you have a lot of good points phoenix, i left a lot of openings and i don't think i was quite clear enough, but...
Phoenix said:
No its not. Why? Because Apple writes most of the drivers or is responsible for driver integration in the OS. To do better at this Apple would need to grow massively their in-house OS teams to support 3rd party hardware. Guess what - that doesn't make good business sense for a company which makes most of its margins on selling hardware. You talk about Apple giving people choice, but choice for what? For buying hardware from somewhere else? Yeah I can just imagine the middle manager sitting there saying "hey we should spend our profits so that we can make less money on hardware" and then being promptly led out of the building. Apple has shown no signs that they are interested in leaving the hardware business because unlike some of the roadkill PC makers like Gateway, Apple is actually making a lot of money doing it.
you're right, to a point. if we look at it as a bipolarity:
either) apple supplies all the hardware, restricts their software to exclusively apple hardware
or) apple supplies no hardware, lets vendors drive the hardware market, attempts 100% compatibility with as many hardware vendors as humanly possible
we can agree that apple's current business model is much closer to the former than the latter, and that's why they write most of the hardware drivers and are largely responsible for integration. it's also why they depend on hardware sales, because the scale isn't big enough on their software, and without the scale, their hardware margins end up generating more revenue (+ they give out a ton of their software for free).
this doesn't have to be the way it works. however, i guess it is hard to argue that they could continue on as a system vendor if they opened up the hardware. i guess the point is that they don't have to be a system vendor, and looking forward, i would even argue that it's not the best plan. why? sun, maybe? i don't mean that to be a direct, concrete analogy (ie, LOOK AT SUN! THEY'RE DOOMED! APPLE = SUN!), but a definite warning on the dangers of trying to compete in what is ultimately a very open market with a closed platform.
Actually no it isn't and you should slap whomever told you that. Software is significantly easier to profit from than hardware. Want a stupidly easy example - Office is $300-500 bucks per seat. Office core hasn't changed significantly in almost a decade, yet Microsoft has been amortizing the shit out of that original development effort. Each hardware product has a much more expensive product development cycle and requires taking on expensive inventory. It shouldn't take an economics class to see that
oh, i know this, and i shouldn't have implied that software is easier profit in general, but i am arguing that it's easier profit for apple (just as it was for sun). microsoft's core products (read: windows, office) benefit primarily from massive scale and entrenchment. without the massive scale and entrenchment of microsoft in its software, apple just doesn't stand to make anywhere near the amount a vendor like microsoft or say, adobe, makes, because, even if they up the margins a bit, software is still a smaller ticket item, so the sheer bulk of revenue per unit is bound to be lower. hardware is an easier profit to make for apple (and in some other situations - like custom hardware) because it's a captive market so they can up the margins over the market average and it's a bigger ticket item, so more per unit revenue. (also note that since apple software is really quite good, their dev costs probably tend to clobber their scale)
(note that i did say that proprietary hardware was much easier profit. if you pick nits by attaching the proprietary to the hardware, this is fairly true. it's a good way to make a quick buck if you have anyone attached (ie, captive) to whatever special service or functionality your proprietaryness provides. in apple's case, it's been media producers. you can raise your margins, attach hidden costs, have very little if any direct competition, and because it's hardware, the price tag tends to be larger -> more revenue per unit).
Unfortunately you're incorrect. Apple's userbase is growing - its just dwarfed by the growth rate of the pc market. Quarter over quarter Apple has been able to sell more hardware than the hardware before.
i meant market share, sorry, not cardinality of userbase. iirc the mac platform's marketshare has been steadily decreasing at least since jobs took over again. actually, if anyone could find real statistics on this, that would be awesome.
Its sad that people think that its always in a companies best interest to increase their market share. Its the same logic that led to the foolishness of the dot com era where people did 'whatever was necessary' in order to increase their marketshare. Next time you're near a Lexus dealership, go debate with them the merits of building a 17K vehicle so they can increase their marketshare. Next time you're with an economist, ask them about the Jaguar brand and the absolute disaster that happened when they tried to increase their marketshare
this is the scale vs per unit price argument again. my argument is and has always been that personal computers are not and will never be the kind of big ticket brand driven product that cars are, no matter how bad a company (or marketer like jobs) tries to make them into one. i think, and industry trends would seem to back me up on this, that computing devices will be commoditized over the long run no matter what sneaky tricks you try to pull. they simply aren't items with a big enough price tag attached to them, and there's too much incentive and too few barriers to making them smaller, cheaper, and faster as quickly as possible (people need the cycles to live and there's no appreciable limit to how many cycles we can shove into each millisecond as a computing population).
as far as the dot-com era is concerned.. it's apples and oranges. the dot-com marketshare was a manufactured content thing and a completely different argument.
the bottom line is that anyone trying to make a bmw or jaguar of computers (and clearly, there are people trying), is bound to fail.
No, every move they've made has been a choice. At any point they could choose to take on any other technologies, or they could simply pioneer their own. Apple has been the first in many areas of the PC space and has been driving its larger competitors and not vice versa.
lately they've been largely driven (in the hardware space) by other companies. also, in the past, there are definitely some things that didn't quite... catch on... (mass market scsi?)
Who DOESN'T have sales that are marketing-driven? If someone doesn't know about your product, the shit won't sell.
ok, sorry! i didn't mean it this way! :lol
Apple doesn't make money from marketing, they make money from products they sell - those products are both hardware AND software. Apple is and always has been a platform of both hardware and software, each driving each other. Apple's sales spike after an expo because, get this, new products get announced at an expo!
what i meant is that apple products sell in large part because they are EXTREMELY well marketed, aesthetically very well designed (there is a marketing component and motivation for this) and not necessarily because they're superior. they tend to be more expensive (larger margins drive a larger marketing budget), and less featureful than their competitors.
again, my motivation for pointing out the classic apple sales cycle is that apple as a company seems to be obssessed with technological aesthetics and not solid engineering (have you ever had the displeasure of using a first generation imac for an extended period of time?). solid engineering makes small incremental changes. technological aesthetics dictate a revolution every six months.
