Replies

Dell might wish Windows did better on high end machines, but MS doesn’t care, a Windows license is a Windows license if the computer cost $400 or $2000. MSN music was a silly idea, too much competition. Zunes are selling, not well but they’re selling. The MS Store is actually a really good idea, MS has a pretty wide product selection and there’s nothing wrong with cutting out the middle man, they been successful selling stuff direct online for a while now. As for search engines (not that it has anything at all to do with their competition with Apple) MSN launched around the same time as Google and rebranded recently as Bing, nothing several about it. Android seems to be doing well.

In the modern age stock prices are the most meaningless thing on the planet. This is the post .com world, stock prices only relate to how much somebody thinks they can sell the stock for tomorrow. Meanwhile they’ve paid dividends every single quarter for the last 5 years, Apple steadfastly refuses to pay them, if you want to buy and hold you’ll get MS. Funny all that great press for Apple and their revenue was still only 2/3 MS, thus proving my point, if Gates thinks about getting annoyed all he has to do is look at the bank account.

Funny all that great press for Apple and their revenue was still only 2/3 MS, thus proving my point, if Gates thinks about getting annoyed all he has to do is look at the bank account.

A year and a half ago, IDC found that although Apple represented less than 7 percent of the personal PC market in the US, it had 25% of the entire US PC market's profits. It's only gotten worse for the PC makers in the year and a half since as Apple has actually grown it's market share to 9.6% and maintained its margins (34-36%) while the rest of the PC market has either shrunk or maintained and their profit margins become, well, marginal...

Dell might wish Windows did better on high end machines, but MS doesn't care, a Windows license is a Windows license if the computer cost $400 or $2000.

:') The reason it will be a problem is, none of the domestic manufacturers will be able to maintain and domestic production -- on the off chance that any of them do now. I think pretty much all of Apple's production is in China (or elsewhere in the Far East), but they've managed to maintain high quality (not always easy with the corner-cutting Chinese profiteers, they build perfect samples, but start shaving when they go into production) and obviously have improved margins even while increasing sales and dropping prices.

One of Jobs' first acts when he returned in triumph from his exile was to withdraw the licenses to manufacture Mac clones (basically, the PM 7200 motherboard, had to be built by and purchased from Apple, included in a variety of offerings by much smaller companies) because it wasn't growing overall OS penetration, merely cutting into Apple's higher-end CPU sales (because the licensees were juicing up their boxes).

The key move by Jobs was the transition to Intel. The focus on specific lines (rather than a delirious riot of parallel development of models that characterized the non-Jobs era) did what it did, the rebirth of the Mac as art (original iMac, the Cube, the shower-massage iMac, the current families) did what it did, abandonment of the classic OS for OS X did what it did, but the Intel transition was the culmination -- until Jobs' next move, whatever it turns out to be -- of Apple's current ascendancy.