day 63

behind apple's blunder 5: riding the trends by Philip Machanick

Yesterday, we showed how Apple failed to move at both the high and the low ends of the processor marketplace, and lost market share as a result. Apple's failure wasn't a failure to forecast the market. They failed to observe clear and consistent technology trends -- trends that anyone with an eye for the industry should have known about. Apple isn't the first company to do this. In 1991, I confidently predicted that IBM would be in trouble within 3 years. They beat me to it; they lost billions in 1992. Can Apple fix the problem? Only if they understand it, and learn to ride the trends. IBM recovered from even bigger losses. Nothing I've heard from Apple so far suggests that they clearly understand the problem. There is hope. The leading Mac cloner, Power Computing, does appear to understand the trends. The top Power Mac on my graph (see figure) is a 225MHz PPC 604e -- and it's not made by Apple. Power Computing's lowest-end model is a 120MHz PPC 604; all I'm waiting for from them is a real low-end model to complete their range. If Apple can't learn from the PC makers, maybe they can learn from their own cloners.

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