According to CNET News, Dell's CEO calls the iPod a fad and dismisses Apple as quaint:
Dell's take-no-prisoners CEO, Kevin Rollins, has seen fads that come and go--and he thinks Apple Computer's iPod may fall into that category. "It's interesting: The iPod has been out for three years, and it's only this past year it's become a raging success,"he said. "Well, those things that become fads rage, and then they drop off. When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman--a rage, everyone had to have one. Well, you don't hear about the Walkman anymore. I believe that one-product wonders come and go. You have to have sustainable business models, sustainable strategy. But don't read that as any sort of disparagement of Apple. They've done a nice job."
I'm not a Mac fanatic -- heck, I don't personally even own any Apple products -- but to claim that the iPod is a "fad" like Sony's Walkman is just stupid on several levels. The Walkman revolutionized personal music. Of course you don't hear about it anymore -- Sony retired the brand because it became so widely adopted as a term that it lost usefulness as a marketing tool. Then, new technology came out to replace audio cassettes. But to think that the Walkman had no lasting effect on consumers is incorrect -- without it, portable music would have been much delayed and we may just *now* be seeing portable CD players come out. And, regarding the iPod in particular, how many consumer devices hold a huge majority of the market- and mind-share and are able to extend that gap year after year? Not many...maybe Apple really is doing it right.
And Kevin, Apple's been around about a decade longer than Dell has and Steve Jobs has personally done more for consumer computing than you will likely ever even imagine yourself accomplishing. To imply that Apple doesn't have a sustainable business strategy sells them short and suggests that you, yourself, don't really have much insight into consumer computing and electronics. But that's OK, really, because your job is to hawk overpriced PCs and peripherals to corporate and government purchasing departments, and that really doesn't require you to understand how the typical consumer or, *gasp*, teenager, thinks about and uses technology.
Oh, and if your idea of being insightful is to toss around overused business jargon, consider this: all my 22-year-old students headed for the fry machine at McD's know those words, too.
