Re: Jobs = Best marketer, etc.
I do not agree. It is Jobs that caused the decline in Apple from years back. He was eventually ousted for financial stupidity. In desperation they chose Scully, Gassee, Amelio, Hancock, Spindler for CEOs and CTOs when the true cause was lack of financial discipline based on the huge cash flow from those early years when they led the pack.
I have often wondered how Apple could have been so stupid as to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
People's liking for Apple or PC is just like right hand drive cars and left hand drive cars....you like what you are used to using. Both do the same thing.
I can use both the PC or Mac to teach DTP with Quark and Photoshop. There are very few applications that are PC only. Quark was a long holdout on the side of Apple, but eventually they surrendered and made a PC version.
I think cost and speed are the main reasons the PC has crept inexorably from having 5% of the market to Apples 95% to the present case where Apple has 3% and the ROW has 97%. That is 3% by value, since Apple boxes are 50% more costly than PCs they really have only 2% share in boxes.
Apple is high in the Graphics and Web authoring fields, but that is because the SW costs a lot more than the hardware so the difference between a PC shop and a Mac shop with a full suite of graphics programs and web authoring programs is under 10%(Apple is under 10% more), and in cases like that the legacy work and employee preferances make the difference.
In a local school they have recently replaced a Mac graphics lab with 26 new pentium 4 machines. The decision was driven by cost of SW as well as HW. Quark gave a 90% educational discount on the software(usually $1500 per seat), and so the school bought 2 13 seat licences for 2 networks in the same classroom using quark on the PC. They also added Word, Photoshop, Indesign and a half a dozen others. many of the others also gave an educational discount, since once they grab the students they keep the adult is the dictum, as pple well knows with their school discount programs.
Still with a good PC at under $500 with a 17" monitor, Apple is still waaay over priced for new people.
Sure APple will keep their graphics niche....mostly, but they will still erode.
Bill
