Expo Speculations [Jan. 05, 2004] – With all the hoopla over ITMS for Windows and the fact that iPods work with non-Mac computers, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Apple’s music strategy is another proprietary platform play. That’s the strategy that gave Microsoft its monopoly and made Apple a niche player in the computer market two decades ago, and I see no reason to think that a proprietary iPod platform won’t be similarly marginalized over time.
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While I agree that iPod is clearly a growth market for Apple, I wonder at pundits who seem to ignore the Mac as a future growth possibility. If Apple could become a big player in the workstation market (as they seem to be attempting) that alone could double or triple the size of the company. It might also cause Wall street to reevaluate Apple’s R&D expenditures, as they wouldn’t be as directly comparable to companies like Dell.
It seems like Apple could “do a Dell” to some of the (admittedly dying) market that was once owned by HP, Sun, and SGI. By applying mass-market volume to the design and components for high-end workstations, Apple could afford to sell products for much less than traditional in the Unix workstation market. With OSX’s FreeBSD underpinnings, I would think that Apple could hold a strong advantage over similar moves by NT/XP based vendors like Intergraph who have attempted similar maneuvers.
This would give Apple a high-value, high-margin market to help them fuel their R&D, the results of which could later trickle down into their consumer level products.
Can Apple Grow the Mac?
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Expo Speculations [Jan. 05, 2004] – [ “(extlink)MacDevCenter.com”:http://www.macdevcenter.com ]
While I agree that iPod is clearly a growth market for Apple, I wonder at pundits who seem to ignore the Mac as a future growth possibility. If Apple could become a big player in the workstation market (as they seem to be attempting) that alone could double or triple the size of the company. It might also cause Wall street to reevaluate Apple’s R&D expenditures, as they wouldn’t be as directly comparable to companies like Dell.
It seems like Apple could “do a Dell” to some of the (admittedly dying) market that was once owned by HP, Sun, and SGI. By applying mass-market volume to the design and components for high-end workstations, Apple could afford to sell products for much less than traditional in the Unix workstation market. With OSX’s FreeBSD underpinnings, I would think that Apple could hold a strong advantage over similar moves by NT/XP based vendors like Intergraph who have attempted similar maneuvers.
This would give Apple a high-value, high-margin market to help them fuel their R&D, the results of which could later trickle down into their consumer level products.