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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, January 14, 2005

Jobs' Apple gets down and dirty

National Post:

You have to love Apple Computer. Not, however, for its products. Those are over-glossy fashion plates designed for the people who like to overpay for products and then brag about it.

No, you have to love Apple for its ability to manipulate the press. Here is a tiny company with 3% market share in the personal computer, and yet Steve Jobs' new product announcements at Macworld earlier this week were treated as if they were auguries of the future of computing from a descending deity.

There is a tremendous bit of unfairness going on here, as I've been discussing for some time. The week before MacWorld, all anyone heard about from CES--a show 5 times the size of MacWorld that encompasses a market about 20 times bigger--is that Gates crashed Windows Media Center Edition during his keynote (which he didn't, but no matter). The Jobs-led Apple has always gotten a crazy amount of positive press. It is odd.

This week's announcement flies in the face of [Apple's] prior strategy. By launching products -- its Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle -- at low-low prices, undercutting comparable products from computer-makers and portable music player makers, respectively, Apple is getting down and dirty and fighting it out on price.

Jobs and Apple should be saluted for this change, not condemned. Now, if the company would just reverse it's "going it alone" iPod/iTunes strategy and let consumers better choose which music services and portable devices to use, I'd really get excited. But the strategy change toward embracing the low-end of the market isn't a bad thing, it shows that Jobs and Company are learning from past mistakes. Thus, there's hope for the iPod yet.

After all, Dell sells more in personal computers in any three-week period than Apple does in an entire quarter. But when Dell CEO Michael Dell announces new prices for his products you don't get saturation coverage from the major North American business press.

This is true, as I've often said. The reason Dell doesn't get this kind of press--despite both designing and building computers inside the US, unlike Apple--is that Dell doesn't have the pure drama and pathos of Apple. Apple is the quintessential American story, the underdog that comes out ahead (or appears to, in the press). Dell, like Microsoft, is a huge conglomerate. We don't like conglomerates in the US. We tear them down instead. What's hilarious, of course, is that Apple is a big company too. It just doesn't look like one next to Dell.

There is also the so-called reality distortion field that surrounds Steve Jobs. He is a mesmerizing speaker, someone skilled at turning sows' ears into silk purses.

Again, I disagree. Jobs disappeared for roughly 10 years while he buried Next Computer under a mountain of debt and absolutely zero sales. It was a huge bomb, even though Jobs spent much of that time giving the same types of mesemerizing speeches. Jobs is the ultimate salesman: A prick in real life, and someone few people would want to be around, Jobs projects a folksy charm in public appearances. And clearly, that is exactly what Apple needed: Someone hard-edged enough to make the right decisions behind the scenes and charismatic enough to sell it to the faithful.

[ Posted at 3:20 PM | Permalink ]