Then a throng of Apple loyalists developed an unswerving allegiance to the Macintosh. Smart Apple users were very self-sufficient because Apple made the computer easy for the users themselves to administer, even for those with just a little interest. In the end, however, Apple wasn't on the right cost curve and the bile built up by network and system administrators relegated the Macintosh back to the niches that clung to it most strongly.

And that's where we are today. The Mac fills some niches extremely well, but seldom thrives elsewhere. As I've lamented before, it's too bad that many of the enhancements that have come with recent MacOS versions, such as embracing TCP/IP and the revised price-performance points, didn't come earlier. That, and a willingness to l et a clone market spring up, would have made for a very different corporate desktop computing market today.

Brand Spankin' New But it's the new Macs that are my focus here. The design of the machine's innards has been simplified, and it appears that Apple has gained some cost advantage by using industry standards like PCI. MacOS 8 is now a more reasonable choice for the corporate environment, so the G3 series is a viable corporate citizen. Too bad all this didn't happen when Apple first introduced machines based on the PowerPC.

In terms of specifications, the G3 series of computers looks, on paper at least, to be a great bunch of machines. For a cool $2,000 you get a PCI-based machine that runs at 233 MHz with 32 MB of RAM, a big hard drive, a fast CD-ROM, a good video subsystem and an Ethernet port. The machine will probably perform similarly to the fastest Intel-based systems on the market--but the Mac will probably cost a bit less.

Those of you who have stuck by the Macintosh seem to have a viable platform for the future. The PowerPC chip continues to deliver an impressive performance, and with its more RISC-like instruction set, it will probably keep up with--or outpace--Pentium processors. Unfortunately, the war for the corporate desktop is over. But those markets that have embraced, and continue to embrace, the Macintosh will get an excellent value for their computer dollar.

Every now and then, I look back to the day when I first played with the 128-Kbps Mac and remember how revolutionary I thought that computer was. Now I see Apple coming out with new and innovative products (in this case, the innovation is a reasonably priced, fast computer), and I wonder what it would have taken to have made Apple a contender in the race for the corporate desktop.

Perhaps all that was needed was an interest in the needs of the corporate market: fast machines at the right price and an operating system that had some management features for those responsible for the well being of thousands o f machines. Was it really that easy?

Art Wittmann can be reached at awittmann@nwc.com.