Editorial

Posted on 7 Aug 2002 at 12:41

 

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Apple needs OS X to be a success, because if it fails the company will also fail.

At last, and despite a somewhat delayed plane, I'm back from New York. The heat! The traffic! The Switcher ads! And Steve Jobs, giving what has to be the worst-received keynote during his time as Apple's CEO.
The best thing about Jobs' speech was probably the air conditioning, which kept everyone cool in the sweltering July heat. This was especially true given that the simmering resentment in the hall was probably adding a couple of degrees to the overall temperature.
For once, the rumour sites had done Apple a favour. Had the audience not been tipped off in advance that Mac OS X 10.2 would cost them the full price, and that iTools would cost them an additional $100, the silence that greeted these announcements might have turned into full-scale boos.
Even Jobs looked nonplussed. At the end, he gave what sounded like an impromptu talk on Apple's vision of the future of the PC, where everyone is a creative person, not trapped in the world of spreadsheets and word processing. Coincidentally, these are exactly the kind of applications that rival Microsoft specialise in. The subtext was clear: 'Who needs Office when you've got iMovie?'
The correct answer is, of course, 'lots of people'. As good as AppleWorks is, and as promising as projects like OpenOffice are, without a compatible version of Office, customers would be reluctant to move to the Mac. And with OS X 10.2, Apple has a decent set of products to sell to corporate customers, for possibly the first time since the launch of the original Mac.
You can't blame Apple for having strained relations with Microsoft. It's inevitable, given that the two companies are direct competitors, that they'll occasionally have a bit of a spat. But you can blame Apple for the frankly insane pricing decisions about OS X 10.2 and .Mac.
Charging for a significant update is one thing - charging everyone full price, even those who only updated eight weeks before, is quite another. Yes, there are a whole host of improvements in OS X 10.2, but these are largely things that should have been in OS X in the first place (such as the revival of spring-loaded folders, which debuted in Mac OS 8).
There's nothing wrong with charging for upgrades, but even Microsoft offers a discount to existing users. Clearly, Apple has decided it must make up the shortfall in hardware sales by looking to software to recover the difference.
Apple needs OS X to be a success, because if it fails the company will also fail. So it must persuade existing users to upgrade, and new customers must be able to trust the company not to want to excessively charge it for upgrades. Had 2.5 million Mac users not already bought and use OS X, the entire project, and with it Apple, would be doomed. Perhaps Steve Jobs should remember that the next time someone suggests charging its OS X early adopters again for an upgrade.

Author: Ian Betteridge