The Apple Tree: 35 years of Apple Products

Dell's done okay with a product line model I'd categorize as "Organized Confusion." I just looked at their site; in the years since I last bothered with them, they've added a fourth root category (Home, Small Biz, Large Enterprise /and/ Public Sector). Dive into any one of those and you'll see a nicely ordered and small set of machines, cheap and wimpy to fast and expensive.

But across Dell's lines, if you picked a machine from the Small Biz bucket and compared it to a machine in the Enterprise bucket, could you tell which was better?

Apple in the 90s was horribly confusing; no buckets. They just sort of barfed out a bunch of machines with not a lot of thought about customers. What would a business buy? A performa? A Quadra? What about that PowerPC thing?

So Dell's been careful to keep choices relatively few. (Once you choose a "chassis you can customize the heck out of it, but you're pretty much limited to components they stuff into sockets when they build the machine, and some colored plastic).

There are markets where more than a couple of choices will /kill/ you. Game consoles and other platforms (phones), for instance. Making developers worry about a zillion platforms will murder an app market and expose you to competition to folks who might have crappier hardware, but a more consistent story.