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Apple Posts 4th Quarter Financial Results
theanonymousbrit writes "From the AppleInsider article: 'Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2004 fourth quarter ended September 25, 2004. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $106 million, or $.26 per diluted share.' This profit (on a revenue of $2.35 billion) apparently constitutes Apple's highest fourth quarter in nine years. In terms of actual units shipped, over 830,000 Macs and 2 million iPods were sold over the quarter. The strength of the new iMac G5 is also credited. Pretty impressive figures."
... about Apple's continued success is that there is no apparent successor to Steve Jobs. Back in the beige days before Jobs returned ... I seriously thought Apple was going to disappear.
What Jobs has done to re-invigorate the company has been amazing, but what happens if something happens to Steve? Is there anyone else who can whip up the "reality distortion field" with the same frenzy to make Apple stay the trendy, innovative company that they are now.
I know the talent will be there, but without the leadership, will Apple again drift like back in the Gil A. days and fade into obscurity?
It just makes me nervous to think that the sole success of this company might hinge on the availability of Steve Jobs. (It's not like people live forever, you know)
That's great, but what are they going to do with all their spare cash? They are already building a much better operating system than Microsoft's offerings with their existing budget. It doesn't matter how kick-ass their operating system is any more - it's ahead of the competition, and the only thing stopping them from taking a larger market share is the fact that they don't have the critical mass of market share there already.
What I would like to see Apple do is be more agressive in getting people to switch. Advertising is nice, but people who just use computers rather than having them as a hobby aren't going to pay much attention. They have a computer already, and they are comfortable with what they know.
How about a trade-in? People bring their old PCs to their local Apple store, and they get a big discount off a new Apple. Or perhaps a free training course (with certificate) when buying an Apple computer. The training course alone will ease newbies in and show them how easy it is, and the certificate will attract the people looking to improve their resume.
Apple don't have a problem building a better system than Microsoft's. They do have a problem with the network effect. When you ask your neighbour for help to fix your computer, chances are, he's only going to know Windows. When you walk into a newsagents, 99% of the magazines are focussed on Windows. When you copy a game from a friend, it'll be a Windows game. This is Apple's bottleneck; it doesn't matter how kick-ass their product is, they are only going to have marginal increases in market share as long as they think outperforming the competition is enough.
There are literally hundreds of places in the US looking for older computers and spare parts. They could easily donate to them and BAM...write-off.
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
The influx of NeXT computing programming houses actually makes this argument weaker, not stronger. As GNUStep progresses in its goal to resync with Mac OS X, another crop of small developers you never heard of will be writing using Cocoa on Mac OS X and GNUStep on Linux.
The developer problem is a lot better now that first class tools ship with every Mac. I expect the problem to get better, not worse over time.
Actually, Apple's building market share on low prices but its in markets you're probably not paying attention to. Final Cut Pro won its position based in part on its low price. Apple's 1U servers and RAID farms provide incredible performance and storage density in their class all for competitive or downright low prices. As Xsan comes out and people realize they can take 20-40% off their SAN storage budget by using XServe/XRaid products and plugging them into their existing Filenet SAN infrastructure, Apple's going to start being a real presence in the enterprise. That growth is going to keep Apple alive during the transition when Jobs inevitably retires in a decade or three.
I don't think it's fair that you got modded down, unless you really meant to troll of course, which, in a Mac section of any forum will get you flamed quite quickly.
Let's look at it from the perspective of a few potential software developers, one small, i.e. shareware, one big, i.e. enterprise ERP and one in a specialised field, i.e graphics.
The case of the small developer: You only need to spend a small amount of time with the generally extremely low quality level and huge mass of sharware software available on download.com to notice that you are both right and wrong here. The huge marketshare of pc's means that the majority of shareware gets developed for Windows PC, BUT also the large majority of junk made by semi-incompetent developers. The market is so large and the competition so high, that as a sshareware devloper for Windows, your chances of making a buck and getting recognition are tiny.
The situation is very different for Mac OSX and Macs. Here, the avergae quality level is quite a bit higher, perhaps because the community being smaller, the word gets around quicker if something is a dud. The Mac shareware developer has a good chance of getting recognition and even money for his work, because the market is smaller.
Let's look at the enterprise market: Apple now makes both servers and raid storage solutions, both of which offer excellent value and performance and very good management tools. These products are obviously selling, both in Apple's traditional media market, where video and sound demand these products as they fit in with Apple's other strengths in this area, and in other enterprises where they fit in perfectly with Linux and Unix servers. The fact that Oracle, Sybase and SAP offer their products for the Mac now shows that the interest is there.
There are indeed corporations using OSX, often because the TCO is very low, the quality high, and because OSX is so extremely flexible to fit in in mixed environments, and because it supports traditional Unix enterprise systems very well (The Java integration is the best available)
Last, let's look at traditional niche markets, such as designers and media industries. This is one area where Apple lost a lot of marketshare in the late 90's and early 2000's because OS9 was unstable and OSX 10.0/10.1 so slow and had so little software available. Many designers moved to Windows and the PC marketshare of Adobe and Macromedia etc, shot up.
That situation has now stopped and people are moving back to the Mac because of its superior colour management and stability and flexibility and simplicity. In video and sound, Apple competes extremely well with its own applications and Adobe, Macromedia, Alias, Quark etc have all now overcome the initial problems and their apps are again second to none on the Mac. I am willing to wager money that media types are simply more productive in a Mac environment, than in a PC environment. I used to be a Windows sysadmin, so I know what I'm talking about.
And then there's the new market of people switching to Macs from PC's. The iMac and iBook are made for these people. A simple, well performing, rugged, stable, virus and problem free, stable computer and OS makes friends on its own.
In fact, about the only market where Apple does have difficulties is in the traditional medium business where there is basically only MSOffice and a few servers, or where there are applications which have never had Mac equivalents, such as AutoCAD and engineering applications.
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
As long as Apple keeps on growing, developers will keep on making apps for the platform, even, with time, specialised ones.
I'm certainly not worried.
I always plug a mouse into any laptop I'm using. I hate trackpads and I hate those nipply things that some other laptops come with (Toshibas?). Bring back the trackball I say!
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."