Certianly, Apple will be able to pull the occasional rabbit out of a hat to keep themselves profitable, a la iPod, iTunes and iMac, but without those brilliant miracles of innovation, inspiration, and disign, Apple would be all but a memory now.
Short of some radical changes, like licencing the OS, Apple will eventually become irrelevant in the PC marketplace as developers cease to create content for Macs and instead develop for Windows only or find another alternative.
Memory is cheap and will continue to get less expensive.
DELL - 1 GB Module for a Dell Dimension XPS Generation 5 System 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM, PC2-4200 / 533 MHz, Non-Parity, Unbuffered Dell Part #: A0488538, Manufacturer Part #: DC6844 Usually Ships: Within 24 Hours Units Req.: 2 $140.99
Moore's law is a wonderfull thing and memory prices have beaten it consistantly.
Your 128 Meg example for XP, which came out how long ago? Apply Moores law and double the requirements every 18 months.
I don't think you can really even buy a new PC without 256 Meg minimum these days.
Would Apple's shareholders prefer to have a 7% profit margin on 4% of the hardware market for a $1.19/share/year, or 30%(MS's profit margin) profit margin on 40% of the OS market for SWAG of 3.62/share/year (assuming Microsoft's OS sales conservatively, represent only half of thier profit)?
Even if Apple only garnered 15% of the OS market they would still be ahead, plus they would still be bringing in the I-Pod revenue, as that hardware would not be cannibalized by selling the OS separately.
Seems to me like it would be worth the risk for the chance to triple profits(and presumably, share price). Plus Apple could always cease licencing the OS and go back to selling systems if things don't work out.
Man, I wish I could just go out and start a 40 BILLION dollar company. How do you do that? Oh, wait, no one does.
Dell like every other company, started out small and grew by doing something right. You don't get to appear out of nowhere and start pushing vendors around.
Some of the things Dell did right, they still do. I'm not saying that Dell has not changed over their 20 years of existance but some of the things they did right they still do now. Like dealing directly with their customers, Improving their manufacturing processes, and providing value. Dell's margins are not small because they have such large volumes, thier volumes are large because the have such tight margins.
That seems a little harsh and uninformed. Yes Dell moves into established and outragously profitable markets and then offers a lower cost alternative. Their innovation however is to provide a better value than the established vendors. If Dell's products were totally crap, who would buy them?
Dell has some huge built in advantages in any market they enter, in that they deal directly with their customers, eliminating the middleman and spend outragous amounts of money on R&D. Not in deveoping or inventing new products, but in producing and providing an equivalent product at a lower cost.
Dell looks for markets with fat margins and moves into them with a higher value alternative. They started in Desktop PC's and moved into workstations then portables then servers then networking, printers, PDAs Televisions, MP3 players...
I don't think that you should base your opinion on what Dell's products are by what they sell to the general public as far as computers go, as the vast majority of their sales are to busineses, and I will wager that the cusomer support that they give to a forutune 500 company is not the same that they give to Joe Homebody. To that effect, you get what you pay for in support and the amount that most consumers are willing to spend for that is near zero.
The only way a company can have fat margins is by deveoping a new and unique product that everyone wants to have. That requires R&D on a large scale and some serious patent and marketing work. Apple has been successful with that for years now, making stylish and innovative products that are easy to use and everybody wants. Eventually though, patents expire or are reverse engineered and you have to invent something new. I suspect that HP is sowing the seeds of thier distruction by trying to be more like Dell, and less like HP.
I give HP five years before they are filing for bankruptcy protection or are bought out by another company. The HP of today is HP in name and logo only.
"If what MS is doing is so bad, why doesn't anyone go after Apple?"
Because Apple does not have a cout defined monopoly in desktop operating systems, nor do they have a history of tying applications to the monopoy OS. Also Apple has not defied court orders regarding bundling of applications.
For me it's all of the classic Microprose games, Civ, MoO, MoO II, Master of Magic, Colonization and X-Com. I enjoy spending hours upon hours revisiting these old classics. I would never move to a new platform that does not support these apps. There are no comparable modern games that provide the fantasic level of gameplay and strategy found in these games. Graphics may have improved exponentially since then but gameplay has since stagnated.
