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They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.

The last time they tried something similar(!), it didn't go too well. That's possibly most striking with past Apple efforts at my place, which also had "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them, ..." approach, during large part of the 90s; with dubious results (expand the detailed past percentages - that 0.92% is after massive growth over the past 5 years). That's despite a determination sufficient for dubious backstage practices / nice sums of money changing hands informally - which virtually had to be the case, considering the mark-up of the machines in the face of economic realities at the time (plus the scale - enough even for both high schools in my irrelevant provincial city; those ~25 machines in total, between the two, most likely being a strong majority - if not all - of Macintoshes in a 20k+ city BTW), and how such things were done ("but Macs have polish qwerty typist's kb layout!" probably not being enough by itself - polish qwerty programmer's layout (physically identical to US layout) wasn't a problem before or after ...besides, you can find polish qwerty typist's keyboards for PCs, they were just always mostly ignored; plus a coordinated country-wide school deployment could easily order the thousands of units needed even directly from manufacturers)

It's a triangle, three markets possibly influencing each other - business, education, consumer. Starting from the 2nd one doesn't seem to work terribly well. As for working from the 3rd... hm, who knows (anecdotally: here, two generations of Commodore machines were the consumer standard for a decade - and also ignored by businesses, their computerisation basically started with PCs anyway when the time had finally come)

The logic goes something like this: people love the iPhone and iPad, will test out a macbook or a imac at home, and after a while they will demand a similar environment at work. Sure not everyone has the pull to do it at work, but if enough C-level people get interested it might happen, in some industries.

Unless... there really will be a dynamics-changing shift, and the tablets will turn out to be the "PC for normal people" (so also good for a very large chunk of business machines); here Apple is doing fine so far, even at my place (unless the world also waits for "PC tablets"...)

As for the general NLE discussion - I wonder if Vegas could get more chance out of this, at least among "indies"; it's quite fine overall, and perhaps unbeatable for the price (with the possible exception of Lightworks). More broadly, I wonder with which tool would you prefer to get accustomed with, on which would you bet as having the greatest chance of filling the void now that FCP might be on its way out?

I guess Premiere Pro, especially since a remarkable segment of machines with FCP will already have PP installed (as they will have Production Premium for Photoshop and After Effects).

And regarding Vegas (thoug one of my favourite apps before I started using Macs), fine as it might be, it is still a Sony product, stuck somewhere between the professional Sony (Sony broadcast is a dependable if expensive partner for most companies in the field) and the entertainment Sony (please distribute my password and CC information to the world). I would be very hesitant of using it as my tool of choice for that reason alone... /jussi

They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.

The last time they tried something similar(!), it didn't go too well. That's possibly most striking with past Apple efforts at my place, which also had "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them, ..." approach, during large part of the 90s; with dubious results (expand the detailed past percentages - that 0.92% is after massive growth over the past 5 years). That's despite a determination sufficient for dubious backstage practices / nice sums of money changing hands informally - which virtually had to be the case, considering the mark-up of the machines in the face of economic realities at the time (plus the scale - enough even for both high schools in my irrelevant provincial city; those ~25 machines in total, between the two, most likely being a strong majority - if not all - of Macintoshes in a 20k+ city BTW), and how such things were done ("but Macs have polish qwerty typist's kb layout!" probably not being enough by itself - polish qwerty programmer's layout (physically identical to US layout) wasn't a problem before or after ...besides, you can find polish qwerty typist's keyboards for PCs, they were just always mostly ignored; plus a coordinated country-wide school deployment could easily order the thousands of units needed even directly from manufacturers)

It's a triangle, three markets possibly influencing each other - business, education, consumer. Starting from the 2nd one doesn't seem to work terribly well. As for working from the 3rd... hm, who knows (anecdotally: here, two generations of Commodore machines were the consumer standard for a decade - and also ignored by businesses, their computerisation basically started with PCs anyway when the time had finally come)

The logic goes something like this: people love the iPhone and iPad, will test out a macbook or a imac at home, and after a while they will demand a similar environment at work. Sure not everyone has the pull to do it at work, but if enough C-level people get interested it might happen, in some industries.

