Doomed to the dustbin of history?
Making more expensive products gives a short-term steroid injection to revenue, but is very risky long term – the risk being long-term irrelevance.
There's the problem. Apple has decided to live and die by the quarterly figures. Market analysts don't care about long term goals only about the quarterly profit. Apple has fallen for this. The worst thing any company can do is put a bean counter or one of their ilk in a position to run the company. A lot of good companies with good products have fallen into this trap. Jobs stopped it once but I don't seen any visionaries high enough up in Apple to change this trend.
Anyone remember Chrysler before and after Iacocca took control? They were in deeper trouble than Apple, but turned around. Once the bean counters got back in control, they've fallen a long way. Pricing themselves out of any large market is not a good thing unless you accept that your products fill a niche like certain sports car companies.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
