The fact that Apple made a half-hearted effort to make an enterprise play does not make me wrong. They underwent a period of serious indentity crises while Jobs was absent, and have made so many half-steps in so many directions. I said they never focused on enterprise clients, and what I meant was that they never engaged that market directly with specialized hardware, and/or OS variants. OS X Server is the closest thing to an enterprise product that Apple has ever released, and it's quite recent.

It's obvious that you don't know much about antitrust economics, if you think markets take care of themselves. Cartelization, predatory practices, and price gauging are very real threats to healthy capitalism. It's happened in Aluminium, Sugar, Oil, Produce and now it's happening in Software. Software is as important today as those other commodities were in the past.


If I sound emotional, it's because I'm a consumer watching an injustice against me play itself out in front of my eyes.

 

BTW, I own a lot of MSFT, and as a shareholder, I have a right to be upset about their practices. I don't see feeding off the lifeblood of the market as a long-term value for shareholders.

 

Here's an interesting article about XP and MS:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html

Food for thought.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sunchild
[B]



See what's going on here?

 

No need to be rude. (It's never a good sign when someone begins an argument with "you're wrong!")

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chris S
[B]Have you seen MSFT's gross margins?

 

BTW, I don't claim to know all the facts and (unlike some others), I don't claim to be an expert. If you're going to tell someone they're wrong, explain yourself and refute them. Don't just say, "I'm an expert and you're wrong" or "I was invited to One Infinite Loop, and you're an ignoramus."

There's more to debate than unzipping and whipping it out, guys.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sunchild
[B]The fact that Apple made a half-hearted effort to make an enterprise play does not make me wrong.

 

Is it so inconceivable to interpret my statement to mean Apple didn't ever make a full-fledged concerted effort to sell computers to the enterpise? I'll try to be more precise in the future. Why the belligerence?

I've never seen you post anything that I didn't agree with (except that thing about me being wrong ), so, tell us all about Apple's failed enteprise plays.

 

No belligerence, You said no such thing as red, I said I saw red, you said that is not red, it was closer to pink. I asked how we identify color, you said I am being picky.

Certainly not worth further discussion..

 

I can partially answer that one. My company (fortune 500) was one of the first companies to jump on the Apple band wagon. We are located right around the corner. Our engineers readily migrated to Apple during their multiple ramp ups. Apple had us eating out of the palm of their hand.

So why don't we use Apples today. Apple wouldn't play the same game as the rest of the children in the sand box. IBM won out with computers that cost half as much and counld perform just as well. Also, the PC allowed my company to remote administer saving additional money.

Apple had a strategy of get them young and they will prefer them in the future. Cheap computers for schools. Expensive for the rest. It didn't work. Companies would not buy them. The software was scarce. The equipment was expensive.

Sound like an attempt and a failure to me.