Starcraft and Diablo II are of course the exceptions...
"OT -- So far, I have not read many serious posts in this thread. I imagine people are afraid of sparking religio-political flame wars by speaking plainly. That in itself is interesting, don't you think?"
Dell will preinstall whatever a customer (for a fee) wants. The bigger the order, the smaller the fee. In this case Questar is just a large Dell customer and Dell is sending the systems to Questar's customers.
That's a lot of etc's. I use Office 2k3 in is businees setting and very little of what I need to do with it requiers more funtionality than what I get in Wordpad. Granted I'm not wrighting tecnical journals or legal documents or creating governmnt forms or the like, but what percentage of the licencees of office actually do those things. Really, what are definitively, the killer features in the newest MS Office that are not present in 97 that you could not live without? I'll give you revision control as a valid point in some situations, but on the fly spell check? That is more of a pain in the ass than it is worth.
"But saying Office 97 is better than the more recent versions is delusional at best."
Really? How so? What featurs on the newer Offices make it more useful than Office 97? I have used Office 97 since the nice Microsoft rep gave me a free copy in 97, and I have yet to see any benifit from the O2K3 version I am forced to use at work. In fact I much prefer, the ease of use, lower system requrements and cleaner interface of 97.
Of course, if given a choice of using any of the 3, free as in beer, versions of Office that I have been given licence to use, I prefer the Open.org one as it is free, as in speech.
I guess the queston would be for the potential purchaser, how is your time better spent, playing games or develping the skills needed to build your own system? For some I'm sure the latter is true, but I suspect, that for a lot of tecnologists, they overestimate the computer savvy of the average user.
I myself, and I have built my share of systems, wimped out on my last purchase and got a stripped down system and added my upgrades later. Most of America however, would not even stoop to adding thier own memory.
I hear you brother. My old pc's mobo gave up the ghost recently, so I bought one of Dell's stripped down minimum config servers ($299) to hold me over until either DooM III or Half-life came out. So at that time I could bump up the proc and vid card with whatever is decently priced. Anyway, after moving all my existing hardware from my old box to the new and reinstalling all my favorite games, I went to start downloading the patches from the various publishers for my games, and almost every one linked me to file planet for the damn patches. Needless to say I was highly irate.
Hell, Fileplanet does not even work without macromedia flash. I refuse to run flash, even if it means I have to do without Homestarrunner. No adware for me, thank-you. That I have to suffer this indignity, this lack of support, because I go out and buy version 1.0 of my games when they come out? Intolerable! From now on I will only buy games from reputable publishers who are willing to support a game and the "licence" that comes with it YEARS after it comes out. Like Blizzard does, or to a much higher standard Id, who acually open thier old code. No more of this fucking abandonware.
I'm pretty sure that my existing computer (2.4gig celeron) and whatever video card is selling for 125$ at the time this game comes out, will be able to run DooM III at a greater resolution and higer frame rate than the X-Box. If not, I can always bump my CPU up to whatever is the going rate for a 3.2 P-4 on game day. I have been pretty much holding off either buying a new computer or upgrading my old one until DooM III or Half-life II come out. I mean what else in the last 3 or so years really calls for an upgrade?
My gamer geek fantasy though is to get a group of my PC enabled gamer friends to somehow log on to X-Box live and wreak havoc on the X-Box, DooM III players with our unfair advatage of mouse, keyboard, and pure PC muscle. Of course if I want a real challenge I will probably have to log on normally to a regular server and get my ass handed to me by those with real skils.
I don't mean to denegrate what I'm sure are quite skilled gamers on the console, but come on a FPS on a console? Yuck.
Good god, yes. Back in the old days when I worked at Computer City in the configuration department the HP's we were hawking at the time had a PCI riser that sat on top of the memory. So you had to pull out all the PCI cards in the system and then an insane number of screws to get the riser out just to add a single DIMM.
In HP's favor though, they had a rep with both the sales guys and us techs that once sold, they would not be returned. Heaven help the poor sales guy that sold a Toshiba (desktop), SONY (desktop) or dare I say it, Packard Bell.
