of boils down to this:
Apple can't seem to make up it's mind whether it wants anyone but Apple to sell Apple computers. At least that's what is being touted by Alex Salkever of BusinessWeek. In his article "Why Apple needs fewer resellers" he make a case on whether the cost of implementing a reseller program that competes with the growing concern of Apple branded store-fronts, is worth the trouble given the various lawsuits and general gripes coming from the reseller community.
The problem is - Alex is missing the point. In today's Apple - Apple doesn't like anyone outside of Apple. Before Steve Jobs returned to Apple there were no Apple storefronts, and no Apple online store - just resellers of the independent variety, business resellers and of course the catalog and online sales driving the whole of the Apple business. There were also fledgling clone makers who had obtained licenses to OEM the Mac OS and put them into their own boxes.
But when Steve Jobs created one of the first reverse-mergers in corporate history with the advent of NeXT consuming Apple (when Wall Street was initially told it was supposed to be the other way around), all sorts of fun stuff was bound to happen - and did.
First - bye bye to clone builders. If they weren't cut loose, they were bought outright like Power Computing for the sole purpose of being dismantled. Next, you could smell the writing on the wall for the retailers when three interesting things occurred. First - the CEO for the Gap jumped onto Apple's board of directors. It was less than a year after that small development when you could hear the whispers of "Apple-Store" running through the trades. The second - development was the creation of the Apple online store which represented Apple first direct sales channel to the general public - as opposed to educators and students. And thirdly - Apple bestowed "most-favored retailer" status to CompUSA while pulling Apple out of every other major consumer retailers the likes of Sears and others.
Most of this was actually a good-thing since Apple's representation at Sears had been weak at best, and CompUSA was the only party that had a sales-force exclusively devoted to selling and supporting computers. The online store however had pretty much everyone's head scratching. There were no savings to be offered to the customer of any significance, apart from end-of-life model rebates and the occasional 3rd party tie-in. Obviously the real-deal was in Apple being able to make much larger margins on per-units sold because of the lack of any wholesale pricing scheme provided for the retail shops.
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 Next page | This is when the cross-hairs began to be painted...
1, 2, 3
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