
Sorry, Steve: Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work (2001) - decadentcactus
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_21/b3733059.htm
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bonaldi
2001 writing is so quaint. Didn't they know they should have called this
"Rotten Apple: 10 reasons why Steve's Stores Are Going To Fail" and had each
reason on a separate page? Saps.

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maukdaddy
He also talked to experts and gave real facts and figures! Why waste so much
time doing that?!

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flatulent1
Is it "real" to predict Apple failure based on the margins seen by PC vendors,
and to assume that the buyers are just a percentage of existing Mac owners
upgrading?

Yes he had figures for both of those things, but they're the wrong numbers to
look at!

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Judson
In an odd way, given what the pundit knew and all things being equal from the
opening of the fist store, they probably would have closed down in two years.

BUT, Apple debuted the iPod that october and put it in its retail stores so
customers could get a hands on for the device. I always believed (after
watching my friends buy iPods, followed by Mac purchases a year or so later)
that the iPod was a huge growth driver for the Mac, by making it easy for
consumers to get acquainted with the Apple brand.

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j_baker
I think it was the iPod that saved Apple from dying, but I honestly think it
was Windows Vista that propelled them to the limelight (whether the criticism
of Vista was valid or not).

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dieterrams
I don't think nearly enough credit is being given to the advances they made
with the Mac following Jobs' return. The original iMacs were a big deal, and
they've been nailing the all-in-one desktop ever since. Likewise with their
laptops. Switching to Intel and supporting dual boot, also a huge deal.

iPods were definitely a huge growth driver for the Mac, but Apple without the
iPod or the benefit of Vista would still be far from dead.

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philk
This is a fine example of why I don't trust pundits. It's near impossible to
tell those who are right from those who merely sound like they're right.

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TomOfTTB
With all due respect I think you miss the point of punditry.

The point of good punditry is not to convince someone you are right and have
them follow you blindly. It’s to take an insight that you have and transfer
that insight to other people by explaining the thought process that led you to
that insight. In doing that a good pundit expects the people who receive their
insight to then evaluate it on an on-going basis and those people need to use
their own knowledge to judge the original insight’s accuracy.

So it isn’t about having the reader say “that guy is right” as much as it’s
giving the reader something to think about.

To use this as an example I think this guy was right when he wrote the piece.
He had no way of foreseeing the iPod/iPhone/iPad and their halo effect. But as
a reader in 2001 people should have taken this piece with all the negatives it
lists and weighed it against Apple’s strengthening product line. Then used all
that knowledge to form a new opinion based on it.

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msie
I think many pundits miss your point of punditry too.

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thought_alarm
I think there has always been tremendous curiosity about Apple's products,
especially in the early 2000s. The hardware looked interesting, and if you
knew anything about the origins of OS X then the software looked very
interesting too. But if you weren't already part of the club then it was hard
to satisfy that curiosity, due the increasing scarcity of the hardware and the
retail environment of the time.

Apple Stores were designed to take advantage of this curiosity.

Every town already had an authorized Apple dealer, and these stores were very
nice, but they usually felt overwhelmingly _exclusive_ rather than
_inclusive_. If you were a curious outsider who simply wanted to play with
this stuff it was a very awkward experience, and it always left me
unsatisfied.

The official Apple Stores solved this problem masterfully.

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blhack
To me, one of the most important things that apple did was offer free internet
access in their stores; I go in there and use it all the time.

This is good for two reasons: it makes it look like _everybody_ cares about
apple (even though a lot of people are just there using what is effectively
the free internet cafe) and it gets people into the store looking at the
products.

Good job on that, Apple.

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tiles
It's an interesting ratio, how many articles on Hacker News are new articles
and stories, and how many are old news submitted ironically.

It's hardly news, but you can learn a lot from looking at old articles--one
benefit HN has over alternative news sources is that it values this.

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JeremyHerrman
I remember reading this article in my high school computer lab.

This is a perfect example of journalistic hubris that has only gotten worse in
recent years. Rather than a non-sensational headline Cliff Edwards speaks as
if he has a crystal ball. This happens all the time - looking at HN right now
I see the sensationalist "RIP Java, 1995-2010" (6 points) and a more humble
"Analysts: Oracle vs. Google May Hurt Future of Java as Dev Platform" (28
points). I'm happy that people seem to be up voting the latter.

