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February 1, 2005
BusinessWeek Tells Dell to 'Beware the Beige Box Blahs'
Dell has been bashing the iPod as a 'fad' and the Mac Mini as 'not going to turn the industry upside down' after a lot of recent press around Apple's recent announcements.
Nicolas Carr over on Business Week reminds them that there was another company that held this attitude and was once dominant in their market, and gave it all away to 'fads'
That company was no other than Ford Motor Company. They were the first to bring the automobile to the masses by simplifying the building process, building it fast, and flooding the market with inexepnsive automobiles. Sound familiar? If you are aware of how Dell works at all you have their business model in a nutshell
But what happened next? Upstarts like Chevrolet, and the European car manufactures jumped in and started making vehicles as well. How did they differentiate their stuff? One word. Style. The paralell has been drawn often prior to the Mac Mini coming out that the Apple platform was the 'BMW' of computers. You got a lot of nice attention to detail at a price premium, and Apple users were willing to pay that premium.
So is the Mac Mini the equivalent of BMW 1-Series? It whets the appetities for what most Apple fans say are the key selling points of the 'Apple' experience yet are inexpensive enough for people to want to 'just try one'?
Time will tell. But the buzz that has been generated and the number of geeks I've seen post 'I got one!' are pretty strong compared to any other system release that they've done in the past
Posted by trekkie at February 1, 2005 11:04 AM
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