Mac OS-X / Vista Gain Share

Just my twopennoth:

My partner is director of IT for a company in Bristol. She's also an ex-Microsoft employee and a web-architect on the.net platform. For those who don't know, that's a Microsoft only platform.

While she uses windows at work she, like many of her collegues and our geeky friends, have switched to using OS X at home (or linux) and keeping Windows in the office.

So you end up with a really strange setup where more literate home users are starting to use Macs at home and PCs at work

It's interesting

For what it's worth I'm a complete Mac geek, having spent over fifteen years using them. However, I'm a musician, so no surprise that I'm more at home on the Mac Platform.

Both systems have their merits. I think however that the free flavours of linux are going to undergo a real surge in popularity over the next three years as the price of living raises and people think twice before spending money on software - not to mention the raise of low power computing solutions in the financially poorer nations of the world.

 

Yeah, I'm there too. Actually, I use both at home, with a preference for the mac. Some of the businesses I work with are starting to consider Apple more seriously, but changing the mindset is difficult.

 

Your comparisons are all biased, and designed to show Microsoft as a "better" company than Apple, or something along those lines. Lets compare Apples to Apples (no pun intended) here.

The "upgrade" factor: What percentage of users upgraded for the new OS?

For OSX, Leopard saw 19% of the user base on Leopard after its first quarter of sales. Vista saw only 13% after a full year (3 quarters!). Yes, that 13% represents a lot more sales than Leopard, but it's all relative.

Next: Market share.

Apple has gained 2% in market share in the past year, while Windows ahs lost market share (to Apple).

So, go ahead and keep chanting to yourself "Microsoft has more sales" over and over again. While true it doesn't change the fact that Apple has been catching up for a number of years now, and Microsoft hasn't been able to do anything to stop that.

Just wait, in a number of years, you'll notice something. Windows server sales are in the dumps, with Linux (AIX, Solaris, etc) servers taking a bulk of the market. Windows desktop machines are rapidly declining as more and more of the population switched to Mac at home for it's improved lifestyle management features, and businesses will follow suit, although those sales will stay with Windows much longer than anything else, due to the software investment.

 

Microsoft got lucky when they were handed a near monopoly decades ago. No big feat to be still on top.

 

Technically, that's not really correct.
.Net was developed by Microsoft, but is described (basically the CLI and C#) as a freely accessible ECMA and ISO standard, which makes it more or less an open system. Of course, the vast majority of .Net development is on Windows platforms, but there are several open source implementations of the .Net framework. For example, there is Mono, which runs on Windows, Linux and OSX.

 

True, but unfortunately (as I have been told by various .net developers) Mono isn't quite there yet. As far as my partner is concerned it's a dirty word...

I'm a music geek, so I know nothing!

 

I'm afraid I don't get that. Yes, people switch to Mac at home for lifestyle reasons, but why would businesses follow that? I would think that other arguments play here. In fact, my observation is that Apple is more and more focusing on consumers and lifestyle equipment, and less on boring corporate IT.

 

You have to take into account productivity - Productivity is going to decrease if someone is used to using a Mac and is forced to use Windows. I see these sorts of productivity losses all the time, every day. You get someone who works in windows all the time working on a task in Linux, and they go real slow... Likewise, you give a linux junkie a task to do in Windows, and they'll move a lot slower as well. The same is true between Windows and Mac.

So now in a few years we'll have a bunch of professionals graduating from college who only ever used their MacBooks for the past 4 years. They're unfamiliar with Windows and thus lose productivity. Now, this won't be a big deal at first - Managers will suffer through the decrease in productivity while the new hires get used to Windows. But at some point they'll reach a tipping point where switching their software and hardware over to Mac actually makes financial sense - They have a planned upgrade cycle in place, they have a bunch of new hires coming on that they know are Mac users, etc.


In short, Apple is tackling the market in the opposite way Windows did. Windows came out on top in the business world, and then trickled into the consumer market because thats what people were familiar with. Apple is going the other way around - there are huge obstacles to tackling the business market (companies have large investments in Windows-based infrastructure), so they're going after the consumer first. We'll either see the home and business markets completely split from each other, or businesses will start to adopt what their customers are familiar with - and it's already started happening:

Survey: 8 in 10 businesses now using Macs | InfoWorld | News | 2008-06-26 | By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

 

What you say makes sense eagle, but there is one other thing that must be taken into account. In the business world you try to avoid single sourcing anything whenever possible. If you go with the PC/Windows platform, you have a large number of vendors to choose from, with the Apple, its only one. My employer for example collects bids from a variety of vendors for IS purchases on an annual basis, this year HP was able to beat out Dell by about $200 per PC, so we switched.
A second issue is the ability of a PC to be customised, largely due to their open architecture where Apple wants to control everything. We have some very specific hardware that's used that an Apple could simply not deal with, airport check in kiosk for example.

 

Single sourcing could be considered an advantage. Instead of getting the old "That's a hardware problem. Phone somebody else", you get people willing to help with whatever the issue is. And they speak English.

Then there's the network issue. Though I had some frustrations with setting up an Apple network initially, it's worked flawlessly since. The PC networks I have to deal with at work need their own full time babysitters.

 

This has been covered a little, but the gain in Vista market share is people simply buying new Windows machines (they increasingly can't buy one with XP anymore), but the increase in Apple market share is more impressive: it represents a shift from one technology vendor (Microsoft) to another (Apple).

