Mainly Macintosh

Apple killed COMP-USA?

I do not really believe the answer to that question is yes. Nor do I believe there is not a grain of truth to the notion that Apple did a little bit to hasten the demise of that bastion of IBM-PC clone computers - COMP-USA.

Not since Egghead Software went belly up in the 1990s has a brand-name computer store this well known gone under.

In his article, Lament for COMP-USA, John C. Dvorak lays out several explanations for what went wrong at COMP-USA.

The last item on his list is that COMP-USA stores were not more like Apple stores.

What?! Is this the same John C. Dvorak that predicted the demise of Apple Computer for almost a decade before he threw in the towel at that game a year or two ago?

Indeed it is.

Now he is saying Apple stores - most all of which are unchanged since their introduction over half a decade ago are the right way to do computer retail. COMP-USA, he explains, epitomized the wrong way to do it.

I am not sure he is right on the mark but I am sure of one thing.

Consumers got less and less value out of a trip to COMP-USA. The staff gradually became nothing more than cash register jockeys and shelf stocking clerks.

They were not super knowledgeable about the products they sold. They did not have a name-brand computer family of their own.

There did not seem to be a direction for their products. There was no unifying vision. There was just a tireless march of randomness. Also, the computers they sold required lots of patches, bandages, fixes - and that was not getting any better. If anything, during the past half decade the situation with the bulk of the computers sold at COMP-USA has been deteriorating.

What Dvorak does not point out is that dates back to almost the exact same time that Apple opened the first of its own computer stores.

While there is certainly no cause-and-effect relationship between those two things, the effects of both certainly magnify each other.

The non-Apple computers typified by COMP-USA are hardly a paragon of reliable computing. In fact, the sort of computers sold by COMP-USA and similar retailers are plagued with dangers for which they nor other stores had a real fix.

There are all kinds of rationales for why that is - which seem, in a word: wrong.

The reality is simply those sorts of computer have that problem in real life. They have had it bad for over half a decade. And it is not getting any better - nor does it seem to.

A lot of people come to the iMac, iPod, iPhone, etc. seeking a sort of refuge from the torrent of issues and problems they are afflicted with when they use competing products.

Cell phone so hard to use you will practically never text or do email with it by the time you have had it a few months? Try iPhone.

Computer runs too slowly because it has just been overun with organized crime and advertiser gobbledygook? Try a Mac - it does not seem to have that affliction.

Your MP3-player not really working with song files and computers they way its manufacturer said it would? Try Apple iPod - its maker built a wondrous appliance and practically lets it sell itself. That sure beats trying to explain past failings and predicting future solutions for a very bleak present.

IBM PC-clone computers have really been stuck in a rut since the late 1990s. It is one that bad guys know far better than the good guys. And they are milking that superior knowledge for all it is worth.

Apple is milking its knowledge of how to build superior consumer-oriented products for all it is worth too. As it has for decades.

All these factors probably helped send COMP-USA on the way to its demise.

When you also take into account that there is an extremly thin profit margin left on computing products PC cloner hucksters have. Computer that no longer have speed, performance, capability, ease of use, name brand cachet, or retailer expertise cannot really charge a premium on anything.

What is really left in many cases is non-profits and loss-leaders. Pretty much at the end game for some of these companies in the PC ecosphere.

I used to go to COMP-USA a lot in the 1990s. However, since then they became practically irrelevant to me and millions of other people.

I think that is what killed them.

Labels: apple, computing

posted by John Collins @ 5:12 PM