[Am-info] Re: adopting alternative OSes

[Erick Andrews]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 20:59:24 -0700, Mitch Stone wrote:

>
>On Sunday, April 27, 2003, at 05:04 PM, Erick Andrews wrote:
>
>> (And I doubt Apple was much less unscathed, but managed to
>> survive with a captured market, controlled the hardware too, visibly 
>> took some
>> of Gates' "investment", and danced to the musical-chairs management 
>> tune till
>> Jobs came back.  All in all, Apple has so far survived).
>
>I'm not sure what you are driving at here, but if you mean to imply 
>that Apple's market is any more "captured" then any other product 
>market, then clearly you are wrong.

No, I wasn't trying to imply that, only that Apple was not doing so well
then either.

>As for the "investment," I thought we all knew this history and would 
>not need to go over it time and again.

History?  I didn't think I was preaching to the choir.  You said:

>I can't pretend to speak to internal IBM management issues, except to 
>observe that IBM's PC division was/is part of the greater company, and 
>if the company was committed to OS/2, so would the PC division be 
>committed. (People do after all generally prefer to keep their jobs.)

and I did not want to overlook the importance of internal power struggles, 
which I believe to a lesser extent continues today, and not just OS/2, but 
for other OSes as well.

However, if I had a bit more hard data from IBM or its close observers, it 
seems they make more money on "service" today than anything else, except 
possibly big iron.  It also seems that the service model got emphasized when 
Gerstner came along.  There are some products you can't generate much
service revenue on.

-- 
Erick Andrews