| Tuesday, January 15, 2002 |
20:12 - Slashdot Comes Out in Apple's Defense
http://slashdot.org/features/02/01/14/1647208.shtml
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It's always refreshing these days to see postings on Slashdot that are charitable towards Apple, particularly in crucial times like the first two weeks after a funky, controversial new product's announcement. It's even more refreshing to see vaguely disapproving, cautionarily anti-Apple articles there, followed up by hundreds of kilobytes' worth of thrashing from a pro-Apple feedback force.
One comment I thought was particularly interesting:
I think Katz's gibberish about the "middle-class" is wrong is not because the tech industry has overlooked them, or is trying to be 31337 kewl. Katz is wrong to think that misguided tech notions of cool are what cause Harry and Martha Homeowner to be overlooked. The reason the middle class is a hard sell is because personal computers are still a nascent technology. The technology hasn't evolved to the point where it is totally acceptable or suited to everyone. Our culture hasn't evolved to place the proper niche for computers in the home. After twenty-five years of the PC, we still have a way to go. When the automobile was twenty-five, black utilitarian Model T's ruled the rutted dirt roadways. A quarter century since PC's first appeared, beige utilitarian Windows boxes clog our mostly narrow-band information superhighway.
Good stuff, that. The rest of the conversation seems to have a consensus that Apple has indeed figured out a way to succeed against Microsoft: by carving out a high-end niche of stylish boutique computers where they control the whole package, rather than trying to compete with entry-level OS-only offerings to run on bargain-basement hardware, an area in which they'd undoubtedly be creamed. But in their current niche, they're in fact a monopoly.
He-hey, how's that for irony?
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