Apple on the Comeback Trail

Stewart Alsop has a smart column on Apple's resurgence. He thinks the new iMacs will help the company recapture some of the 10% market share it used to have with business customers. And he points out that many of the "issues" that made Apple computers incompatible with Windows-based computing world are no longer "issues."

More important, he rightly points out that the new iMacs offer fantastic software applications for managing digital media. To the text we go:

Apple Computer appears to have actually developed a real, applications-based software strategy. In my 20-plus years of observing the computer industry, I've found that hardware companies don't do software well and that software companies don't do hardware well. There are a lot of conflicts between the two. The business models are antithetical, and the engineers don't understand or like each other. So it is all the more remarkable that the programs that Apple now ships with its computers are actually really good: iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and iTunes represent a coherent set of applications for managing digital media that doesn't exist anywhere else. The integration among the applications is at least as good as in Microsoft Office--a huge element in the success of Windows.

Exactly right.