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Three Strikes: Analysts Wrong on Apple For the last two decades, legions of industry wags have kept repeating three things Apple needed to do in order to survive. But they were never right, and even when they appeared to be right, they weren't. |
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First, they said Apple desperately needed to start selling a "headless Mac," a small, cheap Mac to compete against low end PCs. Second, they said it was critical that Apple port their OS to PCs with x86 processors. The third demand was for Apple to broadly license their operating system to other hardware makers. At first glance, it would look like the prognosticators were obviously right on all three things, and that therefore, Mac OS licensing has to be the next big announcement from Apple, since the first two have now already happened. But really, they've been wrong on all three counts. Despite getting a lot of airtime and filling a lot of web pages, all three ideas have always been short sighted, overly simplistic, and demonstrated an ignorance of market realities. While copying Microsoft's apparently successful strategies seems like a winning plan, Apple isn't Microsoft and has never been in Microsoft's position. The market has changed dramatically in the last five years, creating new opportunities for Apple that only coincidentally create the appearance that those who repeated the ideas must have been right all along. But three wrongs don't make a right; here's why. |
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Look Ma, no head Let's first take a look at why the headless Mac was for so long an unworkable conundrum for Apple. It simply could not materialize until all the events surrounding Apple dramatically changed. In fact, things actually changed so substantially, that earlier predictions simply can't take any credit for seeing it coming, because their simple demand was impractical and wrong-headed until all those changes fell into place. Because those changes were not anticipated by prognosticators as necessary factors in the Mac Mini's introduction, they failed to predict anything. In February of last year, I wrote that Apple could, rather than sell a headless Mac, simply 'slap a Xserve or PowerBook logic board on the back [of a Cinema Display] ... a full size hard drive and optical drive that ejects the CD out the side of the display." "It's cheap, it's easy, and it's a machine worthy of the iMac name," I wrote. Which is exactly what Apple did with the iMac G5, albeit with more engineering involved than my use of the word "slap" might have suggested. Apple sold a ton of iMac G5s. A year later, Apple announced the very thing I described as highly unlikely in that same article: the Mac Mini. Part II > More Right Than Wrong |
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