Point Size Pointer
Hello! What a great e-zine you have! Great information and very user-oriented. Enjoyed the "History of Using Macs" and "How I Got Started with the Mac."
One request, though. I'm only slightly short-sighted, and prefer 14-point size to squinting. But your screens are at the edge of legibility at 8-point or 9-point size! . I strongly recommend you increase the point size and make your great material more user-accessible.
Otherwise, good work!
Jorge Fiedler
FIDELIO@acsu.buffalo.edu
If you're having trouble reading ATPM on your Web browser, chances are it doesn't support <FONT FACE> tags. Try version 3.0 or higher of Internet Explorer or Netscape. The body text in ATPM is the same font and size as the Mac OS system font, so it shouldn't be difficult to read. —MT
Don't Cut Apart the Apple
I wish to respectfully but stridently disagree with your two OpEd pieces [Apple Cider and The Apple Treefrom ATPM 3.09] simplistically calling for the end of Apple hardware so that Apple may follow Bill Gates example, so glowingly described. I've got a few good reasons.
1. If it's only "all about money," why not just go out and buy a pc today?
2. The success of our beloved machinery is not just because of the brilliant OS. It's a two-part reason, the OS and compatibility. The moment you license just anyone who desires it to go out and make clones in any way they choose, without strict quality control, is the moment that plug'n'pray becomes a reality with the Mac OS, too. Even under the strict quality controls demanded of the cloners recently, we began to see that certain programs did not work well on variously labeled machines. I happen to own
a PowerPC and have experienced it directly, as good a machine as it is. My next upgrade is back to Apple and damn the cost.
3. What is wrong with owning 10% of the market? Or even 12%? Apple still is far ahead of MS on the Fortune 500 list. MS isn't even represented on the World 500 list where Apple is #400. (Everyone seems to make the error of valuing MS based on the paper value of Bill Gate's stock holdings. One day he's worth $37 billion. The very next, $40 billion. Who's doing the counting? And what are they using for an abacus? MS slips several points on the stock market, yet Bill keeps getting richer? Gimme a break!) Apple should be doing exactly what Jobs purports to be doing now: concentrating on core markets. For instance, if Apple commands the education market, and continues to come up with expanding machines which can run any program, just what machines do you think those children will be demanding and using in the decades to come?
4. Gates' great talent is marketing. He built his business on top of the success of IBM by pitching a poorly designed and implemented copycat OS to machines that were already in the marketplace. Great idea for a quick buck. Hardly innovative. Apple, and it's mission, cannot even be compared to MS. It's apples and grapefruits. Quality has never been Gates' hallmark nor that of the pc clone makers. It's why there were so many Chevys, Fords and Chryslers in the marketplace for so long. And why Toyota and Mercedes (and others) came along and damned near destroyed one of them and panicked the others. It's why American car manufacturers finally got the quality message and began changing their concept of reaching the marketplace. Apple is the Toyota/Mercedes of the computer world. When they've made first rate machines, they've profited. When they've scrambled for the market and released inferior machines just to get them out there, they've paid dearly (PB 5300 anyone?)
5. Cloning, as it was structured, didn't work and couldn't work. Apple was forced to carry too much of the cost load. It was a bad deal for Apple from the gitgo. PowerComputing, in particular, went directly against the purpose of cloning and marketed almost exclusively to Apple's own market instead of the tougher job of making new MacOS customers. That's where a lot of Apple's market share disappeared to. And despite all the hooraw to the contrary, cloning continues both in the US and especially in Europe.
I don't have the magic answer to Apple's problems, nor do all these opinionated "experts" with their simplistic ideas. I can only hope that Steve Jobs and the newly structured Board do. In the meantime, I'm going get on the bandwagon, stop criticizing every move they make and watch to see what happens. What appears as disaster tomorrow may be just the the chaos of change taking place...and could be the huge success of next year.
Eric Barnes
eb@financier.com
Sign Me Up
I just tried out your ATPM 3.09 and loved it. Please send more! I just recently became a small business owner, and I use the Mac to do everything. Being a Mac lover is difficult these days, but its nice to see that there are other intelligent people out there. Keep up the good work.
Jeremy Pinnix
enzyme@telalink.net
Thank you, Jeremy. Believe it or not (ok, believe it), we never get tired of hearing what people think of our e-zine. We'll do our best to continue improving ATPM with each issue.
We'd love to hear your thoughts about our publication. We always welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, and praise at <editor@atpm.com>. Or, if you have an opinion or announcment about the Macintosh platform in general, that's ok too.
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