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Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista?
aalobode writes "The New York Times is running an article on the narrowing window that Apple has for beating Microsoft's Vista. According the Times, not enough has been done to capitalize on the Mac user experience versus the 'world of hurt that is Vista'. It also points out that that restructuring of Apple leaves ambiguities about Apple's exact commitment to the computer end of its business. The article calls MS Vista's certified vendors, developers and driver writers a flywheel that takes a while coming up to speed - and then becomes unstoppable."
Once SP1 hits, the flywheel's going to spin a LOT faster.
Well, I agree on the flywheel example. Very good one actually.
I've been tempted to buy a Mac, but I game - and for the cost of a 17" Imac with pretty crappy video, I recently built a Core2 Quad 2.4ghz, 2gb ram, 500gb disk, Geforce 8800GTS, etc.
If apple were to release a PowerMac chassis at a slightly less inflated price, i'd be pretty keen... but double the cost of what I built? No thanks...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Steve Jobs has picked the iPhone as Apple's next platform. Maybe he should of focused on getting Leopard out this year to steal Vistas thunder. Only time will tell if he has made the right choice.
I think that the place where Apple design realy shines is in portable stuff. Both their iPod and laptop lines seem to be good examples. I have seen a lot of people switch to Apple laptops the last two years.
I was never too thrilled about their iMac, it seems that in the desktop arena, Apple design does not give so much of an edge, and their only advantage (and disadvantage) is their OS.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
It would help a lot if people who want to run OSX aren't artificially tied to the Mac platform.
:(
I know, I know - the hardware is where Apple makes most of its money, but I think they could also make a fair bit from a licensing scheme similar to that of Windows - "OSX Certified" stickers could place a premium on parts like motherboards, network cards, sound cards, and the like.
Apple can't really say that their OS only works on their hardware any more, because it's quite easily hacked to run on anything, so they may as well make the best of the situation.
I know I'd be more likely to buy "OSX for generic PCs" than Windows Vista, but sadly, it's unlikely to happen. It looks like for the moment, I'm stuck on a Hackintosh with no networking if I wish to use OSX
Not even 5% of the availability or support for Linux distros, in any case.
.Net and ASP apps on the one hand; and Web-based apps on the other, mainly on Linux servers. Apple Macs have less than 1% presence in the h/w space; so there's no incentive for s/w development on the Mac platform.
In the US, in any market; the marketshare is something like this:
Top 3 or 4 vendors: 80%
All the rest share the balance 20%
In Europe, I believe in all sectors except the IT sector, the top vendors collectively share less than 50% market share - thanks to strict measures to combat monopoly and anti-trust issues.
In India (where I live) the only desktop s/w that as any sizable usage is Tally (a financial accounting s/w). All other appln. s/w have a very fragmented marketplace; and it's nearly a 50-50 split between desktop,
Last week, I was evaluating a PACS solution for the hospital I consult with - and a s/w vendor suggested Osirix - an open source app. that works only on Mac hardware. We will be implementing this shortly. A few years back, SGI had products in this niche, but they have disappeared now (I used to work for an SGI dealer).
Apple did try to set up shop in India, but strangely packed up and dismissed the thought a few months later. Unless Apple build up their presence in the hardware segment; they will not be a meaningful alternative to the Windows world - Vista or otherwise. Except in miniscule niche segments perhaps.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
and hasn't since Jobs took over. There was a period when Apple's main goal was to increase market share. When they licensed the mac os to run on third party hardware (I have a mac clone from back in the day). It almost killed apple.
Ultimately, to take any significant chunk of the PC space, apple would need to start releasing hardware on a much smaller profit margin in order to compete with Dell, Gateway, Acer, and Lenovo. This would destroy Apple's profits and company, as the Apple clones fiasco empirically demonstrated.
On the other hand, Apple's current strategy of releasing high profile hardware to a niche market has done phenominally well for them. They've stayed profitable, and have boosted their marketshare to an incredible high compared to historical values.
If you'd bought apple stock and google stock at the time google went IPO, your apple stock would have outperformed your google stock by 3 or 4 times. Apple is doing *very* well and has no incentive to move away from their current low volume, high profit margin strategy. They are essentially skimming the creme of the consumer crop with their products.
