You are the first person I've ever known to assert that Apple underpriced
the market! As for limiting the design of our computers to target
education, this couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, Apple is
often hamstrung by the need to produce computers on a massive scale, and
therefore we are unable to make the kinds of adjustments that would make a
product more favorable to one market or another. Only in the last year has
Apple the corporation totally aligned itself to be able to make products by
market segment. The LC 475 (education) and the Quadra 605 (business) were
exactly the same machine, save for the external plastics. Please don't
create a false history to build support for your arguments.
>The only industrial market Apple penetrated was the offset printing
>industry and for this they produced special versions of their Macintosh
>model. They had an excellent design for the job and promptly achieved
>dominance in the small shops of which there were many.
This is also untrue. The computers that publishing shops, not merely
offset printing, use are standard, albeit high end, machines. These same
machines are used in all markets for servers and media creation. That's
not necessarily by design, it's because most desktop users don't need a
blinding fast word processor work station.
>I also teach courses at Keene State College, Professional Studies
>Department. Like many educational groups, Keene State, until most
>recently went with the Apple products. In fact, the faculty is very
>Apple oriented because that was what they were brought up on. The
>*Computers for Education* course which I teach uses Apple Mackintosh
>because the school lacks educational software for the IBM clone equipment.
>
>I believe that we do our students a great disservice by cutting their
>teeth on equipment which still quite isolates itself from the rest of the
>industrial world. A disservice because, though the Apple can now use
>either the Windows/Dos operating system, the Apple is still foreign
>enough that one has to stop an think about *how* this or that works.
This misses the point. If you had all the money in the world and graduated
high school students last year on fast Pentium boxes running Windows 3.1,
your students would be in a foreign world this fall when confronted with
Pentium Pro boxes running Windows 95. Let's teach kids to think, not use a
particular operating system. And to see the other side, in my home town,
all the large employers have standardized on Macintosh, so it would be a
disservice to limit kids to a computer that's not used in the businesses
they're likely to work in.
>I vote that educators stay mainstream and stop making excuses for their
>lack of understanding the industrial markets where most of their
>graduates end up.
And I vote that educators educate students and leave the training up to
trainers.
Incidentally, since you seem to wish to paint Apple as a niche computer
manufacturer, please consider the findings of some research International
Data Corporation recently released:
* IDC estimates Apple is the #1 installed base vendor in U.S. homes in 1995.
* Apple has a 47% share of the U.S. commercial publishing market.
* Apple has a 26% share of the U.S. corporate publishing market.
* Apple has a 50% share of the U.S. chemical, pharmaceutical,
biotechnology, scientific, and engineering markets.
* Macintosh is the number one Web authoring platform
* In two months, Apple achieved status as the number two Internet server vendor
And from Dataquest:
* 63% of all multimedia applications development is done on Macintosh
Please consider the bigger picture when you are analyzing the situation.
Apple sold $11 Billion dollars in equipment last year. So if we are a
niche, it's a pretty nice niche to be in.
Respectfully,
Jim
Jim Tobin, Sr. System Engineer 907/349-3755 voice
Apple Computer, Inc. 907/349-7507 fax
AppleLink: J.TOBIN eWorld: J.TOBIN
Internet: tobinj@apple.com