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Comment by othermaciej | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone still thinks killing Mac clones was the wrong move.

Macintosh's high margins have always been derived from a strictly segmented product line, even pre-Jobs. There's simply too many "holes" in their line to support a consumer-based clone strategy without it turning into a race to the bottom.

What Jobs-era Apple realized is that a simple, distinct product line actually easier to market to consumers than a complex full-line. Easier to understand, easier to buy, less paralysis of choice.

The one place the lack of clones is hurting them is in Enterprise. Apple doesn't really want to be in that market, but they could outsource server/workstations to someone like HP for sales to larger companies only.

I'll take the bait, Apple and everyone else lost a massive opportunity to dethrone the Borg, not once, but twice. First with Windows ME and then with Vista Microsoft were caught with their pants way, way down and without an actually usable consumer OS. Apple could have owned that and could have made a massive push for the mainstream.

This being said, had they actually taken on the Borg at their own game they would be a very different company than they are today, and not necessarily a better one.

That would have entailed finding a way through the fabled 500 orifices into a low-margin market. Good thing they dodged that bullet.

When ME came out, Apple was busy clawing its way out of the grave, and since Vista, Apple has been killing MS in consumer mindshare, revenue and profit growth, and new sector growth. MS is dead in the water in mobile and appliance computing - where do you think the growth over the next 3 years is?

that was saruman's play

Mac sales, at the time, were a non-elastic market. The clones did not increase the Mac marketshare, they just took sales of machines from Apple.

Keeping the clones wouldn't have helped them do the things you are saying, it would have just hamstrung them further.

Well, it is more nuanced than that. Everyone I think would agree that Apple managed the whole cloning thing very badly. But Ross and Fujitsu didn't hurt Sun's sales (for example).

Kind of. Fujitsu has enjoyed lots of high-end SPARC/Solaris sales for large telcos, an extremely profitable market Sun had to compete with them in and, to my knowledge, mostly lose.

The Fujitsu relationship is a bit symbiotic, in that they also co-develop SPARC technology. IIRC, SPARC V is Fujitsu's kid, while Niagara is Sun's brainchild.

As for Ross, Sun hardware has always been low-volume/high-margin. I guess they were aiming to make more money out of post-sale services and software than hardware. Ross made hardware that had to run Sun software. In that scenario, clones didn't hurt that bad. Apple, OTOH, has always been a hardware company with a strong brand.

Good you reminded me of that - I have no Ross in my interesting computer collection.

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