The reason I'm not using Mac OS X nor Vista is the cost. When I have Ubuntu so readily available, why would I want to use anything else? Compiz brings me all of the 3D GUI goodness of Vista and OS X. It's really nice not having to worry about the auto-updater updating files randomly and without my permission, like happens with Windows. I also can use Konqueror, which is just like Safari, but I find it's faster. And all of my Windows games run great on Ubuntu when I use WINE. So see, with Ubuntu I get the Vista experience and the Mac OS X experience, all for basically $0!
Silly people. Jobs was talking about this numerous times.
Apple never targeted broad audience. True, it can sell to very broad audience, but still Apple prefer to have few but loyal customers.
What also crossed my mind, is difference between Windows/Vista and Mac OS X. How does MacOS becomes platform of choice? Because you have to choose MacOS (as well as Apple hardware) by yourself. This establishes kind of barrier. But people who would cross the barrier are people who made their choice. The barrier works both ways: it takes some money investment to cross it (acquire hardware/software) and it takes some paining experience to come back to Wintel (which lacks all the polish, integrity and utility of Apple offering). But still, you are to make the choice by yourself.
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
the day this happens, I'll start investing my money in Windex and Kleenex
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
OSX won't replace Windows anytime soon because it's tied with the Mac and only Apple can make and sell a Mac. There is no way Apple can manufacture as many Macs as the Windows-PCs made by Dell, HP & Co. Ff everybody stop buying Windows-PC and go buying Macs, there simply won't be enough offer to meet the demand. Prices will skyrocket or delivery times will get impossibly long and most people will have to buy PCs no matter what.
OSX can replace Windows only if Apple sells it as Microsoft does, but that means becoming a software company and compete with other manufacturers for the hardware, and likely lose the HW market. Remember what happened when Mac clones started to be successful in the past? Apple shut them down.
Probably Apple is still not interested to change its business model and is happy with OSX being a niche OS, maybe a large niche, but still a niche compared with Windows market share. After all the revenues aren't that bad and MS has no particular reason to look at them as particularly dangerous. I suppose they're thinking, we're making a lot of easy money now, so why take risks and change?
I find it surprising to come from the NYT, but this is such a troll of an article. starting "if you want a new PC you're screwed because everyone knows Windows is shit" going on to say "Apple has a much superior operating system" and ending with "Apple only has a 3% market share because it doesn't want a bigger market share, if they wanted a 90% market share they could have it any time they wanted" And all this suported by the most selective of fact picking.
The article doesn't do Apple credit I think. Apple may not be doing well in the desktop world, but they are right there with the big boys when it comes to notebooks. Here is an article that tells us that Apple's notebook market share was 17.6 percent in June 2007. But having said that, I also must say that I think Apple's policy to only sell their hardware in their own stores and in 'Apple certified retailers' is a way to make certain that they won't get a large marketshare on the desktop. Apple's policy ensures that people can not really compare Apples and other computers side by side, and people who own Apple computers will continue to be considered hip, or weird, or stupid, depending on who you ask. O, and one more thing! Here in the Netherlands Apple certified the Media Markt to sell their computers. In Enschede a few iMacs and notebooks are cramped on some shelves that are just behind the computer the employees always use to check availability and prices of the things they sell. That means there is no space for customers to have a good look at the beautiful iMacs et al. that are displayed there. I asked a Media Markt employee a few questions about the new iMac, and he turned out to know next to nothing about it. He even admitted that. If I were Apple I would make damn certain that the people who sell my hardware in 'certified' shops know their stuff, and put my precious hardware on display in an easy to reach place. My experience at the Media Markt made me decide not to buy the iMac there but online. I'd rather wait a few weeks than have to do with clueless salesmen.
-- Cheers!
I have been a PC user at work and a Mac user at home for the past, oh 20+ years, and I've never thought to myself (while sitting at home)...."Gee, I wish I had that crappy computer from work here at home too!" Now that my company gives me a PC laptop, I bring it home (so it doesn't get stolen from work) and it sits in its bag while I use my $1000 cheaper MacBook.
I'm not sure why you can't understand that a Mac at home does not suddenly limit your productivity at work. If anything, it only highlights how unproductive you work computer is. "hassle of having to learn two operating systems"? The only hassle I see would be having to learn how to learn to maintain and keep a PC running at 1/3rd the productivity of a Mac.
