“While iPods sizzle, Macs and laptops are sluggish. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how to get that computer market share surging… Let’s call them ‘Six Steps to a Bigger Mac Market,'” Alex Salkever writes for BusinessWeek.
Salkever’s six-point plan:
1) Price trumps style in the computer market: Apple charges too much for its computers.
2) Make ’em cool and cheap: Give us a really cheap, really cool PC.
3) Ditch the all-in-one mantra: Offer a headless Mac at a decent price.
4) Sell that soap: Offer a $200 bounty on a PC exchanged for a new iMac or iBook.
5) Sell that soap II: offer all Mac buyers a try-and-buy program.
6) Sell security: debut an Apple ad campaign playing up the fact that Macs remain largely virus-free.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: 1-4 are all the same: Salkever wants a cheaper Mac. Point 5 (really his second point) has been done in the past by Apple. Maybe it’s time to try it again, but it doesn’t strike us as a huge draw. Point 6 (#3 in actuality) is what we’ve been saying all along and we couldn’t agree more with Alex. Even if it irks some malcontents to try attacking Mac OS X, why not advertise the Mac’s security advantage? It is huge! Surely even a massive ad campaign highlighting Mac security is unlikely to provoke the tens of thousands of viruses and worms Windows has and has had in the past.
Related MacDailyNews article:
New York Times: Mac OS X ‘much more secure than Windows XP’ – September 18, 2003