MontagsMacOrama

Enorm ausführlicher Artikel in der Business Week über Apples aktuelle Chancen und Gefahren bezüglich iPod und iTMS:

"Jobs bristles at the notion that Apple's lead is in danger. "It's kind of insulting, actually," he says. "The suggestion is that we stumbled into this thing. When are we going to get some credit?" He notes that the Mac's peak in the U.S. was about 16% market share. That's far less than the iPod and miles less than iTunes, which has 70% of music downloads. What's more, Apple's rivals are fighting among themselves, so it's not mano a mano with mighty Microsoft. Microsoft is pushing one standard, RealNetworks is pushing another, and Sony is supporting a third. That's giving Jobs the opportunity to expand his market and make his technology the standard for digital music. "Over half the iPods we sell are being used with Windows PCs, and it has been that way for a while," Jobs says."

Weiterer interessanter Artikel, ebenso in der Business Week, über die Frage, wie sich Apples Erfolg messen lässt:

"Judging from Jobs's comments, he has no intention of letting Wall Street down. But he wouldn't mind if those analysts would start measuring the Mac by the profits it produces, rather than by its market share. "We've got 25 million customers that want the best computers in the world. If our market share grows, we're thrilled. But we've held our own, while our rivals were losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year," he says. "We're in pretty good shape."
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Neben einer unüberschaubaren Menge an Artikeln zum 20. Geburtstag des Mac (darunter besonders lesenswerte Varianten bei den MacGuardians, bei The Register und in der Macworld), die bereits im Verlauf der letzten Woche einzutrudeln begannen, gab es es am Wochenende Interviews mit Steve Jobs.
Ein recht kurzes findet sich in der Macworld:

"Apple's coverage in the mass media tends to focus on iTunes and the iPod, and of course they run on Windows as well. But the bulk of Apple's business is the Mac. And the Mac is still a major part of where Apple is going in the future.
S.J.: Of course."

Ein tiefergehendes Interview bietet die Business Week:

"Q: Still, many companies are lining up in support of various standards. Aren't you concerned that this could play out like the PC market, in which Apple had a superior product, according to many people, and a market share lead?
A: Whoever enters this market now, is going to enter a market that's not in its infancy. And they'll enter a market against a competitor that has a 70% market share -- and surprisingly, that competitor's name will not be Microsoft. It will be Apple. Now, I understand that there's no guarantee we'll stay on top, but that's the situation.

Q: So you don't believe the history of the Mac and PC is useful in looking at the music business?
A: It's ancient history."

Genau richtig zum Jubiläum kommt Folklore:
"Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it."
Wärmstens empfohlen bei Daring Fireball.
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Ironischerweise bei den MSNBC News zu finden:
"If that's so, then why is the Mac market share, even after Apple's recent revival, sputtering at a measly 5 percent? Jobs has a theory about that, too. Once a company devises a great product, he says, it has a monopoly in that realm, and concentrates less on innovation than protecting its turf. "The Mac-user interface was a 10-year monopoly," says Jobs. "Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late '80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens."

A wicked smile cracks the bearded, crinkly Steve Jobs's visage, and for a moment he could be the playful upstart who shocked the world 20 years ago. "Hmm, look who's running Microsoft now," he says, referring to former Procter & Gamble marketer Steve Ballmer. "A sales guy!" The smile gets broader. "I wonder ..." he says.
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Zwei wissenswerte Details zur HP-Apple Allianz aus einem CNET Artikel:

"As part of the iPod deal, Apple is creating tools that will allow HP programmers to tweak the iTunes music software and store so that they can work with features of Microsoft's Media Center, such as a remote control. While Microsoft has made no secret of its irritation over this deal, which will promote Apple's music store and media format, the arrangement will keep consumers on a computer using Windows.[...]
HP executives also have cited Apple's unwillingness to support Microsoft's Windows Media player format on the iPod. "We would like to see interoperability," said Tom Anderson, HP's vice president of marketing for consumer PCs, but "that is not in our current plans."
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Dass der iTunes Music Store in diesem Jahr nach Europa kommen soll, ist prinzipiell hinlänglich bekannt, eine weitere Bestätigung (und die Nennung der Hürden) kann allerdings kaum schaden:

"A maze of licensing contracts, music release dates that differ by country and incompatible billing systems have combined to sidetrack the service, which many recording executives still hope will make its European debut in the first half of 2004.
"We will be here this year. I'm not going to announce the date at this time, but we are working very hard," Eddy Cue, vice president of applications and Internet services for Apple, said at the annual MidemNet music conference on the French Riviera."

Möglicherweise wird man im europäischen iTMS per Prepaid-Karte zahlen können, berichtet die Netzeitung:

"Für ein Vertriebsmodell der Zukunft halten die Auguren von Forrester Research die Prepaid-Karte für Download-Services von Musikportalen wie iTunes und Napster. Beide Dienste haben ihren Start bis spätestens Ende 2004 angekündigt. Die Karten sollen vor allem die junge Käuferschicht erschließen, die zwar über Kaufkraft, aber nicht über Internetzahlungsmittel wie Kreditkarten oder Girokonten verfügt. "
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Think Secret sagt ein Security Update für Montag vorher:

"The update, which Apple is expected to publicly release on Monday, January 26, will include a number of OS X security improvements and enhancements. The patch will deliver security tweaks to Mail, Classic, Safari, Windows file sharing, and Apache 1.3, sources said."
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Doug Brooks, Produktmanager für Server Hardware bei Apple im Interview mit Server Pipeline:

"Server Pipeline: Everywhere I go I hear that this it the year for Linux. How does Linux fit into Apple's strategy this year?
Brooks: It's interesting. Against Linux we offer really the same open source platform that a Linux does. We're based on an open source technology platform, we run many of the same server services (Apache, SAMBA) that they do. Our value, from a software perspective, is that Apple does the integration for you. We call it open-source made easy. One click install gives you the same open source services; for the command line intensive people, you can get in and modify the configuration files the same way you would on Linux, but what people don't want to do is integrate all the latest pieces and parts. So Apple does that work for you. We have world-class management tools that layer on top of it to make it reall easy to manage one or hundreds of servers. We integrate it for security and performance and reliability."

Kommentar zu Apples Vorgehensweise im Servermarkt bei Infoworld.com:

"But maybe something is afoot at Apple. Last year, the company hired Oracle's former top sales honcho Sebastian Gunningham. He has a leading executive sales position at Apple.
Why would Gunningham take the spot? Name one other high-powered sales person you know who would be satisfied with making opportunistic sales only.
Apple has also extended Xserve RAID's links; it is now Windows Server- and Red Hat Linux-certified.
Next, look for Apple to start targeting some new vertical markets. Any suggestions?
In the long run, the enterprise won't make a commitment to Apple if Apple is unwilling to make one back, and to make it publicly."
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"They laughed when I sat down to play my Apple iPod on a $500,000 living-room stereo system. Maybe, though, the joke was on them." Im Wall Street Journal.
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Safari Überdruss? O'Reilly unterstützt beim Basteln des eigenen Browsers:

"Why is WebKit worth paying attention to? Well, it's a fully documented, fully functional set of web browsing components that developers can integrate into their Cocoa/Carbon applications. WebKit gives developers the ability to make their applications much more powerful with very little added effort."
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Außerdem (Halb-)Wissenswertes aus dem Terminal - heute:
01/26 Australia Day in Australia
(Anleitung).