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Originally Posted by fryke That's a *very* nice switcher's report! Congrats! ... I don't, however, agree that Apple can *only* grow their Mac business if they start supporting US troops.  "If Apple ever wishes to expand and grow on the non-iPod front, then they need to get their act together." - Well, yes and no. Your problems with Apple not shipping to APOs is quite a specialised problem. Not everyone on this Earth works for the US army (and I'm *very* glad about this...), and quite probably, Apple has at one point decided that the hassle would be too much for the (lower) profit. Also, Apple's corporate ideology doesn't exactly _fit_ with the current US regime. Doesn't make them a bad American company. |
Any
American company who doesn't support the men and women I've seen die overseas in various hellholes doesn't deserve to be an
American company. Yes, they make an excellent operating system and good software, but they don't support the military.
Face it: the U.S. DoD
IS Microsoft's
largest single customer, period. I know, I'm one of the DoD's MS software agents overseas.
I've run the numbers, Microsoft has run the numbers, GAO has run the numbers and they are all the same: U.S. DoD is the
largest OS customer on the planet. Period. Why would a company NOT want any of that market share?
Every software company on the planet would love to "get them some of that pie". It's idiocy to not want any of it.
This thing called the "internet" that you're currently using? Yes, the DoD
invented that as well. Why? To have a computer network that could survive a nuclear attack. Face it, the U.S. DoD is the driving force behind almost every single new technology today. IPV6? DoD will be the first huge organization to implement it. We are already banned from buying ANYTHING at work that does not support IPV6, which has lead to some really bizarro purchasing decisions, believe you me. And Cisco is jumping around right now to ensure that their products will support it...why? Because they KNOW the DoD is going to IPV6.
In one way or another, everyone in the U.S. works for the "Army" as you put it. Soldiers buy cars, get laundry cleaned, and pretty much purchase EVERYTHING sold in the U.S. That's more than a million people right there not even counting the Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps.
You would have a better time trying to prove that illegal immigrants don't "work" for the U.S. economy than to prove that no one "works for" the U.S. Army. You pay taxes in the U.S.? Guess what? You "work for" the U.S. Army and put money into my bank account (thanks!).
I've seen companies reschedule or flat-out cancel meetings with other civilian companies just to fly to us to demonstrate new technology. Face it, a contract for over a million licenses of a client/server software product trumps any other deal a company would currently be working on.
Good old American
greed will drive every company to "work for" the U.S. Army or DoD whether you like it or not.
Don't see it as a bi-polar good or bad issue, see it as an issue of:
"Imagine what could Apple do with billions of dollars from U.S. Government contracts?"
And the fastest way in is via the U.S. military.