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"Hey Mike: In Your Face!" (8/17/00)
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Ah, the Apple-Dell rivalry; it's been awfully good to us here at AtAT. From Mike Dell's original public comment about shutting Apple down, to Steve's retaliatory verbal jabs at the Power Mac G3 unveiling, to the unspoken years-long war as Apple knocked Dell out of the top spot for inventory management and Dell tried so hard to ape Apple's products and consumer appeal... it's been one heck of a ride. Back in 1997, Steve offered Mike Dell a little public warning: "With our new products, and our new store, and our new build-to-order manufacturing, we're coming after you, buddy." At the time, we thought it was just idle grandstanding and chest-thumping, but an article in the Sydney Morning Herald indicates that Steve and his loyal followers meant business. Serious business.
The Herald caught up with Apple Money Czar Fred Anderson when he was in Australia recently, and Fred had a few choice things to say about Apple's financial situation. "The most significant turnaround in recent business history" is now complete, he announced, and Apple is free once again to be "the cool company" ready to focus on innovation. All those great new products they've been pumping out translate into some significant revenue growth for Apple; Fred expects the company to post a revenue of about $8 billion for the year ending September 30th, up from $6 billion the year before-- a 35% year-over-year increase. Not too shabby, right? But more to the point, those numbers might have Mike on the run; "Apple expects to eclipse Dell as the fastest growing computer company this quarter."
My, my, my... first inventory, and now growth. Can a Dell-beating revenue be far behind? Well, yes, it can, given how huge Dell is, especially in the enterprise market. And Fred himself reiterates (much to some Apple-watchers' chagrin) what various Apple execs have said time and time again: "We're not going into the larger enterprise market." So don't expect Apple to come anywhere close to Dell's annual $25 billion anytime soon. (At least, not until Mac OS X has been out for a year and Apple announces the Apple Store for Corporate Purchasing, but that's a whole 'nother story.) In the meantime, we guess we'll just have to settle for Apple soon becoming the "fastest growing computer company." What a crying shame...
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SceneLink (2489)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 8/17/00 episode: August 17, 2000: Presumably Steve's got something up his sleeve for his big Seybold keynote-- is it the PowerBook G4? Meanwhile, money guy Fred Anderson announces that Apple may soon surpass Dell as the fastest-growing computer company in the industry, and Samsung opens a new LCD production line just as the years-long shortage appears to be winding to a close-- could this be the beginning of an all-LCD Apple product line-up?...
Other scenes from that episode: 2488: PBG4: Electric Boogaloo (8/17/00) Heads up-- there's less than two weeks left until Seybold and its attendant action-packed Steve Jobs keynote address. And do you suppose that Steve's going to get up in front of thousands of members of Apple's lucrative "content creation" market without introducing something big, and probably expensive?... 2490: The Future Is Flat (8/17/00) We've heard it over and over again through the years: the prediction that "someday soon" CRTs will be a thing of the big, clunky, energy-inefficient, radiation-emitting past, and all computer displays will be LCDs instead...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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