Colin Sandy notes that Business 2.0 Columnist Eric Hellweg has written a follow-up article on Steve Jobs and the Future of Apple, as a rebuttal to the many responses from the Mac community.
Comments
about the first comment: his point is a good one. It's MacOS w/ 5% and Windows w/ 95%. for Apple to survive there need to be apps and drivers and whatnot made for the MacOS. so it's a very good point that Apple's 5% is different than BMW's 5%.
now the smartest thing he says in the piece is that Apple should bring in someone new to keep the company held together, and let Jobs do his "vision-thing". IOW, Jobs can think up and guide these amazing products like the iMac, but at the same time Apple should have someone who can do the stuff that isn't as fun or exciting, but is as or more important. networking isn't a great example, but stuff like keeping the lines up-to-date and price-competitive are things I think Apple is poor at simply because they aren't exciting. a $50 price drop or a somewhat bigger HD or better graphics card aren't really neat things, but they are very important for Apple as a company to do. they ought to bring in someone who can run the day-to-day stuff
Notice he did not attempt to address our comments about his suggestion that Apple switch to Intel processors. Guess he conceded that one...
The world needs to stop viewing Apple as a "niche player... in the PC world". The Mac should not be viewed as a PC, but as a Digital Hub that happens to offer PC functions.
From this point of view, their market share just grew.
I agree with the "Apples to Oranges" comment. Apple needs to get away from being categorized as a PC competing with Wintel machines. It needs to start its own market and let the PC market bury itself.
If you're not welcome in the club, start your own.
...and you've probably read countless articles like this one. Seems like every few months, ANOTHER article will be written by someone who just doesn't "get" Apple, it's machines, it's users, and decides that they either need to get in line with their own viewpoints or they'll die.
This is just another example of that. And yes, I was one of the people who wrote in flaming him for writing that the new iMac. He's obviously an IT guy who just doesn't see beyond big enterprise networked infrastructures.
Funny, that's what they tried some time ago, shuffle Jobs to a visionary position and get a real businessman to run it. You know, like Sculley, Spindler, Amelio. Ah, the golden years of Apple
It's also funny how he states that is in troubles because of it's low market share., while at the smame time Gateway is firing THOUSANDS of employees and closing down stores. Apple has billions in cash, it'sstores are a success, and it cannot produce the iMac fast enough for the demand. But these facts just do not count in the littler pea-sized brain of the author.
He has a point. There's no real excuse as its so difficult to get a Mac on a Windows network. Well, it really isn't all THAT difficult, as long as I shell out bucks for Dave or Sharity.
OS X doesn't even coexist properly. I can mount Windows shares, but they are not persistent between logins. I also cannot easily share directories to my Windows bretheren-- heck, I can't even browse their networks, it gets real fun sharing with DHCP-enabled Wintel boxes and OS X.
Out of the box support, NetBIOS and all, no extra programs, installation, or cost. This feature can be turned off/on with a simple checkbox under the networking preferences. They can use Samba, roll their own solution, or bite the bullet and license it from Microsoft. If you can drop a Mac on a Wintel network, click a button or two and share files/printers the world might just start beating a path to Apple's door.
Basically, if Apple gan get their boxes to interact with a Windows-based network as well as a typical Win2k or NT machine can, his main gripe goes away, it'll make the machines a lot easier to shoehorn into more companies because of this friendliness. This is what we all want in the end is it not?
I wish I knew how people were calculating marketshare. According to this article, Apple has 4.5% and Windows has 95%, but of what market? That only leaves 0.5% for Linux, OS/2, BSD, etc. Do these numbers include servers or just workstations? Do they include home, business, and education? Is it based on recent sales, all sales for the past 20 years, or the number of installed systems currently being used? Does the number of Windows sales include all the OEM Windows licenses that PC manufacturers and individuals were forced to buy even if they were installing an alternate OS on the PC? Are these number for the USA, or worldwide? Or do they just take a poll of a couple hundred people and extrapolate overall percentages?
I know that in the past 9 years, I have thrown almost all of the Windows PCs that I have bought for myself or for my business in the garbage, but all but 2 of my Macs are still being used by someone. So although I've purchased a much greater number of PCs than Macs, we are currently using more than twice as many Macs as PCs. Most of the PCs that we still use are now running Linux even though they had some version of Windows installed when we got them. Since no polling agency has ever asked me, or anyone I know, the current status of the PCs and Macs that we have bought, how can they know what the install base for each OS is?
If they use recent sales figures, then that means that they are not counting systems with older versions of operating systems installed. How many Mac users have not upgraded their OS in the past year? I know of many people still using MacOS 7.6 or MacOS 8.1, or MacOS 8.5 - so do these people still figure in to the 4.5% quoted? The same is true on the Windows side; I know of many people still using Windows 95 and Windows 98.
Who is supposedly keeping track of all of this info and figuring out accurate marketshare figures?
The writer, Eric Hellweg, has a point. 4.5% marketshare (probably lower now) is not enough to attract a lot of new developers or manufactureres to the mac platform in the near future (although OS X shows some promise).
If Apple could get something like a 10-15% marketshare, which should be possible considering Apple's products and their quality, I think we should see a boost of mac-support in the market.
Companies would then be "stupid" if they ignored the mac-platform, by not releasing mac drivers or porting their software to the mac-platform.
So my opinion is that the mac-platform would be MUCH better off with at least twice the marketshare. It would also be a more "safe" and common alternative to Windows, which I think people are starting to get really fed up with. (XP makes me crazy and frustrated, and that's on a good day ;p )
OR
Network Headlines
Most Popular
MacNN Sponsor
Recent Reviews
iHome iW2 AirPlay speaker
iHome generally isn't known as a luxury brand when it comes to audio, but it is prolific -- the company's docks and speakers are every ...
Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover
One of the iPad's main weaknesses has always been productivity. It's not a question of apps; while it has taken a little time for a na ...
Logitech UE Air Speaker
If maybe a little more slowly than Apple would like, AirPlay is becoming a staple of the wireless speaker market for iOS devices. The ...
Most Commented
Popular News
Forum Regular
Joined: Aug 2001
Hes still wrong
he talks about Wintel as if its one company, its not. there are 100s if not 1000s of PC manufacturers, if you treat Apple as just a PC manufacturer then their 5% doesn't look that bad.