Unless... there really will be a dynamics-changing shift, and the tablets will turn out to be the "PC for normal people" (so also good for a very large chunk of business machines); here Apple is doing fine so far, even at my place (unless the world also waits for "PC tablets"...)

As for the general NLE discussion - I wonder if Vegas could get more chance out of this, at least among "indies"; it's quite fine overall, and perhaps unbeatable for the price (with the possible exception of Lightworks). More broadly, I wonder with which tool would you prefer to get accustomed with, on which would you bet as having the greatest chance of filling the void now that FCP might be on its way out?

I guess Premiere Pro, especially since a remarkable segment of machines with FCP will already have PP installed (as they will have Production Premium for Photoshop and After Effects).

And regarding Vegas (thoug one of my favourite apps before I started using Macs), fine as it might be, it is still a Sony product, stuck somewhere between the professional Sony (Sony broadcast is a dependable if expensive partner for most companies in the field) and the entertainment Sony (please distribute my password and CC information to the world). I would be very hesitant of using it as my tool of choice for that reason alone... /jussi

They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.

The last time they tried something similar(!), it didn't go too well. That's possibly most striking with past Apple efforts at my place, which also had "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them, ..." approach, during large part of the 90s; with dubious results (expand the detailed past percentages - that 0.92% is after massive growth over the past 5 years). That's despite a determination sufficient for dubious backstage practices / nice sums of money changing hands informally - which virtually had to be the case, considering the mark-up of the machines in the face of economic realities at the time (plus the scale - enough even for both high schools in my irrelevant provincial city; those ~25 machines in total, between the two, most likely being a strong majority - if not all - of Macintoshes in a 20k+ city BTW), and how such things were done ("but Macs have polish qwerty typist's kb layout!" probably not being enough by itself - polish qwerty programmer's layout (physically identical to US layout) wasn't a problem before or after ...besides, you can find polish qwerty typist's keyboards for PCs, they were just always mostly ignored; plus a coordinated country-wide school deployment could easily order the thousands of units needed even directly from manufacturers)

It's a triangle, three markets possibly influencing each other - business, education, consumer. Starting from the 2nd one doesn't seem to work terribly well. As for working from the 3rd... hm, who knows (anecdotally: here, two generations of Commodore machines were the consumer standard for a decade - and also ignored by businesses, their computerisation basically started with PCs anyway when the time had finally come)

Unless... there really will be a dynamics-changing shift, and the tablets will turn out to be the "PC for normal people" (so also good for a very large chunk of business machines); here Apple is doing fine so far, even at my place (unless the world also waits for "PC tablets"...)

As for the general NLE discussion - I wonder if Vegas could get more chance out of this, at least among "indies"; it's quite fine overall, and perhaps unbeatable for the price (with the possible exception of Lightworks). More broadly, I wonder with which tool would you prefer to get accustomed with, on which would you bet as having the greatest chance of filling the void now that FCP might be on its way out?

PS. And at the crossroads of NLE and the mentioned above tablets, one has to wonder how a large (more in the league of MS Surface) tablet setup could work for the "pros" :p

They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.

The last time they tried something similar(!), it didn't go too well. That's possibly most striking with past Apple efforts at my place, which also had "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them, ..." approach, during large part of the 90s; with dubious results (expand the detailed past percentages - that 0.92% is after massive growth over the past 5 years). That's despite a determination sufficient for dubious backstage practices / nice sums of money changing hands informally - which virtually had to be the case, considering the mark-up of the machines in the face of economic realities at the time (plus the scale - enough even for both high schools in my irrelevant provincial city; those ~25 machines in total, between the two, most likely being a strong majority - if not all - of Macintoshes in a 20k+ city BTW), and how such things were done ("but Macs have polish qwerty typist's kb layout!" probably not being enough by itself - polish qwerty programmer's layout (physically identical to US layout) wasn't a problem before or after ...besides, you can find polish qwerty typist's keyboards for PCs, they were just always mostly ignored; plus a coordinated country-wide school deployment could easily order the thousands of units needed even directly from manufacturers)