And I'm not sure you've read the article or the other posts, but it is fairly clear that Apple isn't trying "hard" to take over the business world. They aren't trying at all, and they and their users are perfectly fine with that. They aren't breaking into new markets either, just making existing markets better. If Mac OS X only does one thing for the business world, I would hope it would be the same thing their other products do: force the competition to improve their offerings. Everybody wins that way.
IMHO Vista is a sh!t. But, IMHO, you are doomed to use it anyway.
Below is all my IMHO, folks. Be friendly, don't take me as troll. But you still doomed to see Vista, no matter how shitty Vista is. Because:You would say what is the proposal? Let's try to think. ;-) In my opinion:
P.S. I am MacOSX, Solaris, Linux and BSD advanced power user and developer of software for more than 10 years. Don't tell me soap stories about "nice Linux Desktop", please. Just fucking please.
If I'm Steve Jobs, why should I care whether Apple is "beating" Vista? Investors sure don't, if their stock price is any indication.
What matters to Apple is whether Apple is doing well as a company. They don't really have to care what's happening to MSFT. In fact, I'd expect that AAPL tends to go up at about when MSFT goes up because a large percentage of the stock price is based on the industry rather than the company.
I am officially gone from
The first question to ask is: could Apple even handle having a larger share of the market? They'd need to expand their range of hardware, they'd need to expand support staff, they'd need add a boatload of new APIs and functionality to their OS, and on and on. Outside of Apple, there would need to be a huge infrastructure of consultants, supports staff, technical authors, and other people supporting Apple hardware and software.
And that isn't even taking into account technical issues and missing functionality in their software platform. Having a nice looking desktop user interface and being able to talk a good talk on UNIX compatibility isn't the same as having a software platform that people can use in a corporate environment.
Overall, despite all the bluster, I don't think Apple is even aiming for Microsoft's market. Apple is happy to skim off the high margin, low volume market. Right now, they can afford to say "your wallet is too small", or "we don't do that" and send customers away. If they want to compete with Microsoft, they need to meet the needs of the vast majority of users--corporate, home, and engineering--and they need to do so on price, performance, functionality, features, and compatibility, and they don't. They aren't even trying or even making the investment (Apple's R&D investment is comparatively small).
Hoping that Apple can take over the market quickly because Microsoft stumbled with Vista is wishful thinking--taking market share away from Microsoft is a slow, steady process. Apple makes it particularly hard on themselves because they have created a bottleneck by being the single hardware vendor that runs their software, and by not giving an inch on compatibility with Windows.
Correction, you can install Windows XP as long as Microsoft's WGA server is around.
I am a former Apple employee who still maintains close ties to the company. I am also a former professional economist; I went to grad school for my Ph.D., but didn't finish my dissertation. I can state affirmatively without breaking any NDAs that The Fine Article is full of bullsh*t.
Let's start with his sales figures. "The Mac's *worldwide* market share was 3 percent as of June 2007, according to Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm in Wayland, Mass." (Emphasis mine) Worldwide market share is a poor indicator of Apple's markets. It is mostly a US-focused company and will stay that way in the near future. In the US, Apple's market share is around 5-6%, according to the most recent figures I could find. More importantly, the growth rate is more than four times higher than the industry growth rate, 32% vs. 7.2% (IDC estimates via Apple's latest quarterly report). It doesn't take long for that kind of second order effect to dominate. Comparing the market share now (after the events of the 1990's) to Apple's market share when its mainstay was the Apple II is really bad analysis. I would expect better from the author, a professor of business who presumably knows basic microeconomics.
