John Dvorak's October '95 column ("Performance Anxiety," page 218) was right on the money! Many of the features most often mentioned in Windows 95 advertisements are things the Mac OS has had for years. Why didn't Apple advertise these same features years ago?
Most businesses have replaced all their PCs within the last five to seven years. If Apple had been aggressively marketing the Mac, showing off all its advantages, maybe more companies would have forgone the next generation of PCs and converted to the Mac.
As a recent graduate of the University of Michigan (where the Mac is king) who is now forced to use an IBM PC at work, I sure wish they had.
Jonathan Chittenden
via the Internet
I agree with John C. Dvorak. The Wintel platform has one helluva marketing company behind it -- Microsoft.
Apple has done probably some of the best R&D ever when it comes to user interfaces, but it doesn't have an R&D arm for advertising. In the end, it forgets how good its machines are and doesn't go far enough in promoting them.
Meanwhile, Microsoft would sell cars with holes in the tires if it could.
Ron Holmes
holmesrg@cs.curtin.edu.au
John Dvorak is right about Apple's marketing. Apple has been too nice lately. We need to go back to the days of the sledgehammer smashing Big Brother's face and the lemmings marching off a cliff. Nothing is more effective than the truth. Imagine a TV commercial that shows the seconds ticking by while a Pentium-based PC finishes something the Power Mac completed in the first half of the commercial.
If Apple wants to really play dirty against Windows 95, it has access to the ultimate weapon. The host of the most popular radio talk show in history is a big fan of the Mac. He owns a couple of Power Macs, and he is an expert at exploiting the competition's weaknesses.
So here's the big question: Does anyone at Apple have the guts to advertise on Rush Limbaugh's program?
Fred Johnson
70651.3171@compuserve.com
A classified ad that I found in my local university paper says it all: "New com-puter, Hardly used, including Windows 95. Will trade for ANY Mac. Call . . . for more information."