It's a triangle, three markets possibly influencing each other - business, education, consumer. Starting from the 2nd one doesn't seem to work terribly well. As for working from the 3rd... hm, who knows (anecdotally: here, two generations of Commodore machines were the consumer standard for a decade - and also ignored by businesses, their computerisation basically started with PCs anyway when the time had finally come)

Unless... there really will be a dynamics-changing shift, and the tablets will turn out to be the "PC for normal people" (so also good for a very large chunk of business machines); here Apple is doing fine so far, even at my place (unless the world also waits for "PC tablets"...)

As for the general NLE discussion - I wonder if Vegas could get more chance out of this, at least among "indies"; it's quite fine overall, and perhaps unbeatable for the price (with the possible exception of Lightworks). More broadly, I wonder with which tool would you prefer to get accustomed with, on which would you bet as having the greatest chance of filling the void now that FCP might be on its way out?

PS. And at the crossroads of NLE and the mentioned above tablets, one has to wonder how a large (more in the league of MS Surface) tablet setup could work for the "pros" :p

The question isn't about how many there are, their existence - but how widespread the few (in practice) of them are.

One stark example: despite my place having for a long time its own version of qwerty with diacritics, computer keyboards are virtually exclusively of the standard US layout (physically, what this is about; function is slightly modified of course - right Alt acts like AltGr; and nullifying it is a matter of one quick & easy keyboard shortcut - too easy in fact, people often do it accidentally and get totally confused / "the keyboard is broken"). The only "PCs" I used which had a "proper" local keyboard were old Mac Classic, LC475 and some middle-size Quadra (in itself exceedingly rare machines here back then); more recent Macs (much more popular now, relatively; but still quite rare) don't come with such very often - however slightly "weird" the Apple keyboards might be anyway, people perceive their US variant as more "standard & expected national keyboard" than the ones with diacritics...
A quick search for "typist layout" (how it is called; though vast majority of people aren't even aware of this, and indeed of its existence!) on local auction service, among 1200+ keyboard offers, gave 2 results - one of them a 10+ year old Apple one, the other some new HP one (I'm slightly surprised / would say it's a lot, when it comes to new ones). Biggest online product catalog doesn't have the category and few variants of search term didn't find anything.

Similarly (if not so extreme) in few nearby places. Apart from their qwertz, standard qwerty is also widely used in Czech Republic and Slovakia (even if in their case AltGr, diacritics, etc. are typically printed on the keys - probably partly because they made an unfortunate choice of nonintuitive positions for letters with diacritics, not "on top"/as a modifier of pure latin ones - that is still essentially a standard US layout, and it's not too hard to see/buy a keyboard without local symbols ... one might as well simply add them with a permanent marker). At least Hungary, Romania, Moldavia, Bulgaria and Netherlands are similar. Few linguistic families already, and only my local examples.

Now, from glancing at Wiki - the two most prominent places of Francophone, France and Canada, have different keyboard layouts (FR qwerty similar to US vs. FR azerty). France isn't very rigorous itself - Canadian multilingual qwerty is apparently very easy to find, as well as... Portuguese or US international (which isn't at odds with standard one at all). Even neighboring Belgium made changes. Now, I don't think a lot of places in the Francophone would be more rigorous than France about using the "proper" keyboard...

In contrast "U.S. keyboards are used not only in the United States, but also in other English-speaking places (e.g., Australia, English Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, the Philippines and India)" - most of the Anglophone, it seems (excluding only UK itself and Ireland). So, regarding your last post - it would seem that in former colonies FR-US cancel each other out at best (for azerty) - and then there are quite a few non-EN places using US qwerty.

Checking the biggest potential market, and one which might dictate things in the future ... contrary to what AC said, apparently the most popular keyboard in China is a standard US qwerty, with some additions on top of existing keys (without modification of the underlying layout, just like in my area), used phonetically with their input method software (BTW, at least in the case of languages from my area it's not much of a stretch to say that the standard US layout, with its latin letters, is better for them than for English - their alphabets are much more phonetic than EN one, they are generally very close to latin pronunciation)

So yes, there definitely exists a standard keyboard layout. And even if not used everywhere, it's apparently easy to obtain worldwide anyway...