His figures for the share of computers in use are suspect as well. "Funny thing, though: based on the ratio of Windows and Macs actually in use, no gains can be seen for Apple. The Mac's share of personal computers has actually edged a bit lower since Vista's release in January, and the various flavors of Windows a bit higher, according to Net Applications, a firm in Aliso Viejo, Calif., that monitors the operating systems among visitors to 40,000 customer Web sites." Measuring OS usage share by measuring browser hits is a seriously flawed methodology. There are know sources of bias that lead to higher than actual market share figures for Internet Explorer on Windows, including sites that require users of other browsers to spoof the user agent header, measuring usage on sites that have ActiveX elements that drive away non-Windows users, and extra files being sent to Internet Explorer in order to work around problems in the IE rendering engine. Furthermore, the author is looking at the wrong figures and the drop that he's looking at is statistically insignificant anyway. The figures that he refers to are 4.68% (2007Q1) vs. 4.63% (2007Q2). Windows Vista was released to the general public on January 30, 2007. Thus, the base figure he should be using is 4.06% (2006Q4), which predates the release of Vista. A simple statistical test based on the Net Applications market share figures for 2004Q4 through 2007Q2 shows that a 0.05% difference is not statistically significant. Heck, any reasonably trained economist should be able to eyeball this and say that given that trend, a 0.05% difference is not statistically significant.
As far as the whole Best Buy thing goes, the author completely misses the point behind Apple opening its own retail stores. Apple tried for years to work with CompUSA, Sears, Best Buy, and other consumer electronics retailers to sell Apple computers to the masses. Each attempt was a dismal failure, as the personnel at the retailers could not sell something as complex as Apple's equipment. They were barely able to sell TVs. The only sort-of, kind-of successful experiment in there was the store-within-a-store at CompUSA, which was done by putting Apple employees into CompUSA stores. Even that didn't work too well, as the Apple section got lost in the middle of all of the other stuff. Apple is trying again to expand it's retail reach, but I would put the odds against it. Big box retailers' emphasis on low price and minimal service is completely at odds with how to sell Apple computers.
"Apple has not even begun to try to re-enter another domain from which it had withdrawn its Mac sales teams: large corporations." That would be news to Apple's entire Enterprise Sales team -- several hundred people. I work with them on a daily basis, even now. They've been there all alon
I find this an interesting article for the most part, but it's really kind of "preaching to the choir" isn't it?
The author talks about not taking advantage of this small window of opportunity to attack Vista. He also goes into great lengths about all the fabulous things Apple has already done to position itself as an alternative to Vista including the transition to intel processors, the fantastic ad campaigns, and the refinement of OS-X. Although he only says that "the official Mac line is that it has gone swimmingly" which seems imply falsehoods, he does manage to mention that sales are up over 30% across the board!
To me this sounds like unprecedented growth and execution, not a failure.
He then answers his own unproven assumption (that Apple isn't doing enough) by expressing "what could be done" as:
- ramping up their retail presence
- offering more for corporations.
But these two things are exactly what Apple *has* been doing for the last couple of years. In fact, Apple's focus has been so intent in these areas that it's on the verge of dropping the ball this year on a number of other issues as a result. How could Apple could ramp up the retail expansion any faster than they already have lately without stumbling? How could they focus any more on their high end and back-end server stuff for corporate environments with Leopard? Being certified as UNIX this year doesn't give them enough cred? Coming out with a fully exchange compliant server and simultaneously offering it's own end to end solution to compete with exchange server based on open formats and open source code is not enough? Coming out with a brand new corporate smart phone to challenge RiM is not enough?
Apple is already going through intense, rapid expansion on all fronts probably more than at any time in it's history and the very issues he mentions are already already major focii of their expansion plan.
I'm not saying it's a stupid article, but it's kind of pointless in that all it really does is restate some recent history, (MS took five years off and OS-X has come in from the cold), add some overly obvious business advice, (expand retail, expand markets, consolidate marginal markets), and then it just kind of wrings it's hands and worries about how far Apple can get before the "giant flywheel" of Vista gets it.
I'm worried about the flywheel too, but I fail to see what more Apple can do on any of these fronts that it isn't already doing. In particular, expanding retail locations any faster than it already is, would be a dangerous course for Apple and in the end probably bad business advice.
Think for a second who makes computer purchasing decisions. It is always the techy friend or family member. By eliminating them from the user base, you essentially eliminate a large free sales force.
There are plenty of 'techie friends' out there recommending Macs-- even guys who making their living supporting Windows. If the people asking for recommendations are not hardcore gamers, advising them to get a Windows box is the dumbest thing you could do, unless you like getting constant support calls when you're off the clock. For non-gamers a Mac would meet their web/email/word processing needs just fine, without the maintenance requirements.
As for internal expandability, it's a nonissue with non-techies-- more so with Macs. You seem to imply that no 'techie friend' would recommend a system without internal expandability. If you are recommending what YOU would buy to your friends, you're doing them a disservice-- you should be recommending what will meet THEIR likely much more modest needs.