Kudos for posting this, hopefully it will show that headlines like this tend
to make people look stupid in hindsight.

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eavc
Often the author of an article does not choose the headline. That would be the
editor.

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borisk
HN is so slow, this was on /. 9 years ago ;)

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liedra
Hah, I was clearing out my dad's collection of computer magazines (not
throwing them away, just making them not a huge pile in a corner!) and there
were some absolute gems from the early 80s. I ended up getting half way
through and just flipping through the magazines looking at the ads :)
thousands of dollars for a megabyte of storage! that sort of thing :) I love
this sort of nostalgia :D

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blahedo
Yes indeed, and now I have to post: <http://www.xkcd.com/768/>

~~~
davidmurphy
[http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productCate...](http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productCategory/us_graphing.html)

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ck2
Well, just imagine if they didn't have the pod/touch/phone/pad.

How many computers do the stores move in comparison?

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InclinedPlane
5 months later, Apple released the iPod.

At the time, Apple knew they'd be releasing the iPod, but nobody else did.
Given the shift in Apple's product line retail stores made sense.

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T_S_
It's fun to chuckle at the mis-punditry on display here but the author had no
idea how strong Apple's product line would become. Jobs had a clearer picture.
A balanced article would have talked more about the drivers and risks, but
that's no fun to read.

Even today the question still remains, did the stores drive the product
success or the other way around? But nobody even bothers to ask. The success
bias ("All's well that ends well.") buries all mistakes. That's why business
people learn more from failure than success.

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mattmanser
This is stuffed full of howlers now we can look at it with hindsight. Just
goes to show how out of touch the core computer market was growing with its
customers.

Still, one wonders how the market would have looked if Vista hadn't been such
a disaster.

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habitue
All this guy is saying is that the Apple stores weren't going to get Apple
booming. And they didn't, the iPod and it's successors did. Does anyone really
think the Apple stores are what saved Apple?

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jsz0
Sure. It certainly helped sell iPods in the days before deals with WalMart,
Best Buy, etc. The iPod was a major shift in how people listened to music.
Being able to try it out in the store before buying it was probably a big
reason it caught on so quickly. As someone else pointed out the author didn't
have all the relevant information at the time. Apple Stores only selling
computers would have probably been much less successful but Apple was fully
aware they wanted to make a push towards consumer electronics with the iPod.

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hakl
> In early 1999, Best Buy Co. (BBY ) dropped the iMac line after refusing a
> Jobs edict that it stock all eight colors.

That's pretty amusing.

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zephyrfalcon
That would explain why Macs are colorless now... <0.5 wink>

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samratjp
I think the mac success story could be very well be attributed to students and
Starbucks.

Students because of the back to school deals that got better with each
iteration of a better intel chip and that was a comfortable bet for parents
enough.

And Starbucks, well, that's just a metric I've found to be useful in measuring
the mac's proliferation in the american zeitgeist - I mean, the macbook has
been somewhat of even a jewelry to adorned in public these days it seems, not
just at Starbucks.

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philiphodgen
The story reminds me of the "Man in the Arena" speech by Teddy Roosevelt.
Apple is in the arena creating its own (and our) future. Journalists are in
the stands, yelling at the ump and drinking $6.00 beers.

EDIT: Apple, damn you and your spellcheck on the iPhone. :-)

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saint-loup
Pundits are mostly a bunch of self-proclaimed experts acting as if they had a
crystal ball.

Nontheless, punditry is important. We have to trust certain people, trust
they're smarter and informed than the average.

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kloncks
Reading this text with this stylesheet is so painful. My my, look how far
we've come with CSS.

Even something as simply as some line-height and a "double-spacing" effect
would be so welcome here.

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philwelch
Some people still had smaller screen resolutions at this time. I had 1024 by
768 but 800 by 600 was still known and there were still some people with 640
by 480 as well.

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CamperBob
_Since PC retailing gross margins are normally 10% or less, Apple would have
to sell $12 million a year per store to pay for the space..._

Yeeeah, I think I see the author's problem.

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aneth
Why you should listen to doers, not talkers. Makers not breakers.

Unfortunately, people who know how to do usually spend their time doing
instead of writing in magazines and blogging.

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S_A_P
OOOOOOOOO IN YOUR FACE CLIFF EDWARDS! HOW DOES THIS ONLINE SMACKDOWN 9 YEARS
LATER FEEL!!!!

