Will We Miss Apple When It's Gone?

Jake Kirchner

Even those of us who watch the computer industry for a living were surprised by how quickly Apple Computer Co. slid into ruin.

Last fall, Apple was one of the leading hardware vendors, with almost 10 percent of the PC market, poised after a rocky year to take advantage of what was expected to be a strong Christmas buying season. It had just spurned an acquisition offer from IBM and was redoubling efforts to compete against Intel-based PCs at the low- and midprice levels.

But in very short order--just a few months, really--a price war in Japan and Apple's inability to meet demand here at home during the holiday rush conspired to leave the company with a $69 million loss for the year-ending quarter. The company announced significant staff layoffs and plans to withdraw from unprofitable markets. With rumors growing of a top-management shakeup, the company's executives opened the year reportedly searching in vain for another company willing to buy Apple.

Events have been moving so rapidly that by the time you read this the company either will be well into serious downsizing under the direction of new CEO, Gil Amelio, or will have closed a merger deal. No matter what happens, the organization we remember as opening the door to the personal-computing age will never again have the stature or the influence of the past.

Should we care?

On the one hand, there's a question of sentimentality that will occupy many chroniclers of Apple's exit from center stage. But I will find it hard to weep for the organization that sold so much hooey to unsophisticated end users, persuading them that an Apple machine was some kind of counterculture icon "for the rest of us." The rest of us evidently comprised anyone who would internalize the marketing mantra that Apple--a Fortune 50 company with industry-leading profitability--was the only computer maker not interested only in money, and that only Apple could produce a machine worthy of the information revolution and its cadres of right-thinking computing enthusiasts.

On the other hand, outside the few industry niches that are still Apple strongholds--graphics and desktop publishing in particular--it's doubtful that the great majority of us will feel any effect from Apple's fall from greatness. Its operating system's combination of technical sophistication and ease of use has been matched for the most part by Microsoft's Windows. The next version of the Apple OS has been so long in coming that no one cares any more.

No doubt a bitter group of Macintosh users will feel the sting of Apple's demise. I'm sure there will be a large, forlorn group of Apple users who will struggle along supported only by one another, their online postings becoming increasingly bitter as we close out the millennium.

I won't be counted among their number. But I know that every PC user is better off with a vibrant range of competitors pursuing different approaches to information technology. The industry already is experiencing far too much consolidation and is far too monolithic for its own good. From that standpoint, we indeed will miss Apple when it's gone. And that's reason enough to mourn its passing.

I'll find it hard to weep for the company that sold so much hooey to end users.

Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company