We have underlined how unhealthy is the present climate of ruthless price cutting in the personal computer industry, and Apple Computer Inc president and chief operating officer Michael Spindler is of the same view, Grant Buckler reports for Newsbytes. He struck out at aggressive price-cutting in his keynote address at MacWorld Expo/Canada, declaring that it will deprive the industry of the resources it needs to continue innovation in hardware and software. He likened the industry to the airline business in the US, where a few years ago a large number of cut-rate airlines were competing for business mainly on price. Now only a few carriers remain, they are not very profitable, and customers are suffering, he said. Spindler said that the personal computer industry needs to continue innovating to make full use of technology, and that the key is in imaginative new software. He sees a convergence of the computing, communications and content industries citing Sony Corp’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures as an example of the trend, forecasting that over the next few years, the combined industry will become the world’s largest. High-capacity communications links will open a variety of new possibilities in a range of industries, Spindler said, for exapmle enabling doctors to make electronic house calls. Spindler also talked about the digitisation of information. By the turn of the century, he said, some 90% of all information could be represented in digital format. I don’t predict that paper will go away, he said. By no means. We like to have hard copies of things. We’ll still read books and newspapers. But an increasing amount of information will also be available in electronic form. What people will need then, he said, will be tools to get access to that information – such as the personal digital assistant. Spindler said that Apple can be expected to introduce several more products like its Newton assistant over the next two years. He also complained of what he said was a misunderstanding of the Newton’s target market. The device is not intended to compete with electronic organisers from the likes of Sharp Corp and Casio Computer Co because it will offer software and integration with larger systems that they lack. He also said new portable Macintosh products can be expected, and spoke of future Powerbook models with docking stations where the notebook unit will dock as smoothly as a tape goes into a videocassette recorder.
