Subject: Re: Apple vs IBM
rom: supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2.programmer
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Date: 25 Jun 1999 11:03:24 GMT
References: <37715C23.E50CF2E1@texas.net>
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Message-ID: <19990625070324.12113.00004353@ng33.aol.com>



phoenyx <phoenyx@texas.net> wrote:

>"Jack Spencer JR." wrote:
>
>> My pervious mention of the MSX platform got me thinking, what if Apple had
>> backed that one up instead of the PC?  The Apple IImsx?  I have no idea what
>> advantage the MSX platform had over PC or visa-versa.  I do know it was
>> popular overseas, and some still use it, I guess.  Apple putting it's muscle
>> and customer base against the PC like this may have well changed the face of
>> the computer industry today.
>
>This sounds reasonable, but we seem to be forgetting the fact that the largest
>part of the apple base was educational. If all those apples hadn't been sold
to
>schools (or given away as apple did sometimes) the customer base would
>not have been near as large as it was. It was pretty much a given that IBM
>would corner the business market just because they were the business machine
>maker of the era. The clones didn't really boom until people started getting
into
>home based business. With a flood of cheaper clones available the market
>bloomed. Too bad most of the software was (is) ridiculously expensive.

That may be true, but schools were and are still a large market.

I think at the beginning, the Apple II had a more diverse market.  It had
the schools cornered and because of this, it had a foot in the nascent
home market.  It also had a sizable number in businesses.  It is true
that the large corporations nodded to IBM, but lots of small and chain
businesses (up to the size of insurance companies) did chose the IIe
when it came out.  The one I remember most was the Lamps Plus stores,
which had Apple IIe units as POS machines.  When I saw the monitors,
I became suspicious.  Looking over the counter confirmed my suspicions.
Apple IIe.

A friend of the family who was an engineer also had extensive numbers
of Apple IIes at his office as well as copies of AppleWorks.  His office
did not switch over until the '486 units came along years later.

But the final battle of the computer war was not won in schools or
business.  It was the home market and multimedia won it.  And that is
the real reason why the abandoning of the IIGS was so sad.  The
Commodore Amiga 1000, the Apple IIGS, and the Atari 520ST were
basically the only three early multimedia computers in 1986.  Of the
three, Apple was the only one with the clout and the users to take
the ball and run with it.  Instead, Apple let the IIGS languish while
Commodore and Atari made valiant efforts to forge ahead.

Come 1990 or so, MPC standard PCs hit the market.  Soon, PCs
far exceeding MPC standards followed.  Commodore and Atari could
not compete and disappeared from North America.  Had Apple
developed the IIGS further and kept its huge user base happy, it
would have been poised with at least a fighting chance to win the
multimedia battle for the home market.  With the Mac, they had to
start from behind (notice how the sound started off worse than the
IIGS with the Mac Plus and only slowly improved) thus allowing the
PCs to get ahead in multimedia.  And so the final battle of the
computer wars was lost.

PS. Does Phoenyx=BluePhoenix?