[Ti] Market Share: 2.3% -- That's NOT good press

[Henry Kalir]

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Massimo Marino wrote:
> 
> Henry,
> 
> it is not that I do not see your point or do not agree in general but 
> the market share figure looks like it is a bit biased. For one thing it 
> is Apple vs all others. If we take Apple vs individual manufacturer 
> Apple is the third largest manufacturer AND it is the one best doing 
> financially.
> Second: the market share takes into account the sale of software for 
> the platforms. The comparison there sometime amount to Windows vs Apple.
> Hybrid CDs (presenting program valid for a Windows installation and a 
> Mac installation) count as Windows sale.
> Internet presence: Mac amounts to some 11+% presence of existing 
> computers. From other reported figures (in this same list) Apple has 
> been recently the leader presence in the whole market if you split down 
> to the single manufacturer.
> 
> Safari now reports 24% of the whole internet traffic. How 2.3% market 
> share computing platform could provide 24% of all internet traffic?
> 
> It is known that the iMac has been the best PC selling so far (crude 
> sales) , the TiBook (I might be wrong) the best or next to the best.
> 
> I have yet to find a single definition of this 2.3% market share 
> presence of Apple (it has been reported US presence is 3% now).
> So until I get a crisp unambiguous definition of market share that does 
> not provides different numbers depending on who is doing the actual 
> computation I get all this business as the myth Apple bashers are 
> trying to spread: "Apple is about to close". Analysts report Apple 
> market share shrinking since 1984. If that was true Apple would have 
> been long gone.
> 
> If a single user buys 3 PC in two years (likely to happens) that counts 
> as 3 PCs while instead on reality only one PC still runs.
> Corporations change the entire base of PC by the wagon: nobody says 
> "well, OK, it is not that PC presence has EVER increased, you know!!!", 
> it counts as increased presence of PC in the market. Those PC end up 
> nonetheless into incinerator.
> 
> The fact that even with all that, analysts say that market share has 
> increased from 2.3% to 3% in the US tells instead that some of those PC 
> users - actually a considerable part of PC users - is now adopting a 
> Mac. Maybe they are keeping the PC but out of those 3 PC they would 
> have bought, this time one is an Apple computer. This has never 
> happened before. I would not be surprised if this little figure of 
> market share will keep increasing even if pro-PC analysts will try to 
> do their best to prove the contrary.
> 
> In the last 2 years I have seen with my eyeballs more Windows users 
> switch to the Mac than in all my professional life which has started in 
> 1988.
> Actually, before these two years, I was the only one swticher (happened 
> in 1997) that I personally knew.
> 
> This said I agree with you: Apple should prove Windows users that they 
> will not lose anything moving to the platform, actually they will gain. 
> I think slowly the message is being received.

AMEN

> 
> If by "using their own PC stuff JUST AS WELL" on the Mac you mean get a 
> Windows program installer and install it directly on the Mac, 
> presonally I do not see how this would ever be possible with the 
> current architecture. Will an IBM or AMD collaboration lead to that? 
> Doubt so.
> How would that work?
> 
> What I am seeing it instead as a realization of what you say is in the 
> Unix world. Today I was experience exactly that: we were doing some 
> prototyping on a Red Hat 7.x Linux machine with some C++ programs. I 
> had just to get the exact same source files, compile them on the OS X 
> and get the exact same results. This is why I see more and more Macs in 
> the scientific and academic community: they are just popping out as 
> mushrooms.

Excellent example! Linux is expanding precisely because there's no need to
invest in any new hardware! Now, I'm NOT a programmer - but I'm sure there
are enough knowledgeable people at Apple to figure something out - either
a Mac OS running on Wintels or a Mac capable of running Mac OS *and*
Windoze and Linux, or a Mac OS capable of taking any current Windoze
Application and running it in a Mac environment...Can't be done, you say?
Well - Jules Verne envisioned a flight to the moon, wireless and tons of
other stuff without necessarily having the engineering details outlined.

 Sure it would be radical, with great implications! But
I hope the one thing that would happen is that Apple would thrive.

> 
> I think Apple is doing what you suggest: run on the Mac the same 
> applications others are running on the PC. And Apple did whatever it 
> took to do that: it killed Mac OS. OS X is not an evolution of the Mac: 
> it  is Unix.
> Now, I do not think we could expect to have Apple run Windows as well 
> ;-)
> 
> Cheers
> 
> 	Massimo

Best,

Henry