| Friday, May 17, 2002 |
11:12 - Still scraping off the limpets...
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2865868,00.html
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This time it's Stephen Somogyi at ZDNet with a glowing outlook for the Xserve-- noting that it's an entrant into what's likely the very most demanding sector of the market, with the very most stringent product requirements, and Apple's offering is extremely competitive. Not even "for a first try" competitive-- I'm talking best-of-breed. It's a 1U box competing with 2U boxes, because the 1U competition is significantly more expensive for the same features (or significantly less advanced for the same price, as you prefer).
But what ZDNet article would be complete without some moron in the TalkBack at the bottom with the obligatory "Apple sucks! All their products suck! The only people who would ever buy Macs are morons who don't know what a real computer is!" post. (Although as is happening more and more frequently these days, such posts get ripped to shreds almost unanimously by their follow-ups.
This one's just priceless, though.
I hate to go inserting reality into all this heady fantasy, but...
Remember that Apple is the company that can't convince more than 1 in 20 people to buy one of their machines in the consumer market. This is a market where the Apple faithful were willing to overlook the shortcomings of the original I-Mac having no direct means of backup or even an easy method of transporting data from one machine to another, not to mention NO method of connecting a different monitor when the internal one fails.
No, the I-Mac's 2 biggest selling points: A different colored box and the fact that it isn't Microsoft. Someone buying machines for a server farm isn't going to be making the same numb-skull decisions as the people that bought the I-Macs because of fruit colored translucent boxes and a consuming hatred of Microsoft (not necessarily undeserved, mind you).
So if Apple can't do any better in the market they're best suited for (naive first time buyers, ABMers, and force of habit graphic artists) what in the world makes them think they're going to make it in a highly competitive market where they've never had a presence before and where the people making the buying decisions aren't going to be as influenced by what color the box is that houses the guts? Yesterday I actually saw someone spend a paragraph talking about the pretty LEDs on the new Apple server and how much fun it would be to watch the CPU load indicators change.
Everyday we're seeing at least one story about an insignificant niche player trying to play puffer-fish. Does anyone wonder why?
This is the future of web advertising, folks! It's not too hard to figure out who paid for the Intel java ad in the middle of Anchordesk, but I'd bet a significant amount of money that all these stories on Apple are bought and paid for just like the Intel ad is. In radio and television there's a law requiring sponsors contributing over a certain percentage to a particular program to disclose their involvement. This is the reason for "billboards" ("Tonight's episode of Friends is brought to you by..."). But in web publishing there is no such requirement. That's why we have the Apple ads disguised as content.
I have seen some jokes about the "Steve Jobs field of reality distortion" the last few days. Everyone seems quite amazed by it but the explanation is really quite simple and easily explained in the digital world of ones and zeroes. You take a special piece of paper including the words "Apple, Inc." and the name of some bank in Cupertino. On the line that starts "Pay the amount of..." you place a 1. You then begin adding zeroes until the distortion field achieves the desired level. Here's a little chart:
Tracking the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field:
No zeroes: Distortion too small to be measured.
1 zero: Threshold of visibility. Distortion barely detectable.
2 zeroes: Slightly more noticeable but still barely evident.
3 zeroes: Much more noticeable but reality still clearly visible.
4 zeroes: Now we're getting somewhere. Reality still slightly visible but extremely hard to see.
5 zeroes: You mean someone else besides Apple makes computers?
6 zeroes: What's reality?
I really don't have any problem with ZDNet getting money from Apple. They are in a publishing business that is advertiser supported and I can't blame them a bit for capitalizing on willing customers. And if Apple is giving them a lot of money then I would expect to see a lot of Apple ads. That goes with the territory. Remember, I'm the guy that doesn't see all advertising as the ultimate evil that some of the other forum posters do. I'm not even running ad-blocking software so that nice Lycos ad at the top of this page and the Intel, IBM, and Oracle java ads on the start page have gotten more than the occasional glance from me.
And I'm not so naive as to think for one minute that all those pro-Apple articles by DC and others are just some of the staffers finally realizing what a wonderful product Apple makes and feeling guilty for ignoring it for so long. I just have a problem with the presentation. The java ads have a little arrow pointing to them saying "Advertisement" (like we wouldn't have figured it out on our own). I'd say it's kind of unnecessary for them, but I think it would show a great deal of honesty to put the "Advertisement" moniker at the beginning of stories like these. There really are people out there that don't realize these are just as much commercials as the Lycos ad at the top of this page.
I won't bother picking this apart, because it's already done quite well by some of the other respondents. But I just had to make note of the delicious little logical leap he makes about halfway through, and then treats as fact for the rest of the post: that Apple is paying-off the columnists at ZDNet and other tech sites to write Apple-positive articles. You see, because only a moron would say anything positive about Apple on his own steam.
Look: Apple isn't perfect. They do some pretty repugnant things of their own. Their repair and service channel, for instance, leaves a lot to be desired, as I hear frequently from Marcus (who works in an Apple Certified Reseller service shop). And they're pigeon-holed into some technology that isn't on all counts the best in the field, and sometimes their marketing is misleading when it comes to performance. (I'm well aware that the G4 is a laggard when it comes to integer and floating-point math, which is why the marketing tends to focus on graphics and media processing, which is dependent heavily on vector operations, where the G4 completely blows away the competition.)
But these are details. Take your telephoto lens and zoom way, way, waaaaaay back, and see where computers are today compared to where they were twenty years ago, or even ten. Macs and PCs are neck-and-neck, technology-wise. They both do the same things, they both run the same kinds of software. It's no longer an argument between command-line proponents and GUI lovers; it's an argument between very subtly different flavors of GUI, with similar feature sets, whose only differences are in the details of implementation.
So what's the selling point that Apple brings to the table?
New stuff.
They think of new stuff. Like LCD monitors on adjustable swing-arms. Wireless networking. DVD burning. Digital video editing. Portable music players that you simply plug in, wait a few moments, unplug, and go.
The reason it's so hard for me to word this in such a way that it's convincing is because once you've been a part of the Mac community for a while, it all becomes so obvious that this is the winning team that when you start trying to explain it, you start sputtering. You quote examples, you take pictures, you write long-winded repetitive articles, you get more and more frustrated as it just doesn't sink into the listener's skull. Eventually, you probably just give up and learn to ignore the cacophony of people jeering at you and your candy-colored lickable so-called "computer".
I haven't given up yet, and I'm not about to-- after all, now we have the press on our side. And more importantly, we have the geeks on our side-- at Slashdot, The Register, Ars Technica, and elsewhere, you'll find legions of developers and innovators toting TiBooks and G4 PowerMacs, their eyes bugging out when they see the comparison curves in FileMerge or the almost obscene level of Object-Oriented visual nature of Project Builder or the flexibility of Cocoa. You'll see a whole new generation of technological movers-and-shakers who are growing up in an era where Apple represents cool rather than retarded-- and so in the next few years, we're going to reap the rewards as these people start running new software companies, writing killer apps, and running IT departments.
And that's why the Xserve is perfectly timed and perfectly targeted.
Pretty soon, the people who say "Macs are for losers!" will be looked at with the same expression as you would reserve for someone who says "Air travel is for idiots! Rail, man, that's the only way!"
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