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Three Strikes: Part VI Tears of a Clone |
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Apple faces the same struggle. As soon as the company stops forward looking innovation and loses a lead in directing markets, copycats will take over and eat it alive. It is therefore puzzling why the army of tech analysts has been beating the clone drum for twenty years. The conventional rag says that Apple has to license the Mac OS to other hardware makers in order to sustain a market big enough to continue to exist and remain relevant. This message was so entrenched into the psyche that when the old guard of Apple ran out of ideas, they decided that licensing the Mac OS to other hardware companies would be a good idea. It turned out to be disastrous. Mac clone makers took over all potential for innovation, shaving off the most profitable high-end market by shipping the fastest available processors, while at the same time making the Mac platform more diverse in ways Apple was forced to support in their development of System 7. Apple ended up with more work, less profits and no net gain in their marketshare. All the expansion in the Mac clone world came out of Apple's hide. After buying NeXT, and the resulting takeover in operations by NeXT engineers, the clone market was terminated and Apple started shipping innovative, new machines that generated excitement about the platform again. Since there is little to argue about the progression of events and the damage caused to Apple by cloners, it is hard to imagine how that drum keeps getting banged. Licensing their OS to other vendors' hardware or attempting to sell it to run on third party hardware didn't work for NeXT. It did nothing for Be and didn't work out great for Palm. IBM couldn't sell OS/2, and even Microsoft couldn't figure out how to sell Windows NT for Alpha, PowerPC or MIPS. Even the term "IBM-compatible PC" is a reminder that IBM lost the hardware market to cloners, benefiting very little from the ubiquity of PCs using the design they introduced. It turns out that no, they are wrong. Strike three! Apparently everything you read isn't true, even if it gets repeated ad nauseam. |
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