Reply: Sayonora Mac?

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

     Kelly Burhenne posted a note about an unpublished Dataquest report on
     the imminent demise of the Mac, to which, as senior Mac evangelist in
     my neck of the woods, I feel obliged to reply: Don't trade in your Mac
     yet!

     Apart from the fact that the study was unpublished (makes one wonder
     how good the data was), it's worth noting that Apple's market share is
     growing slowly but steadily, and may explode soon once the PowerPC
     Reference Platform (PREP) specification is openly adopted and the new
     Mac clones are widely available. As for the demise of OS/2 for the PC,
     please note that although this is true, it's only part of the story.
     The truth is that OS/2 is being replaced by something called
     "Workplace OS", which will run off the PowerPC PREP platform.

     People have been predicting the demise of the Mac for going on 11
     years now, and nothing has happened yet, even with far worse prospects
     than at present. Windows offers an interesting alternative, but with
     more than 10% of the market for North American PC's (up to 15%,
     depending on estimate source), Apple is hardly in trouble. In
     particular, note that for the past year, Apple has offered better or
     equivalent price/performance than PCs from brand name manufacturers,
     and only slightly worse performance than generic clones. Final point:
     Apple still has the highest gross profit margin in the industry (well
     over 20% at last count), and thus, has lots of room to cut prices.

     I'm not bailing out yet, and don't expect to in the near future.
     There's lots of room for Apple and Microsoft to coexist, as they have
     for some time now, and I don't see any reason for this to change.

     --Geoff Hart   geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
     #8^{)}