Apple Death Knell Counter

Apple Death Knell Counter – The Mac Observer

Taking a trip down the Apple doomsayer memory lane. The pieces from the pre-iPhone era make for particularly interesting reading including naysayers for Apple Stores and the crowd favourite Macs. Also, note the dozen times Rob Enderle has been quoted over the years – not a quitter for sure. Incidentally, the first quote (at the very bottom) comes from Steve Jobs himself, way back in 1995.

tags: apple death

Some of the highlights:

• Google will probably run the most popular online store, but there will be thousands.

• This will happen quickly because mobile phones are being turned over about every year.

• The era of the all-in-one hardware and software solution has been gone for at least the last ten years, even though Apple hasn’t quite caught on yet.

  • Well, we’re comfortably past 2010 and the rest of the industry is trying its best to get their all-in-one strategies into place
• Sometime in 2006, Steve Jobs will probably get hosed

• Apple turns to Philips Electronics for a bailout and is sold to the Netherlands-based consumer electronics giant for $80 a share.

• by the time Longhorn ships, Apple likely will have discontinued active computer OS development, anyway, so that the company can concentrate on the consumer-electronics market.

• If it doesn’t offer solutions that will play on those platforms the way iTunes currently does on Windows, it will probably become a footnote by the end of the decade.

• Let’s hope Apple has broader consumer electronics plans than just the iPod.

• The panel agreed that it would be Apple, Sun and Novell.

• iTunes won’t contribute to the bottom line and iPod is not "the only game in town anymore

• some sucker, likeApple, is left holding a brand of dubious (and soon to be extinct) value.

• A few years downstream, Linux desktops will force Windows to get cheaper. At that point even Windows boxes, seriously cheaper than Apple, will be in the "too expensive" category

• press the 48-year-old Jobs to split Apple into two separate companies built around its hardware and software lines of businesses

• They have to dig themselves out of the going-out-of-business cycle they are currently in

• No one at Apple has the guts to correct the mistakes of Steve Jobs.

• Find a way to exit these businesses – preferably by spinning out or selling to a company that can continue to support die-hard Macintosh fans who are married to the ways that the Mac OS blows away Windows.

• The company is moving toward the consumer electronics space, in everything from digital media boxes to handheld players — but that is even more vicious and margin-thin territory than the PC biz.

• Even for Steve Jobs, going up against Sony has to look a bit scary.

• "Certainly by…2005, possibly by the end of 2003, Linux will pass Mac OS as the No. 2 operating environment," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky.

• "I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake." David Goldstein

• But Jobs’s dream of becoming the world’s biggest computer-maker will likely remain just that — a dream. 

• He succeeded in the short term during this, his second, Apple tenure because he ran the whole company as a product team.

  • And look what it did over the next decade
• Faced with a similar question on what he would do if he were acting chief executive Steve Jobs, Dell chief executive Michael Dell said, "I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

• I think you have done enough to "save" Apple.

• The Macintosh will die in another few years and its really sad.

• Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed bases.

  • Even Steve Jobs hadn’t envisioned the rabbits he pulled out of the hat.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.