| Friday, May 2, 2003 |
17:01 - There Goes the Neighborhood
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Last night, on the way to a midnight squash game, I drove by the freeway-facing side of the Apple Campus on I-280 and saw that there was a new banner up:
This replaces the "Less is more. More is more." banner for the 12" and 17" PowerBooks.
And just around the corner-- literally across the street from the Apple campus-- is this decidedly more glum sight:
Elite Computers & Software, the central Mac reseller in Cupertino for the better part of two decades, is apparently going out of business. So is the whole ComputerWare chain, similarly long-lived and a part of Silicon Valley tradition, which had gone under about a year and a half ago-- only to have its name, assets, and employees snapped up by the tiny octagonal Elite store. A few months after that, Elite expanded its floor space-- they knocked out a wall separating it from the next store over in the strip mall (an eyeglass store, I think), and filled it with software and iMacs.
Last I heard was that ComputerWare, under its new management, was doing great.
Then, without warning, this. I talked to the guys in Elite-- apparently word had suddenly come down from central management that it was time to close up shop and sell everything off at cost. (I fought off the urge to pick up a new G4 tower.) They didn't know anything about the reasoning behind the decision. I guess things just slipped out from under them-- maybe the expansion was an overreach. Maybe something was handled clumsily. Things can snowball. There's certainly nothing in Apple's business track record over the past year to suggest this kind of reversal of ComputerWare's fortunes; it must have been something endemic to the chain.
Still sucks, though. Glenn Reynolds isn't kidding when he says it's a gray day here in San Jose.
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