As Simple As That

Week of July 18, 2002
Lose the fans and you lose the corporation.

Apple have now announced that Mac e-mail addresses will cost $99 per annum. As a consolation, all current subscribers will be able to keep their addresses after September 2002 for only half that amount.

Apple have only a few things going for them.

• Microsoft Office. The downside here is that MS Office is priced too highly to be attractive to most users.
• Photoshop and Adobe's dependency. With over 30% of their revenues coming from Mac users, Adobe needs Apple.
• A brand loyalty second to none. Mac users love their machines, and some users even want to marry them.

Apple stand to lose their most important asset, their brand loyalty, by pursuing this new policy. Currently only 10% or 2.5 million Mac users have upgraded to OS X. With 2.5 million OS X users all told, and with an iTools storage capacity - including e-mail and webspace - of 15MB per user, Apple can easily keep all of this on a single machine. If Mac e-mail users were limited to only 1MB, they could still store up to 1,000 text-only messages, while the capacity requirements would be trivial.

Apple may need additional cash flow, but going after their loyal customers is not the way to do it. Lose them and you lose the corporation.

It's as simple as that.