🚀 go-pugleaf

>I share your instinct about pricing. My impression is that lower prices
>would increase both sales and market share. But I don't know much about
>corporate marketing and sales, which is an increasing share of the Mac
>market, so perhaps there is a reason why this is a Good Thing for
>Apple.

Increasing sales only works if you can increase production to match the
demand. If your manufacturing is at capacity and you can't get the parts
from your suppliers you need to build widgets, lowering the price to make
more people want the widgets you can't build doesn't do you any good. Until
the SIMM crisis works itself out, it will be hard (to impossible) to ramp up
production and build more widgets.

This is one reason why the rumored laptop (code name Laguna) is still
unannounced. Apple's having enough trouble finding parts for their current
machines. Announce a new machine, create a new demand, and you have even
more of a need for SIMMs you can't buy. So even though the rumored machine
is rumored to be finished and sitting in a corner, until you can find a
supply of memory to feed the rumored machine, you don't announce it because
it'll create all sorts of havoc in the market. 

>And then I decided Macs were VERY expensive. I find it difficult to
>believe that even corporate buyers are going to buy 1 Mac instead of 3
>PC's.

Take a look at secondary costs of the PC class machines. When you factor in
the amount of training a person requires on a PC, and the differences in
productivity, the speed a person becomes proficient and useful and all the
other ancillary issues, the Mac becomes quite cheap. You're looking at only
one part of the total cost of a system. When you start factoring in the cost
of the software, the training, the maintenance, all the accessories, it's a
different ballgame. You're $1K PC clone is cheap, but once you put the
mouse, the extra memory, Windows, the software and all the other toys on it,
the total system cost isn't as different as you might think.



Chuq Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ
Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms