Back in the day, I read MacUser religiously. John C. Dvorak, computer curmudgeon extraordinaire, wrote a monthly column that always appeared in the back. To him, it seems Apple could do no right, and were always on the verge of tanking.
This came to a head when Apple announced its deal with IBM to jointly develop technologies (sparking many jokes around then: “Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM” :rolleyes:). Dvorak considered this to be Apple’s death knell.
He wrote a column that had him gazing into his crystal ball and watching a scene some years in the future, with a dazed Jobs sitting by himself, and a tied-and-gagged John Scully being lorded over by a mysterious cloaked villain (who, naturally, at the end, turned out to be Bill Gates) mwah-hah-hahing over the strategic blunder Apple made with this deal.
I’m convinced columnist like Dvorak try to keep their old columns off-line, because if they had to live and die by predictions like these their particular subspecies would be extinct long ago. But I would still like to read this column again: I remember it being particularly amusing. Any directions from the crowd?
As Dvorak rather pompously decreed that nothing is really backed up until it’s on 8-inch floppy, I’m going to bet you’re going to need a really, really old PC to run this search.
Sorry, it looks like if you want issues of MacUser you will need to find them in library archives MacUser - Google Books as Google Books does not have those magazines scanned in for free e-reading.
The only old magazines that are readable on Google Books, with John C. Dvorak as the writer, seem to be InfoWorld and PC Mag
To be fair to Dvorak his columns were always excessively sarcastic, that was just his thing. And to be even more fair, he was kinda right about Apple. Yes, they are the biggest company in the world now, but it was not the Mac (nor the iMac) that got them there. They never even came close to beating the Windows PCs.
What got them there was the iPhone and the tablet, and nobody saw that coming. And even today the iPhone went from over a 50% smartphone share to less than 20%. And the iPad is following suit. And worse, it’s happening for exactly the same reasons. Android is beating the iPhone the same way Windows beat the Mac: By being open source, licensing the OS to all other hardware makers, and offering comparable devices (i.e. hardware & an OS) for significantly less money. And once again Apple is relying on little more than appealing to devoted hipsters and extremely smug hubris, continually chanting that all their stuff, ‘…is just better’.
Sam,e way Sony beat off Betamax and how Phillips became king of the cassette tape business. Maybe Linux will see off Microsoft eventually, but I won’t hold my breath.
You’re making the age-old mistake of thinking that marketshare is a reliable indication of the health of a company position in a market. “Beaten” Apple takes home 90% of profit in the smartphone market. Almost every other smartphone maker would switch places with Apple in a heartbeat if they could.
Apple just sold its one billionth iPhone. You think the hipster market is that big?
True. I didn’t take into account that although the iPhone’s share has gone down, the market for smartphones in general has exploded, I don’t know, maybe a hundred-fold*!*
And although I am a Windows PC, not a Mac, user I do use an iPhone and much prefer it to Android. So I don’t want Apple to blindly blunder its way into obsolescence (yeah, I know that doesn’t seem likely, but 20 years ago who’d have thought the Windows desktop would be going down the tubes…)
if Apple leads in marketshare, pound on marketshare. if Apple leads in profits, pound on profits. if Apple leads in neither, pound on AAPL stock price.
all the while carrying yourself as though you had something to do with it.
Another point to consider is that while Android might be well ahead of the iPhone by now, Android phones are made by many different companies. Is there any other one company who holds as large a share of the smartphone market (by any measure) as Apple?
In terms of profits, the breakdown from 2nd quarter 2016 is:
Apple, 75%
Samsung, 25%
Everybody else: no profits.
Per unit, the profit gap is far wider. OTOH, Samsung’s cellphone/mobile device profits are climbing and Apple’s are declining. The big question is when will the Big Shakeout start. I.e., when will some of the semi-major players quit the market. (I’m surprised LG isn’t doing better. They make a lot of deals with cellphone companies.)
The post I was replying to said, “Is there any other one company who holds as large a share of the smartphone market (by any measure) as Apple?” This report by IDC Research says that in the second quarter of 2015, Samsung had 21.4% market share (by units sold) vs 13.9% for Apple.
OK, then, the answer to my question is “yes, there is another company that has more market share, by some measure”. Apple isn’t necessarily the biggest dog in the park. They’re still in a pretty decent position, though, as phone hardware companies go.
As phone software companies go, of course, Google is quite obviously the biggest dog in the park by any measure. Even there, though, Apple is still a contender, and can cry themselves to sleep over their multi-billion-dollar business.
(And note that I’m not just trying to be an Apple fanboy here, either. The computer I’m typing this on is a Mac, but the phone in my pocket is a Motorola running Android, both of which I purchased because I believed that each was the best product available to fill my needs at the time.)
I’m amused that Google used the Microsoft model to achieve dominance in the smartphone business. Just as Microsoft made DOS and then Windows available to all PC manufacturers, Google made Android available to all phone manufacturers.
If Microsoft were more clever or more lucky, they might have the dominant smartphone OS.
That’s a piece of revisionist history that annoys the crap out of me.
Microsoft made DOS to run on an IBM PC.
With no help or permission from either Microsoft or IBM, 3rd party computer vendors backwards-engineered the essential components of a PC to create IBM-compatible clones. DOS would run on the clones. Microsoft did not make DOS to run on the clones but they did nothing to make it less possible once it started to happen.
By the time Windows came out (especially ver 3, the first version that anyone actually used), they had no reason to make Windows in such a way as to run only on an IBM PC; they’d thrown IBM under the bus and come out with Windows roughly as IBM was coming out with OS/2. Give Microsoft credit at that point, I suppose, for going to extra trouble to make sure Windows would run on a wide variety of equipment (the existing world of what was once called IBM-compatibles), but it wasn’t their doing that created the situation. It was the clone-makers who made it originally happen.
