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Some Free Advice For Apple. Lower Prices.
For the life of me I cannot figure out why Apple does not go for more market share; it seems a very elementary thing to do. The place where you grab globs of market share is from the corporate market. Although different IT folks will quibble that the corporate market and the enterprise market are distinct, and I might agree, for purposes of simplicity, let's just glom them together. Apple's basic problem with market share is they've been pussy footing around the enterprise market and have barely put a toe in the water with the low-volume Xserve. Considering Apple's downward trending market share, I've decided to help them out with some free advice. My advice is exceedingly simple. Step 1. Lower prices. Step 2. Target the corporate world. Step 3. Profit like underpants gnomes. To that end, I'm going to help out Apple marketing by donning my if-I-were-Apple's-CEO-for-a-day cap and redesigning Apple's product grid. The new grid boils down to this: offer lower price points on the mid to low-end products, and increase functionality to justify higher prices on the high-end. No longer should Apple limit itself to a 2x2 grid of Mobile and Desktop segments for Consumers and Professionals. I've expanded the grid by adding an Enterprise market and a Server segment. Here's what Apple should be selling in the very near term:
There are a few interesting additions in the proposed grid. First, I slashed prices everywhere. The first thing you need to do if you want to increase market share is lower prices. Next, everywhere I could, I would use standardized components to reduce costs and increase volume purchasing power. There is no reason why Apple has one 17" monitor for its stand-alone display, and a different one for its iMac and PowerBook. Also, in the enterprise market, I basically watered down the Pro machines to tailor them to the more price sensitive enterprise market. Then, I boosted the Pro product offerings to give Apple some high-revenue generating products. Last, I also created some new devices to let Apple expand into new and emerging markets. Let's start with the mobile segment. First, I've standardized all the screens across all the lines. Let's get some economies of scale going here. The 15" and 17" screens on the laptops are the same ones that should be used in the iMac and in stand-alone displays. I also bumped the 12" screens on the iBook and PowerBook to 13.3" with wide screen resolutions. I upgraded the CPUs to G5s on the PowerBooks. Next, on the high-end professional PowerBook, I used dual G5's and dual hard drives.
So the new eMac will fill this void. It needs to have a decent processor, but not a screaming processor. As such, I dropped single G5s in there as well. It needs to be pretty compact, sport an AGP video card that can be upgraded, and maybe one spare PCI-X/Express slot. Of course, you need a nice looking case for the new eMac, and I'll leave it to Ive & Co. to do their dandiest. Here's a nice one someone dreamed up.
Next in the grid, we have the PowerMacs. There is no reason to have less than two processors on a PowerMac. I have a 1.33GHz PowerBook G4, and a Dual 1.25GHz G4 PowerMac. It is amazing how much more responsive the Dual G4 feels; way more than twice the speed. OS X is so efficient at handling multithreading and multitasking, that having an extra CPU greatly improves the feel of everything. Particularly with Quartz overhead being handled by one CPU, it leaves the other CPU more available to tend to your actual tasks. Anyway, what you'll notice is that the grid does not stop at just two CPUs for the PowerMac. On the high end for both PowerMacs and Xserves, we go up to Quad (4) processor systems. And as dual-core processors become available, there is the prospect of having eight (Oct.) processor systems in the future. Of course, these would be a bit more difficult to build and should cost more as a consequence. Nevertheless, this multi-CPU trend is going to continue. As IBM moves to produce more dual (and higher) core PPC CPUs (i.e., two or more CPUs on one chip), it allows Apple to increase the processor count on its machines more readily. Before we get to the server market, a quick note on the stand-alone monitors. I've dropped the prices and updated the 15", 17", and 20" monitors so they share the same mechanism found in the iMacs and PowerBooks. Hey, it's good to be the CEO. This should save some costs through economies of scale. Also, I added a new 30" LCD to the line up with a super high resolution screen. At that size, the screen would have a very high 151 DPI resolution, so the caveats from my previous article apply. Finally, let's look at the server market. My proposed feature sets for the Xserve, at this point, are mostly self-explanatory. The addition of quad processor Xserves would make it even more attractive for supercomputing and renderfarm applications.
What you will first notice from the chart is that the iHome has a built in Airport base-station. Getting networking to work for most people is too much of a hassle. By putting the router and server in one unit, you save a step. Yes, it can decrease reliability, etc. by putting in so many features into one box, but we're talking about a consumer device that's supposed to be usable by mere mortals here; this is not an Xserve environment. Next, you'll see I threw in a smidge of TiVo functionality, the ability to sync with devices (e.g., iSync wirelessly) and programs (e.g., iLife, iCal, Address Book, etc.), and the ability to directly import video and pictures from cameras. The idea is to let Granma and Granpa plug their cameras in and get a DVD burned or a photo album ordered through .Mac with little fuss or muss. I also threw in an integrated iSight. An iHome server connected to your television is a natural for video conferencing. Add a Bluetooth remote with a built-in mic, and you have the ability to be heard and seen from your couch. You could even send e-mails.
The iHome and the better price points I propose would change all that by being attractive to more consumers and to the enterprise. Apple is perhaps the only company with the prowess to come up with an interface simple enough to make something like the iHome work. They did it for the iPod when earlier MP3 players didn't catch on; partly by picking and balancing the right mix of features, but mostly by coming up with an interface that was usable by the average consumer. With a Bluetooth remote sporting an iPod-like wheel for controlling the iHome, Apple is well on its way to conjuring up a new UI for such a product. To be sure, it would require effort, but most things worth having do. And more marketshare should be worth the effort to Apple. Its marketshare has been going downward for quite some time. Apple's last quarter global marketshare has reached a precipitously low 1.7%. It's time Apple started doing something different.
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