It's not a niche everywhere. It is the number one browser (yes, ahead of IE) in Ukraine, is becoming number one right now in Russia. It has generally quite respectable usage share in large part of Europe, often between 5 and 10% (in cotrast to Safari, which typically almost doesn't exist and is in places behind Opera Mini, the j2me one; Chrome is doing better, but still typically noticeably behind Opera, even with all the Google promotion on every Google website)

Check for yourself a slice of regional data: http://ranking.pl/

Now, why all those people suddenly have to adapt to the way of browsers totally dominating different region of the world?

They do in many european countries.

Like in those two:
http://www.en.ranking.pl/
http://www.en.ranking.com.ua/
(as you see you can check few more from the area)

In places where efficient sofware, perfectly useable on old computers is sometimes preferred

http://www.en.ranking.com.ua/index.php?page=Ranks:RanksPage&stat=22|OW (who'd have thought, more than Gecko...)
http://www.en.ranking.lt/index.php?page=Ranks:RanksPage&stat=22|OW
http://www.en.ranking.pl/index.php?page=Ranks:RanksPage&stat=22|OW
http://www.en.rankings.cz/index.php?page=Ranks:RanksPage&stat=22|OW
(there are also stats for Hungary, where Opera performs similarly to "West"; though many people wouldn't consider Hungary to be in the same region, culturally at least; and I suspect culturall factors also play some role in spending habits/software choices; oh, and there's also Russia with Opera usage share comparable to Ukraine...though it's also a bit "out there" ;P )

Anyway, most interesting thing from those stats for most of you, I imagine: yes, there are places where IE is on the brink of falling below 50%

And personally I just think that it would be perfect if all four major layout engines end up each having roughly the same market share...

Opera in US has marginal share, so there is nothing to take. OTOH in Poland Opera has 6.5% market share and Firefox almost 16%. Since Firefox hype started Opera didn't lose market share and it usage still grows, although much slower (last year Opera had 4% while FF had 0.5%).

Software Publishers Association (SPA) estimates that 16 percent of computer users are on Macs.
Maybe in the USA and possibly UK. I live in Poland and I don't know a person using a Mac. According to this site Mac users constitute a 0.3% minority among Internet users. Linux is 0.9% and Windows - 98.5%. I suppose it is similar in Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, ... Windows wins, Linux comes distant second and Mac is a curiosity. Sorry to bring you down to earth folks

1. IE: 84.6%
2. Gecko: 10.2%
3. Opera 4.9%

Certainly in Europe :)
Here are the stats from Poland :
first all the guests stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browAL
then Polish users stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browPL
and outsiders stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browFG

as you can see Opera RULES in Poland (second after IE) with >4% steady rising userbase :)

Certainly in Europe :)
Here are the stats from Poland :
first all the guests stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browAL
then Polish users stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browPL
and outsiders stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browFG

as you can see Opera RULES in Poland (second after IE) with >4% steady rising userbase :)

Certainly in Europe :)
Here are the stats from Poland :
first all the guests stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browAL
then Polish users stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browPL
and outsiders stats
http://www.ranking.pl/rank.php?stat=browFG

as you can see Opera RULES in Poland (second after IE) with >4% steady rising userbase :)

"Where is this, though?"

"Where are you getting these statistics?"

"However, why is there ~90% usage of IE 6"

Also note that Google is a US site. As I said, Opera seems to have a higher market share outside the US.

I have a Master degree in computer science. I studied together with a 100 people at my faculty. I work as an IT consultant at a rather respectable company, yet I have never seen a Mac in my life (just in pictures). Suprised ? Well, I live in Poland (approx 40 million inhabitants).

Apple is pretty nonexistant in my country and probably in many others as well. The barrier in a country where the average salary is $500 and there is 20% unemployment is the price.

The IDC survey, as I understand it applies to users worldwide and new computers! Your survey measures existing usage, which is something much different