By Gary Kirchherr
The advertising on the cover of the Mac Zone mail-order outfit's latest catalog only reflects what should have been.
"All new! Fastest Mac OS systems ever!" the bold red letters exclaimed underneath photos of three computers - a Mac 9600, plus a Power Computing PowerTower Pro and Motorola StarMax Pro. "Backside cache for super speed!" it said of the PowerTower. "New CHRP motherboard!" was the StarMax boast.
Unfortunately, of course, neither the Power Computing nor StarMax models so advertised ever will be available to John Q. Public. When Apple Computer killed clone licensing last month, these fast and innovative machines - better than anything Apple has - became history before consumers could get their hands on them.
September 1997 will go down as a month of infamy for Macintosh customers. It began with Apple's buying back Power Computing's cloning license, and within a couple of weeks, all cloning was effectively over; Apple won't license any new models.
So what happens now? Power Computing will continue to sell clones for the rest of the year. Other clone makers can continue marketing their machines, but without the possibility of introducing new models, the clone makers are at a dead end. One exception is Umax, which will continue making clones, but only to certain markets and with certain models where Apple already has shown it can't compete. The November 1997 issue of Macworld magazine has an excellent article that has a more complete review of the debacle, for those who have the stomach for this sort of thing.
The effect of Apple's decision on your average Macintosh user cannot be overstated. When the first clone licenses were announced not even three years ago, users were excited about the prospect of a choice of brand names, models and features that's taken for granted in the Wintel world. And the clone manufacturers delivered. In fact, they were victims of their own success; the clones were better, and cheaper, than the Apple brand, a situation the new powers that be at Cupertino couldn't tolerate.
Now we're stuck with Apple, and only Apple, again. Oh joy. The last time only Apple made Macintoshes, the Wintel world beat the Mac market share into a pulp by offering systems that had more variety, were arguably faster and certainly considerably cheaper. The whole point of Mac-cloning was to address that situation. But since Apple can't compete at its own game, Steve Jobs and Co. believe the key to the company's financial health is to restore its monopoly on Mac systems. Apparently, history is destined to repeat itself.
Apple's principal argument for ending cloning is that it was subsidizing the clone makers through its own low licensing fees; the market wasn't expanding, and Apple wasn't getting anything in return except lost sales. Several industry watchers have questioned this assertion, but easily the best rebuttal came from MacWEEK editor emeritus Henry Norr, whose Sept. 3 column pulls no punches. Indelicately titled "Apple relies on half-truths and omissions to justify licensing line," Norr's column says Apple complained about the mere $50 OS-licensing fee it got for each clone, but that the company doesn't mention the often substantially higher hardware-licensing fee it also got. Norr also says Apple fails to mention that under then-CEO Gil Amelio, Apple already had negotiated with the clone makers new license fees two to 10 times greater than the ones Apple was holding up as examples of how the nasty old cloners were bleeding the poor company dry.
Norr leaves no doubt who's to blame for the end of cloning. Company co-founder Steve Jobs, Apple's acknowledged visionary co-founder and now its prodigal-son interim CEO, never liked cloning and couldn't kill it fast enough. Unfortunately, no one is left at Apple to challenge a living legend. Never mind that Jobs' record in the executive suite, both at Apple and then at NeXT, is spotty at best. What Jobs wants, Jobs gets - even the failed policies from his original tenure at the company.
So why did Jobs kill cloning? Norr offers a probable explanation when he quotes Amelio himself in an interview that ran shortly after the former Apple chief was ousted: "Apple does not know how to compete. It is a corporate skill set that does not exist at Apple today. ... Trying to avoid competing ... is what the entire history of the company has been."
And something we can look forward to again.
My perusal of Mac pundits in the computer media show a strong majority agree that ending cloning was a bad idea, although a very few sympathize with Apple. The biggest company apologist is MacWEEK columnist Don Crabb, who has written several columns that can be summed up thusly: "We may not like it, but it's not our place as users or developers to second-guess the geniuses running Apple, and we all know that the Mac platform is best and we're all going to continue using it no matter what anyway, so shut up already and why can't we all just get along?"
Sorry, Don, the users and developers who feel Apple rewarded their loyalty with a bitter betrayal aren't going to be quite as forgiving as that. Even those of us who despise the monopolistic, 800-pound-gorilla attitude of Micro$oft and Intel and what it has wrought now will consider it a possible alternative to the shortsighted, boneheaded, ongoing mismanagement of Apple Computer.
I know I am.
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