If you stuff a Mac full of RAM and hang a USB or Firewire hard drive from it to add storage capacity, it will serve your needs for five or six years, or more. Hell, I've got corporate design departments for clients that are still very productively using Macs that rolled off an assembly line as early as 2001-- running the latest version of OS X. (Know anybody running Vista and doing productive work on hardware that old? Didn't think so.)
(Posted as AC to avoid undoing moderation)
I've written about this before, but I think the best argument I can make is to point to the dot-net addict site, and point out that wherever he compares .NET to ObjC, it's almost a guarantee he'll prefer ObjC. He's authored several (a dozen ?) books on .NET, and is a self-confessed addict, I'm guessing he's a better advocate than I.
:: signs everywhere when he sees a C++ program). It's far simpler than C++ (and provides a full object-orientated system), it's much better designed than .Net, it's faster than Java for most things (those byte-code compilers win over everything sometimes :).
Most people come late to Objective C, it's only really used on the Mac, and the [method syntax] throws people off (though I don't think it's any worse than a C programmer seeing all those
The only real drawback in modern times was the [retain]/[release] memory management, and even that is pretty simple - it even works with the built-in distributed objects across applications. With Leopard, we get managed memory, while still keeping the ability to link with any C library - did I mention it's a formal superset of C ? So *any* C program will compile under ObjC. And then you get to the real crux of it's strength - the dynamic nature of the language. Messaging an object ([myObject doSomething]) is not the same as calling a method (myObject->doSomething()), and you get a lot of power from that.
And, of course, it comes with a very powerful, elegant class-library. It's *hard* to write a non-MVC application in Cocoa - you have to really try. I think you only start to appreciate the subtlety of the class-library design after you've used it for a while. Easy things are easy. A lot of hard things are easy, and pretty much anything is possible. I've had a few "so that's why" moments over the past few years, and another cog slots into place.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
There is a little German car maker you might have heard of named Prosche. They make sehr viel money. Their stock is doing sehr gut. They don't really care about market share. Now, nobody bothers them about this or writes little essays about how Porsche will never catch up with Toyota or GM, because everybody understands they are playing for profit, not market share. For some reason, many people don't understand this with Apple. They keep talking about market share.
Apple has no debt. They are making lots of money -- okay, so is Microsoft. Their stock is up, what, 70 per cent this year -- Microsoft's has been dead in the water for years. Apple has two different product lines that are doing fine: Computers and iPods. They are working on a third, the iPhone. Microsoft has two products of the same type, Windows and Office, that make money. Everything else they have touched, like the Zune and the Xbox, has been a financial disaster.
Let Microsoft keep its market share. Apple is making money and making its shareholders happy. Like Porsche.
The elephant in the room of course is:
You are not doing all you can to defeat Vista as long as you will not sell it in direct competition with Vista. That means, on OEM hardware.
Now, that may or may not be the right thing for Apple to do. But until they do that, they are not even trying to compete with Vista.
Why is this so hard to see?
Yes, it's ending. The reason it will end is because handheld wireless devices will (really already have) become powerful enough to do what most people want to do with their computer, which is communicate in various ways, play games, find information on the web. Look at people in their teens and twenties to see what's happening, they are ahead of this curve. They have cell phones, not land lines. They might have a laptop, but they use it occasionally. They spend a lot more time communicating with their cell phone than their laptop. Banks will start optimizing their online account services to work from these handheld devices. The overly complex and clunky PC will be all but abandoned by ordinary users. Nobody will think that they need a PC like they need other "standard" appliances in a home.
Among those that do use laptops, they tend to be used as glorified typewriters. Many of them don't even have a real email address, due to the effect of spam they've migrated en masse to private email-like systems such as MySpace and FaceBook. (At first blush there may appear to be a hint of irony there, migrating their email communications to MySpace to get away from spam? Since the spam isn't in their inbox, it's not a pain, and it's not really ironic when you realize they've traded annoying spam for other forms of spamvertising that are easier to ignore. )
Sure, there may long be a workstation market that serves power users, but most people are not power users.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
So are you going to enlighten us as to the statements he made which were incorrect, due to his bias? Ah, no.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.