More developments in the Silicon Soap Opera known widely as Apple Computing. The most recent development in the saga is Apple's purchase of rival company Power Computing. You may recall from the last Spew entry (August 2) the dispute that was arising between Apple and the licensees of Mac OS 8. Apple's silicon pheromones were giving everyone the drift that the troubled company wasn't quite so keen on it anymore. Well, we needent worry about that any longer.
Apple bought a controlling interest in Power Computing for $100 million of common stock. I have already seen stories elsewhere on the Net saying that Apple's purchase of PC (oh, the irony!) was a stroke of genius on Steve Job's part; that Apple will be able to use innovations created at PC to fight the Wintel War Machine. Personally, I think that this would have been money better spent, and not just for Apple. In this one blast of cash, Apple has blown two-thirds of the capital that Microsoft invested last month. From Apple's standpoint, they've eliminated a major competitor in an extremely tight market. I doubt Apple has anything to gain from this purchase as far as product innovations are concerned; rather, they felt as though they had too much to lose by passing up this opportunity. Realists already understand that this puts Apple back in the position to gather greater profits through their historical overpricing scheme, perhaps restoring some power to their base. Folks, as we are shown each day in the PC compatible market, competition is good, monopolies are bad. Its the same no matter what side of the computer battlefield you're on.
On a completely unrelated note, I finished my motherboard's upgrade several days ago. In retrospect, I wish I had a digital camera so I could have recorded some of the steps. I would have liked to share the whole thing. I certainly could have shown you some of the things that could trip you up during the procedure; I certainly ran into a few. I'm planning a Great Wipe of both of my harddisks with the hope that it will eliminate a few annoying bugs. But that will wait for the arrival of a Zip drive, so I can archive some of the more important stuff, like this web page.
I've also installed a Mitsumi CD-R drive, which arrived by FedEx Overnight this morning. Its one of the few EIDE recorders availible right now, and was reviewed favorably by Computer Shopper in July. I'll take the opportunity now to plug Computer Quick for their service. Bounce over there, they've got competitive prices, and lots of items. The search engine-only interface takes a bit of getting used to, but is capable.