You might want to look into what a Dell XPS laptop entails. It may only have 5 munites of battery life, but as a portable LAN party system, it beats making 3 trips out to your car at to move your monitior, system, and the box with your surge protector, mouse/keyboard etc. Plus they have some pretty cool "case mods" to personalize your system. For someone with an insane level of disposable income, and not enough time to spend the effort to "build your own", this is an ideal gaming rig.
My bet is that the margins on this market are not worth their time. Most if not all wireless standards are open, so anyone can get in and compete. There must be a half-dozen or more wireless router manufacurers alredy and if Dell jumps in what profit is left will be destroyed by Dell's direct model.
Hmm, never is a long time. Just looking at hypotheital possiblities, Opteron could be huge. Everyone except Gateway and Dell have started shipping or are planning to ship Opteron. It could be that that market could get so large that Dell would HAVE to adopt it. Just looking at the prices for Opteron on Pricewatch leads me to believe that very many pople are willing to pay for Opterons in as much quantity as AMD can produce them.
At what point would Dell HAVE to start shipping Opteron systems? Sure Dell currently gets some sweet deals on Intel processors and motherboards by being an exclusive vendor, but at what point does the savings there become less than what they could make shipping Opteron systems? How low can Intel go with their preferential treatment of exclusive vendors? What if AMD continues to beat Intel at retail the next week? Questions like these make it seem reasonalble to me to buy and hold AMD stock on the prospect of the potential return I could get when just Dell announces that they are going to ship Opteron. Particularly since AMD beat earnings expectations by some 200% this quarter and Intel missed expectations, even if only by a penny or two. I don't think Intel can afford to sweeten the deal any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Certianly, Apple will be able to pull the occasional rabbit out of a hat to keep themselves profitable, a la iPod, iTunes and iMac, but without those brilliant miracles of innovation, inspiration, and disign, Apple would be all but a memory now.
Short of some radical changes, like licencing the OS, Apple will eventually become irrelevant in the PC marketplace as developers cease to create content for Macs and instead develop for Windows only or find another alternative.
Memory is cheap and will continue to get less expensive.
A pple-Makes-512-MB-RAM-Standard-on-Mac-Mini.xhtmlco m/story/J783zlPrDnjg4t/Apple-Makes-512-MB-RAM-Stan dard-on-Mac-Mini.xhtml
DELL - 1 GB Module for a Dell Dimension XPS Generation 5 System
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM, PC2-4200 / 533 MHz, Non-Parity, Unbuffered
Dell Part #: A0488538, Manufacturer Part #: DC6844
Usually Ships: Within 24 Hours
Units Req.: 2 $140.99
Moore's law is a wonderfull thing and memory prices have beaten it consistantly.
Your 128 Meg example for XP, which came out how long ago? Apply Moores law and double the requirements every 18 months.
I don't think you can really even buy a new PC without 256 Meg minimum these days.
http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/J783zlPrDnjg4t/
Hmm, let me think.
Would Apple's shareholders prefer to have a 7% profit margin on 4% of the hardware market for a $1.19/share/year, or 30%(MS's profit margin) profit margin on 40% of the OS market for SWAG of 3.62/share/year (assuming Microsoft's OS sales conservatively, represent only half of thier profit)?
Even if Apple only garnered 15% of the OS market they would still be ahead, plus they would still be bringing in the I-Pod revenue, as that hardware would not be cannibalized by selling the OS separately.
Seems to me like it would be worth the risk for the chance to triple profits(and presumably, share price). Plus Apple could always cease licencing the OS and go back to selling systems if things don't work out.
Man, I wish I could just go out and start a 40 BILLION dollar company. How do you do that? Oh, wait, no one does.
Dell like every other company, started out small and grew by doing something right. You don't get to appear out of nowhere and start pushing vendors around.
Some of the things Dell did right, they still do. I'm not saying that Dell has not changed over their 20 years of existance but some of the things they did right they still do now. Like dealing directly with their customers, Improving their manufacturing processes, and providing value. Dell's margins are not small because they have such large volumes, thier volumes are large because the have such tight margins.
That seems a little harsh and uninformed. Yes Dell moves into established and outragously profitable markets and then offers a lower cost alternative. Their innovation however is to provide a better value than the established vendors. If Dell's products were totally crap, who would buy them?
