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Is Apple Up or Down These Days?
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If I turn one way, I see a great number of reports that indicate
that Apple, which by most accounts looks good, is slowly but surely
losing the battle to remain relevant.
No, this is not a John Dvorak column. However, there are a few
worrying signs that things aren't so rosy. For example, Adobe
recently dropped Framemaker for the Mac. Not a big deal for most
people, but considering that Frame is the dominant piece of software
for publishing technical documents, this isn't a good sign. Throw in
the fact that the Unix version seems to be chugging along nicely, and
it's a bit of a mystery why the OS X version (which is built on
FreeBSD) was never in the hopper.
Other worrying signs include Apple's market share, which hasn't
budged significantly even with all the great products being
delivered. If you look too closely, you might get downright depressed
looking at the numbers.
And a recent News.com article (Apple,
Adobe drifting apart) makes some rather discouraging remarks
about Adobe's general support for the Mac.
On the other side of the coin, Apple seems to be going great guns
in several areas. It seems scientists are lapping up the G5 for their
research. Free advertising regarding a dirt-cheap supercomputer can
do that for sales.
There are also some encouraging signs that at least some system
administrators are taking a second look at the Mac.
On the music side, it's all good news as the iPod continues to
dominate the market and the iTunes Music Store has not only a healthy
lead but may actually have claimed the life of its first competitor,
BuyMusic.
This swinging back and forth is nauseating, really - up after
reading one article and down after reading the next.
What to make of it? The pessimist in me sees the computer market
for Apple at a standstill with the music market picking up the slack.
It's likely that Apple wouldn't have had successive profitable
quarters without the iPod.
The optimist in me sees success in the iPod and future success
with Macs. Climbing out of a market share hole as deep as Apple's is
no mean feat and will take years to accomplish. Apple has performed
consistently over the last several years, and more people are
recognizing (Average Joe
notwithstanding) that it can consistently deliver outstanding
products. The recent enthusiasm for the Mac in the science community
is just a small example of Apple gaining ground with users who had
pretty much given it up for dead a long time ago.
If nothing else, it will be some time before things settle down
one way or the other.
Stephen Van
Esch is the founder and president of
the
E-learning Foundry, an online training
resource for Mac users. Steve loves the Mac and is doubly bilingual,
since he's also fluent in Windows and French.
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