I must say that the more I use Apple hardware (iPod, Apple TV, iPhone) the more impressed I am with the company.

I have a Windows XP laptop at home, another for work and a Vista Ultimate desktop computer at home. I write code using Microsoft technology and am subcontracting for Microsoft corp in my current consulting gig, but my next laptop may be a MacBook (though I'll be dual-booting OSX and Windows).

I wonder what kind of market share Linux et al have now. I never really considered them a threat to Windows (Linux isn't very good, despite the hype), but I think Apple may have Microsoft biting their nails as I see them as having terrific growth potential, especially in the consumer market!

 

The hardware support person, that would be me, and I speak English.
As for networking, there should be no difference if you have Apple, PC, or whatever else, as long as you are using standard protocols. For my use, everything is running TCP/IP over ethernet, and it has a mixture of Wondows and Unix servers.

 

That would only work in favour of Mac if their market share is larger than Windows. As long as Windows remains the most commonly used OS, it is actually an argument pro Windows (and one that helped securing their dominant position for many years)

But I think that this argument today plays less than 10 years ago (which is one of the reasons Apple can grow again). Internet, one of the most dominant components of today's IT, look and feels the same regardless of the OS. Modern software development technology makes cross-platform development less of an issue, so that you have lots of applications that work exactly the same way on different OS'es.

Single source of hardware can be good indeed, but single source without the option to switch to another "single source" if the first one screws it up is bad. And your support point only makes sense if you assume that all the software you would ever run on your Macs comes from Apple (which is very unlikely in a corporate environment)

Incidentally, my Macbook Air at home constantly has problems with dropping connections on my wifi lan. I never had those problems with any PC before. Apple says it's the wifi station

 

I'm typing this from my home PC, running linux. Being a geek, I have a home network; currently 5 machines. All running linux.
At work my workstation runs WinXP and I hate it (too many of our tools don't work under Linux, although I could get wine or VMWare...); my laptop runs WinXP, only because Linux doesn't have good handwriting recognition (yet). All the lab boxes are Linux...

Yes, Linux is less pretty and less friendly than Windows and that's great. I want a powerful machine, not a pretty 'friendly' one. (I hear Mac are pretty too...)

More important to me is the fact that I have no idea what windows is doing "in the background". What tasks are running? Why is my virus scanner using 50Mby of ram?

But none of this really matters, because my car isn't running Mac, or Windows, or Linux.

 

You do make some very good points there, i will admit that. However, i would also say many places do currently single-source their computer purchases. I know my company has been exclusively dell for a long time now. While single-sourcing equipment means you might not be getting the best deal, at least you know what you're getting is consistent. For the sake of argument, if company A charges 5% more than company B for their widgets, you might still go with company A if those widgets are 20% more reliable and allow you to have fewer IS staff. How that comes into play here is with Apple - they control the hardware and the software, so everything works together seamlessly, where you don't have that with a Windows box (thus near continual driver issues).

Of course, that points to your second point - special hardware that is required. A majority of todays business world uses standard off-the-shelf PC's, and that will be the PC's that switch over first. Applications that require special hardware will either continue being done on PC's or Apple will have to go after that business by opening up the way they do things for those applications. To date, they've ignored that segment of the market.

Not necissarily. The "market" includes all business purchases, which i would argue probably outsize the home sector by a bit. I know my family typically has a 1-1 ratio of people to computers at home (i'm an obvious nerdy exception with multiple computers running in a cluster...). And all of those people also have computers at work - and i know all the workplaces they're in have a greater than 1-1 ratio of computers to employees.

That being said, a person could grow up with a Mac at home, use mostly Mac's at school, get a Mac when they go to college, and enter the business world with very little exposure to Windows without Apple's market share being greater than Microsoft's. A great many people could, in fact. Obviously, it's not going to be a big deal right now with Apple's marketshare so low, but if they start getting up to 20 or 30 percent, i would be worried if i were you - that would probably represent more like 60% of the consumer market, with the business market making up the rest.-

 

And right after i posted that, i came across this gem:

Gartner Says Worldwide PC Market Grew 16 Percent in Second Quarter of 2008

That puts Apple at 8.5% market share (based on new shipments), placing them third in the market and placing their growth head and shoulders above everyone else's.

 

I wouldn't say that. Apple controls the hardware and the OS, but certainly not all the software that is running on their machines. Every now and then, this may have some nasty consequences, such as the FrameMaker debacle for OSX.

Your argument works equally well in the opposite way, and often even better because of the larger market share. I tried to convince my wife's parents to buy a Mac, but they refused. The reason was that, here in Belgium at least, a lot of courses for seniors are available for PC's and applications on PC's (even in the village they live in). There isn't such an offering for Mac's.

Besides, I'm not worried for my professional activities (if that's what you mean). People who need our product don't think in such terms. They simply buy the required hardware in a heartbeat. It also helps that a single license costs 30x the price of the computer it's running on...

 

Again, another market segment that Apple isn't aggressively targeting. They have plenty of workshops to train people how to use Mac's at the Apple stores, but when it comes to the elderly... well i guess the best way to put it is they aren't a long term investment for a company :lol: But in all seriousness, those types of courses will become available for Mac's as Apple's market share grows.

Also, keep in mind that market share for various OS's is different in different regions of the world, so comparing your experiences in Belgium in regards to the computer market may be slightly different than mine here in the US