From: David Ensteness (denstene_at_mac.com)
Date: Fri Apr 23 2004 - 11:18:40 PDT
On Apr 23, 2004, at 12:36 PM, Joel M. Sciamma wrote:
> Well, that 25% is down from 70% or so 5 years ago. And my prediction
> is that
> it will continue going down if Apple remain on the course they are on.
> In 5
> years from now, Adobe may only supply a handful of their titles for
> the Mac.
Five years ago it was 40% not 70%. Also the up shot in Windows sales
has not been in Illustrator or Photoshop for Windows it has been in
Adobe Acrobat for Windows in the corporate market. So that is a tilted
way to look at it. You would contemplate dropping 25% of your income?
Honestly .... Adobe has been pushing Acrobat for the "paperless office"
for about 15 years, the market is finally moving that way and Acrobat
sales are giving Adobe a big boost in the Windows corporate market.
That does not show that Apple is losing the DTP market.
> Apple seem to be pushing very hard for the video editing market with
> some
> strong offerings (in direct competition with Adobe products
> incidentally)
> but that's even smaller than DTP as a niche. Where will they retreat to
> next?
How is going into a new market with high profit products retreating?
Adobe is not and never was a big player in video, that would be Avid.
And Avid isn't complaining, in fact they are saying that they are doing
very well in the Macintosh space and have no issue with what Apple is
offering. I am very confused by the "retreat" statement. Apple has
moved into the digital audio market and consumer electronics space with
the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, how does developing a brand new
market indicate a retreat?
> I cannot in all honesty continue to do so while this
> 2nd Job's-era company continues to turn out products that are well
> below
> what I would expect from Apple. Mac OS X particularly is not worthy of
> a
> company that spearheaded the industry for so long.
The iMac, the iPod, the eMac, the iBook, DVD-RW drives, FireWire 400
and 800, BlueTooth and USB when the industry did not move on them,
AirPort/WiFi/802.11b and AirPort Extreme/802.11g.
> It is well known that Jobs is hostile to user interaction design (one
> of his
> first actions was to sack the Human Interface Group) and frankly, it
> shows.
> All they are doing is inexpertly tinkering with a 20 year old UI
> concept
> instead of doing the sort of proper R&D they used to do.
Apple never took user feedback in the past, they were famous for it.
With the advent of the Mac OS X Public Beta nearly every Mac OS X
application from Apple has a feedback feature. There are numerous
instances of Apple changing their products since that point based on
user feedback. Famous case in point: Mac OS X PB did not have an Apple
menu at all, the 10.0 release did that and a lot of other things, the
option to display network servers, disks, and hard drives on the
desktop, also something not available in the PB release. Multiple
libraries in iPhoto 4 was also by user request, sale of the eMac to the
general market outside of just the education market was by customer
request, the just revised iBook G4 now has a SuperDrive option which
was included because of customer feedback. The Xserve was produced by
request of video and education customers.
How are they not listening?
Also the UI concept they are using had 14 years of work at NeXT so it
wasn't exactly a new kid on the block. Mac OS X is not just a NeXT
based UI, it also has a lot of hybred carry over from Classic Mac OS.
But honestly, while the Classic Mac OS was an elegant UI, it was not
revised much over the 20 years it existed. The basic UI had not changed
at all since the first release and its very easy to look and say, this
is system 1-6, this is system 7-8.1, this is 8.5-9.2.2. Why? Because
the changes that did occur were very long apart in appearing. The
control strip showed up in 7.1, most everything else we knew and love
has been there since System 7, the UI didn't really change much past
that point.
The number of things I can do in Mac OS X
> They are trading on work that was
> mostly done as much as 10 years ago (like FireWire) and little is
> coming
> along to replace it.
FireWire was done in a joint development effort with Sony and first
appeared on computers in 1999 with the release of the Blue and White
G3. That is far from ten years ago, try five. Mac OS X is the first
consumer UNIX system that has gained wide adoption in the consumer
space. DVDRW is considered something that should be standard. 802.11b
and g were codeveloped with Lucent, Apple released the iBook with
AirPort a year before any PC maker had anything available, although
Dell does claim that it beat Apple to market ... check the ship dates,
so not so.
"Mostly done" is a good way to also sum up Apple's OS plan. In 1986
Apple had plans to release System 7 [Blue] and a next generation OS
[Pink]. Pink was to be codeveloped with IBM but it fell apart. Then
came Copland, after Copland was spose to be Gerswin. Gerswin never
entered development, Copland was rolled into System 7 in versions 8.6,
9.0, and 9.1. Apple never planned for System 7 to last beyond the first
generation of PowerMacs but they did not have a viable alternative
ready. Apple, the old Apple you say was so great, had just as many
faults as victories, and that old Apple knew that Classic Mac OS was
already long in the tooth before 1990. The fact that it lasted another
ten years is simply because of how slow the rest of the market moved in
catching up.
> The declining value of DTP to Apple is, quite honestly, shameful. They
> can
> and should absolutely dominate that sector but Mac OS X in its current
> state
> is just not the tool to do it and the reluctance of the DTP market to
> embrace Apple as it once did should send an enormous rocket up the
> backsides
> of the Apple board. If they don't want to end up as makers of bijou
> computers for enthusiasts they had better get their act together.
No one has put forth any evidence that Apple does not have a large
share of the DTP market. It is the corporate business sector that has
been contributing to Adobe's sales in the Acrobat arena and that does
not affect the publishing sector. I have yet to read an article about
any DTP firms moving to Windows even with the long delay of Quark
Xpress to make it to Mac OS X. Dozens and dozens of firms said they
would not move to Mac OS X until Xpress was there, but none were
publicly reported to move to Windows to get there faster.
David
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Apr 23 2004 - 11:30:01 PDT