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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.
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.
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.
Its not a question of how many issues there are, its a question of perception. Neither 98 nor XP were significantly different at 1 year old compared to 3 years old, but the perception of them changed massively in that time.
In all likelyhood that pattern will repeat with Vista.
apple tried that it nearly bankrupted the company. Selling an OS without a monopoly is unprofitable. why else do you think that only free software OS's have been able to make in roads while every single other for profit OS company is just about gone?
Without a monopoly no matter how gained selling just an OS will fail. Apple is worth more than Dell because they keep things locked down, and stay out of the cut throat market of cheap hardware.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Obviously you were never in charge of an IT organization. These control freaks are attempting to keep the business network running reliably. ... The IT folks are not here to grant your technological wishes.
Well, I have been in charge of IT (for a small company, granted) and I have to say, your post reflects a fundamental, dangerous, and regrettably common misunderstanding of what corporate IT is for. The purpose of IT is not IT; the purpose of IT is to enable users to get things done. And if users can get things done better on Macs, then by God, it's IT's job to support those Macs. And "support" does not mean willful ignorance -- the latter, unfortunately, being what a lot of shake'n'bake IT techs show any time the word "Apple" is mentioned in their presence.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
And windows is like a dog that has been fed pet food from china since birth. (Vet trips, limited survival)