[Ti] Apple Store Service blows

[Tarik Bilgin]

On Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 05:12  pm, Michael Bigley wrote:
>
> Apple needs to have a presence in these retail outlets more than they 
> need to sell Apple products. Not only will this have a real effect on 
> Apple's bottom line, but it will feed the still-present misconception 
> that Apple is going out of business; hence, a reversal of the switcher 
> campaign. Do you think these big chains will tell the public that it 
> is an unreasonable contract dispute?  I am willing to bet that we will 
> here statements like "We do not think Apple's marketshare and future 
> is viable enough to devote retail space to their products." This is a 
> PR nightmare waiting to happen.
>

<RANT>
In the UK, where Apple centres have always been synonymous with "high 
prices and low service", as far as i can see the market is dominated by 
dedicated third party resellers, and the Apple store online.

I only ever bought one Mac product (iMac DVD SE) from a UK Apple centre 
(also keep in mind they don't look like the cool "wired" looking ones I 
see photos of in the US) and the service and buying experience was the 
lowest compared to the "Official Apple resellers" that I normally use.

The biggest problem that Apple has had was the lack of (public) 
awareness of what a Mac ACTUALLY is, beyond being a beautiful object 
that is rather expensive and looks good in a chic modern home, but with 
Apple finally spending some money on poster, print and TC advertising 
that has changed in a matter of months.

More and more of my friends and colleagues are buying or saving to buy 
Macs for home and small office use. However in the enterprise computing 
and servers world Apple is nowhere, and M$ is in a lot of places.

With products like Apple Remote Desktop 1.2 (stick that up your RDP and 
smoke it Bill) and WebObjects 5, Apple _does_ bring something to the 
table in this key market.

I used to work for a major Fortune 100 company and saw the Sun boxes 
slowly but surely replaced with NT servers. I think now some managers 
ARE willing to buy real computers again (after seeing the total cost of 
ownership of the M$ platform) for server and enterprise applications, 
but this is where Apple marketing needs to do the most work (in the UK).

I want to see newspaper advertising similar to the one that Oracle runs 
in the UK, that gives IT budget managers the kind of propaganda that is 
required to get sign off on an Apple server purchase.

I suspect it will take a lot of work ($$$)  to get the kind of 
awareness Apple needs in the enterprise sector, but the products are 
getting there, and the pricing is looking reasonable too.
</RANT>

:)

--
Tarik Bilgin
Opalblue
tarik at opalblue.com