August 11, 1997
Apple needs clones as much as the clones need Apple
By Bob O'Donnell
Like lost, anxious children, the Macintosh faithful huddled in Boston last week at the
semiannual Macworld Expo, hoping to hear something that would calm their fears. Their
favorite company's woes have been continuing unabated and they were all in desperate need
of being reassured.
Hopes ran high, with White Knight Steve Jobs planning to offer his vision for Apple's
future during his keynote speech. Many secretly, or even openly, hoped that Jobs would
announce he was taking charge of the company he founded 20 years ago and would
single-handedly lead it back to glory.
Ah, but times have changed. While Jobs did announce he was joining the company's
overhauled board of directors (along with pal Larry Ellison), he stopped short of taking
over the company. And his keynote, while offering a bit of emotional solace to some of the
fearful faithful, did not provide a very complete roadmap for Apple's future. Other than
announcing the new board and admitting that past directions weren't well-defined, Jobs'
only substantive points were that Apple would concentrate on its core strengths -- in the
education and creative content markets -- and that it would work to improve partnerships.
Jobs' bombshell was that the most important of these new industry partnerships would be
with perennial adversary Microsoft. Not surprisingly, many in the crowd were aghast at the
idea and responded with strong booing. Jobs replied by pointing out -- correctly, I think
-- that Apple needs to work with Microsoft, and that Apple's success need not come
at the expense of Microsoft. The sobering reality is that without strong application and
technology support from Microsoft, the Mac market is ultimately doomed.
Conspicuous by its absence was the most pressing issue facing Apple today: Macintosh
clones. Apple's negotiations with clone vendors have stalled recently, particularly in the
last few weeks, and as a result, serious questions are being raised about the continued
viability of Mac clones. And without a healthy clone market, many industry watchers-myself
included-have serious concerns about the future of the overall Macintosh market.
The timing of these developments could not be any worse. This year's Boston MacWorld
Expo finally saw the debut of the first Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP,
sometimes also referred to as PreP, or PowerPC Reference Platform) Macintoshes. Motorola's
StarMax 6000 line of Mac clones and new models demoed by UMAX and Power Computing will be
the first systems that were designed without an Apple motherboard. CHRP systems still
require a Mac ROM, which Apple has yet to deliver to the clonemakers, but they offer the
potential for tremendous improvements in Mac performance and promise to bring the type of
diversity currently found in the PC world to the Mac market.
Not coincidentally, the decreased dependence on Apple technologies allows clone vendors
to try out new technologies of their own and the results of these efforts are already
clear. Despite slower processor speeds, initial benchmark results show that Motorola's
early StarMax 6000 units significantly outperform Apple's fastest machines (see "First CHRP Mac
speeds past all others". And even without CHRP, clone vendors such as Power
Computing have consistently built systems that outperform Apple machines.
So, while Jobs talks about partnerships, Apple acts as if it's afraid of the
competition. It can't seem to keep pace with these smaller, quicker vendors, and now the
company is using strong-arm negotiating tactics to try to reduce the clonemakers'
effectiveness or even existence. True, many of the clonemakers' sales have cannibalized
Apple's sales, instead of increasing the overall Mac market as some had initially hoped.
But that still doesn't justify running the competition that Apple itself created out of
business. If consumers are opting for Mac clones because they offer better
price/performance ratios, then Apple needs to make better, faster Macintoshes. It's as
simple as that.
In his keynote address, Jobs referred to Apple's interest in offering a choice when it
comes to browser software, but if the company doesn't let customers have a choice when it
comes to hardware, the choice of a browser may soon be irrelevant. And that would be a
sad, sad day, indeed.
©
Copyright 1997, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
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