Dell has some huge built in advantages in any market they enter, in that they deal directly with their customers, eliminating the middleman and spend outragous amounts of money on R&D. Not in deveoping or inventing new products, but in producing and providing an equivalent product at a lower cost.
Dell looks for markets with fat margins and moves into them with a higher value alternative. They started in Desktop PC's and moved into workstations then portables then servers then networking, printers, PDAs Televisions, MP3 players...
I don't think that you should base your opinion on what Dell's products are by what they sell to the general public as far as computers go, as the vast majority of their sales are to busineses, and I will wager that the cusomer support that they give to a forutune 500 company is not the same that they give to Joe Homebody. To that effect, you get what you pay for in support and the amount that most consumers are willing to spend for that is near zero.
The only way a company can have fat margins is by deveoping a new and unique product that everyone wants to have. That requires R&D on a large scale and some serious patent and marketing work. Apple has been successful with that for years now, making stylish and innovative products that are easy to use and everybody wants. Eventually though, patents expire or are reverse engineered and you have to invent something new. I suspect that HP is sowing the seeds of thier distruction by trying to be more like Dell, and less like HP.
I give HP five years before they are filing for bankruptcy protection or are bought out by another company. The HP of today is HP in name and logo only.
"If only longhorn would do a Macos9->OS X jump and axe nearly all backwards compatibility and be a real start over i might move back to windows."
Yea, that worked really well for Itanium.
If all of my legacy applications are going to break in Microsofts next OS rev, I may as well switch to Linux and get off the MS OS treadmill.
"If what MS is doing is so bad, why doesn't anyone go after Apple?"
Because Apple does not have a cout defined monopoly in desktop operating systems, nor do they have a history of tying applications to the monopoy OS. Also Apple has not defied court orders regarding bundling of applications.
For me it's all of the classic Microprose games, Civ, MoO, MoO II, Master of Magic, Colonization and X-Com. I enjoy spending hours upon hours revisiting these old classics. I would never move to a new platform that does not support these apps. There are no comparable modern games that provide the fantasic level of gameplay and strategy found in these games. Graphics may have improved exponentially since then but gameplay has since stagnated.
Starcraft and Diablo II are of course the exceptions...
"OT -- So far, I have not read many serious posts in this thread. I imagine people are afraid of sparking religio-political flame wars by speaking plainly. That in itself is interesting, don't you think?"
You must not be reading at -1...
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx ?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=100Lsap&s=bsd
Just go to small business/lattitude for a supported install of W2K.
Dell will preinstall whatever a customer (for a fee) wants. The bigger the order, the smaller the fee. In this case Questar is just a large Dell customer and Dell is sending the systems to Questar's customers.
That's a lot of etc's. I use Office 2k3 in is businees setting and very little of what I need to do with it requiers more funtionality than what I get in Wordpad. Granted I'm not wrighting tecnical journals or legal documents or creating governmnt forms or the like, but what percentage of the licencees of office actually do those things. Really, what are definitively, the killer features in the newest MS Office that are not present in 97 that you could not live without? I'll give you revision control as a valid point in some situations, but on the fly spell check? That is more of a pain in the ass than it is worth.
"But saying Office 97 is better than the more recent versions is delusional at best."
Really? How so? What featurs on the newer Offices make it more useful than Office 97? I have used Office 97 since the nice Microsoft rep gave me a free copy in 97, and I have yet to see any benifit from the O2K3 version I am forced to use at work. In fact I much prefer, the ease of use, lower system requrements and cleaner interface of 97.
Of course, if given a choice of using any of the 3, free as in beer, versions of Office that I have been given licence to use, I prefer the Open.org one as it is free, as in speech.
That is wonderfully funny. I whish I had thouht of that. The whole idea begs for some fun with photoshop and a parody article for the Onion.
I usually find one in the bedside drawer of most Southern hotel rooms.
My guess would be that the COAX has a higher markup and a larger SPIF.
Mmm, nice. Where's the torrent of the ISO?
I guess the queston would be for the potential purchaser, how is your time better spent, playing games or develping the skills needed to build your own system? For some I'm sure the latter is true, but I suspect, that for a lot of tecnologists, they overestimate the computer savvy of the average user. I myself, and I have built my share of systems, wimped out on my last purchase and got a stripped down system and added my upgrades later. Most of America however, would not even stoop to adding thier own memory.
