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| Re: Wasn't the PCjr the incompatible one that flopped? by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 01/31/2014, 4:39am PST | ||||
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blackwater wrote: The PCjr failed because IBM deliberately "crippled" it so it wouldn't compete with other machines that were more expensive. IBM kind of learned that lesson from the days when it sold the 360 and 370 mainframe, some places that had 360s moved to the more capable 370, but could buy a smaller and cheaper machine. So the PCjr had all sorts of cost-saving (for IBM) changes that were basically so shoddy, people either were disappointed or (more likely) refused to buy it. Like the "chicklet" keyboard instead of a regular one. IBM didn't realize that your cheaper machine usually doesn't "cannibalize" sales of your more expensive systems, what it usually does is it puts a machine otherwise unaffordable in the hands of people who probably couldn't afford the more expensive one. And IBM needed to take a page out of Procter & Gamble's playbook. If your product sells into a market where it cannibalizes sales of more expensive items, then it means someone else can do the same thing, and it's far better you cannibalize your own market and extract some profit from the sales to value conscious people, instead of letting someone else do it. Procter & Gamble sells lots of products that compete against each other, so that if P&G can't get you with one of their more expensive items, they sell you something else that's cheaper instead of leaving money on the table for someone else to get. They're not afraid to cannibalize their own product with something else of theirs to increase sales volume. That P&G is still successful after 150 years tells us that they're probably doing something right. blackwater wrote:I had a choice, buy Windows or buy OS/2. They were both the same price and OS/2 came with Windows so I bought it myself. It was a damn shame, OS/2 was better but IBM never pushed it. You could run Turbo Pascal 6 on OS/2 through the DOS box, and it runs flawlessly. Turbo Pascal 6 cannot run on Windows 95. blackwater wrote: Apple made a fatal mistake that almost killed the company. It has been openly hostile to trying to push sales of Macintosh in the commercial market. For some reason they are basically 100% targeted at the consumer market despite the fact the business market is more lucrative and because businesses have support staff they can handle the routine problems. Apple could probably have gotten 2 or 3 times as big as it is now if it had done to the Macintosh what it did to the iPhone. Make it the sort of thing that even professionals would want to use in a business environment. blackwater wrote:There probably ain't a dime's bit of difference between the Mac and Wintel machines, but Apple and Steve Jobs figured out how to sell at a premium price to a small class of consumer. My sister had one of the original pre-OS X color Macintosh, and you had all the same problems with incompatibilities and drivers and everything else you got on Windows or have now. But quite a few things they did right. My sister sent me to the computer store to purchase an external 800 megabyte drive for her Mac, which at that time was an SCSI drive. Well, I figured the sort of horrible problems you get when you try to add a drive to a (pre-windows and pre-usb) MSDOS machine. So I bring the drive home, plug the cable into the SCSI adapter on the back of the Mac, plug it in and turn both on, and just like today's jump drives and external USB drives on either Windows or Mac, the Mac sees the drive, it mounts it as a second drive on the desktop, and it works perfectly. |
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