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IE Market Share Drops Below 70%
Mike writes "Microsoft's market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. It's too early to tell for sure, but if Net Applications' numbers are correct, then Microsoft's Internet Explorer will end 2008 with a historic market share loss in a software segment Microsoft believes is key to its business."
Macs can charge what they do because they promise to deliver a "just works" solution. That market is far, far bigger than the "tweaker" market will ever be and pretty much in direct opposition to everything Linux is about like choice, flexibility, modularity and configurability. It's aobut creating highly integrated software with a small selection of hardware that has been extensively tested and more or less instructs the user "this is how it works" rather than ask "how would you like it to work?". It's costly but really these people have little choice - they're lost on a computer and would otherwise rack up other support costs. Linux quite frankly isn't even close on this market.
That I can understand. Where I'm disappointed is that Linux isn't able to capture more of the tweakers, of those that really are interested in computers and how they work and want to customize their experience. It'll never be a huge market, it'll never pay that much since people are skilled and can find their own way rather than pay expensive hand-holding, but it is much bigger than the 0.85% reported here. In many ways I see Macs and Linux as chipping away at different ends of the Windows market, but one would hope that as the Windows market share dropped and the monopoly loosens that Linux would get some free help from that, but... no, doesn't look that way so far.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Remember, Internet Explorer 8.0 is coming probably around March-April 2009. Once that comes out expect IE marketshare to increase again, mostly because there are so many corporate internal applications tied to IE that switching to Firefox, Chrome or Safari is not an option, especially with today's poor economy.
Switching to Firefox means IT departments will have to test all their applications for Firefox compatibility, a potentially expensive process if they need to convert apps for Firefox compatibility.