I am following Apple since the 1980s. And I was many times amazed about their ability of building things in a different way. I started in the early 80s with Commodore, went to Atari in 87. At this time there were a lot different OS on the market and i worked with many of them, even with OS2. I actually liked OS2 a lot, it had multitasking and a nice graphic interface. It took me almost 8 years till I had my first windows computer (1980). I only had one because I needed auto cad for the university.
Apple was for me the Ferrari under the computers. Sexy, cool and fast. But because of it's niche it was expensive.
I followed Apple and in 1995 I could buy again an Apple, which was actually a power PC from UMAX. Yes Apple did once license their OS, however the market share was not higher than 7% of total macs.
Anyway the point is, Apple was almost dead in the late 90s, till Steve came back and did revamp Apple by getting some cash from Microsoft in (for 10% of Apple shares).
Steve basically could do whatever was necessary to gain momentum. Apple was too small to get into the eyes of regulators. His first biggest move was iTunes with some questionable record label contracts, to outfight other music libraries. Then he did build a network around iTunes, iPod, apple tv and later iphone and iPad, all can only sync through iTunes. Great move but not an open system.
When Microsoft got too big, they got big trouble with integrating Internet Explorer into OS or having an office product which was not open enough to allow other developers to build on. If Microsoft have been as small in market share as Apple nobody would have had a problem. But Microsoft had too much market share on business and home computers that the regulators could not ignore them.
Now Apple is even bigger than Microsoft and it is market leader in one way or the other for music players, smart phones and mobile touch screen computers.
Apple is now a bear and I don't think it shares will go up so much anymore. They are now in the same boat as Microsoft. Apple can not anymore just do what they want, they are watched. The only difference is that there is as well Google and Facebook which are under the eyes of the regulators as well. Which helps Apple to avoid attention. But we will see a lot of lawsuits coming up for Apple, and if you have some Apple shares you should be aware that they are not going so much up like the last 4 years.
Apple is not anymore an underdog and will spend a lot of money to fight against the lawsuits.
Apple's best bet is to find a new niche, were they are too small to be important that they can spend a few years to build again in an almost secret way an empire. What about a dating portal? I heard a nerd was defined sexy because he had an iPad.
- Posted using My iPadl
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