I hear you brother. My old pc's mobo gave up the ghost recently, so I bought one of Dell's stripped down minimum config servers ($299) to hold me over until either DooM III or Half-life came out. So at that time I could bump up the proc and vid card with whatever is decently priced. Anyway, after moving all my existing hardware from my old box to the new and reinstalling all my favorite games, I went to start downloading the patches from the various publishers for my games, and almost every one linked me to file planet for the damn patches. Needless to say I was highly irate.
Hell, Fileplanet does not even work without macromedia flash. I refuse to run flash, even if it means I have to do without Homestarrunner. No adware for me, thank-you. That I have to suffer this indignity, this lack of support, because I go out and buy version 1.0 of my games when they come out? Intolerable! From now on I will only buy games from reputable publishers who are willing to support a game and the "licence" that comes with it YEARS after it comes out. Like Blizzard does, or to a much higher standard Id, who acually open thier old code. No more of this fucking abandonware.
I'm pretty sure that my existing computer (2.4gig celeron) and whatever video card is selling for 125$ at the time this game comes out, will be able to run DooM III at a greater resolution and higer frame rate than the X-Box. If not, I can always bump my CPU up to whatever is the going rate for a 3.2 P-4 on game day. I have been pretty much holding off either buying a new computer or upgrading my old one until DooM III or Half-life II come out. I mean what else in the last 3 or so years really calls for an upgrade?
My gamer geek fantasy though is to get a group of my PC enabled gamer friends to somehow log on to X-Box live and wreak havoc on the X-Box, DooM III players with our unfair advatage of mouse, keyboard, and pure PC muscle. Of course if I want a real challenge I will probably have to log on normally to a regular server and get my ass handed to me by those with real skils.
I don't mean to denegrate what I'm sure are quite skilled gamers on the console, but come on a FPS on a console? Yuck.
Good god, yes. Back in the old days when I worked at Computer City in the configuration department the HP's we were hawking at the time had a PCI riser that sat on top of the memory. So you had to pull out all the PCI cards in the system and then an insane number of screws to get the riser out just to add a single DIMM.
In HP's favor though, they had a rep with both the sales guys and us techs that once sold, they would not be returned. Heaven help the poor sales guy that sold a Toshiba (desktop), SONY (desktop) or dare I say it, Packard Bell.
You might want to look into what a Dell XPS laptop entails. It may only have 5 munites of battery life, but as a portable LAN party system, it beats making 3 trips out to your car at to move your monitior, system, and the box with your surge protector, mouse/keyboard etc. Plus they have some pretty cool "case mods" to personalize your system. For someone with an insane level of disposable income, and not enough time to spend the effort to "build your own", this is an ideal gaming rig.
My bet is that the margins on this market are not worth their time. Most if not all wireless standards are open, so anyone can get in and compete. There must be a half-dozen or more wireless router manufacurers alredy and if Dell jumps in what profit is left will be destroyed by Dell's direct model.
Hmm, never is a long time. Just looking at hypotheital possiblities, Opteron could be huge. Everyone except Gateway and Dell have started shipping or are planning to ship Opteron. It could be that that market could get so large that Dell would HAVE to adopt it. Just looking at the prices for Opteron on Pricewatch leads me to believe that very many pople are willing to pay for Opterons in as much quantity as AMD can produce them. At what point would Dell HAVE to start shipping Opteron systems? Sure Dell currently gets some sweet deals on Intel processors and motherboards by being an exclusive vendor, but at what point does the savings there become less than what they could make shipping Opteron systems? How low can Intel go with their preferential treatment of exclusive vendors? What if AMD continues to beat Intel at retail the next week? Questions like these make it seem reasonalble to me to buy and hold AMD stock on the prospect of the potential return I could get when just Dell announces that they are going to ship Opteron. Particularly since AMD beat earnings expectations by some 200% this quarter and Intel missed expectations, even if only by a penny or two. I don't think Intel can afford to sweeten the deal any more.
Intersting? Seems more insightful or informative to me. In any case, making such a salient point surely gets you added to my "friends" list.