Tony Vazquez's Profile

The tired, old VHS-Beta analogy needs to be re-tired. The V-B wars were over a dominant standard in a growing new market. The computer market is mature. The shelf-space on video rental stores, and the store-buys-user-rents model, forced the need for only one standard; the computers themselves, and the Internet they access, make shelf inches no longer relevant. Most important, Beta never achieved a critical mass in the general market, nor established a niche market, where it could survive as a second standard. Macs have both a general second standard status and the education, music, publishing, and video niches. I have never heard an argument predicting Apple’s fall to Wintel that did not also apply to Pepsi collapsing against Coke‘s dominance. Neither Pepsi nor Apple are going anywhere. The end of a Mac IE is not a death knell for Apple. It’s an acknowledgement from Redmond that they could afford to drive Netscape to bankruptcy by making their product better, then giving away a better product for free, but they cannot make inroads against the superior Safari with Apple behind it. Especially when Safari has the same location, location, location advantage on Macs that IE enjoys on Windows. What I DO thank MS for is for being a model of stick-to-it-iveness that Apple should learn from. From Windows itself to IE, MS has made many sorry and low quality products, and reworked them and reworked them until they became tolerable, then usable, and sometimes even quite good. Apple repeatedly puts out great products, put no or ineffectual marketing behind them, then abandons them. eWorld used the same AOL engine; the Newton broke ground that’s still not matched, and HyperTalk is STILL the most English-language-like programming language ever. If any of these were MS products, you’d still be using them.

I can hardly credit the idea that Apple has ever successfully marketed anything. Doesn?t anyone remember eWorld? The Newton? Anyone out there surfing the web with CyberDog? Do you see the market share of HyperCard growing? Apple STILL doesn?t know what market HyperCard addresses! The success of the Mac is based on the fact that it?s so good that it survives Apple marketing fiascos. Even in the immediately pre-?Jobs 2.0? era, when Apple was bleeding marketshare faster than Exxon tankers bleed oil, the Mac held on. I think the ads target who they say they do. Whether they do so effectively or not is a different question. I can?t help but be struck by the fact that ?switch from Wintel? ads appeared *immediately* after the 5 year MS investment deal with Apple ended. MS could concentrate their efforts for 3 1/2 years on other areas, like putting voyeur peepholes for national security groups into their OS, in exchange for the Justice Department suit dying. Then they had 1 1/2 years left to get their first ever decent Mac department in place and running before the agreement ended. Now THAT?S marketing strategy that makes even an inferior product a best-seller.