Apple's First Flops

Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."

Comments

Re:Sounds reasonable.

[el_womble]

Imagine everyday coding in Cocoa and XTools as standard in businesses... bliss. Core Data is probably enough to shift the TCO and ROI on Apple Hardware in Apple's favour, but then what CFO in his right mind would get locked into a single vendor for the OS and hardware, especially with the initial investment in x86 hardware? If I were Apple I'd think seriously about licencing the fabled x86 build of OS X for business use only. Not only would they get a boost from support contracts, but more people would be exposed to the software at work, and hopefully, start thinking seriously about buying the hardware for home. They might even start to shift a few more XServes! I guess the biggest problem they'd be facing then is piracy but that could be curbed by limiting the processor compatability to Xeons and Opterons, kind of the anti Windows XP Starter Edition.

Re:Sounds reasonable.

[DenDave]

I think the biggest technical problem for x86 OSX is that they would have to suppprt a plethora of hardware options that really wouldn't earn them enough money in the end to pay it off. Tiger goes for around 130 retail so then what would they charge for x86 volume licenses? maybe 30 bucks? I doubt they could muster the current level of support and quality on 30 bucks a seat. Nope, better that users who really see the need dish out for the hardware as well, I mean think about it, you cannot turn a dodge into a mercedes just by changing the badge.

Growth is now the biggest threat to Apple because it is not so simple to scale your business to meet the demands of the market. Already Apple is feeling the strain, employees are being worked dang hard and the company is struggling to keep up supply. Success of Ipods, Ibooks and Mini's is so high that new OEM's are being used and all the long while, they still need to keep the quality and standards up to par with their reputation. If the mini's all started to exhibit failures and poor workmanship than that would harm the crossover (new mac users) market more than anything the competition could hope for.

The best situation for Apple now is to stabilize the growth and scale the infrastructure so it all runs smoothly. In EU there have been three month delays in some shops and that simply won't do.