Numbers don't lie: Apple's ascent eviscerates Microsoft Microsoft Windows once enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable dominance over operating systems offered by Apple, but new market share number-crunching shows Apple's inexorable rise blasting gaping holes in Redmond's once-impregnable battlements. According to stat-happy analyst Horace Dediu, founder of Asymco, the ratio of …
Does anyone else read stories like this and not think to themselves "Where exactly is the NEWS in this article?" I believe that even ostriches with their heads firmly entrenched in soil would be unsurprised by the data reported here. Oh great and wonderous prognosticators lend me your wisdom.... </sarcasm>
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I appreciate the point he was trying to make, but he's writing for a UK based red-top, yet fails to correct his appalling (to UK eyes) spelling. That's just sloppy.
He could also have linked to Tunnocks, known by > half the global population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnocks) but chose not to.
Sloppy.
Why should we have to accommodate US English? They always translate ours. Anyone who has worked extensively and personally with Americans quickly finds out the semantics and meanings are often very different and, would you say that If it was written in French or Swiss German or Russian? After all, they accommodate English fairly well.
Respect for and pride in our own culture and language please, before we lose it altogether, or get your green card, pay their taxes and move there.
I think you'll find the "accommodation" is resolutely one-way.
And, yes it does matter. I'm sick of having to suffer the increasing proliferation of idiotic American spellings and grammatical constructs, creeping into 'proper' English ["bigger/faster/older... THEN" —for fuck's sake!], just because people who should know better, or who should take the time to proof-read others' efforts adopt this "Well, it doesn't really matter, does it?" attitude.
really? Tunnocks? I'm British, I spent several years living in Scotland, i recognise the product by its picture but i'd never have known was a Tunnocks was if i hadn't clicked the link to wikipedia.
Hostess cakes, however, i know about, not least from their reference in Zombieland. So in this case, i'd say a Sno Ball trumps a Tunnocks
in either case, it's redundant. everyone calls that model of iMac to iLamp anyway, since neither of the sugary foodstuffs have a screen sticking out of them on an angle-pose neck.
I read this with thoughtful malevolence.....
"Comment Microsoft Windows once enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable dominance over operating systems offered by Apple, but new market share number-crunching shows Apple's inexorable rise blasting gaping holes in Redmond's once-impregnable battlements."
Microsoft's once impregnable battlements?
While the whittling away was occurring from a million and one tiny cuts - most of them came as a result of customers and corporations getting nasty back at Microsoft, and their appallingly bad software and service;
But where Microsoft really did fuck up, was being so dishonest and so bad and so unethical and so monopolistic that these were the seeds of the rot that grew from within.......
Microsoft - the corporation that has the rights of a person but is not a person, that has no personal accountability for anything that the people in it do....
The people in it are wading across the rivers of time with their feet of clay.
Attacking your customer base with shitty products, unethical practices and outright greed and deceit can only carry you on so far....
Ohhhhh so charging an imaginary figure for Software Suite No. X - at say $200 US, in the USA, and then charging the same in other currencies making the software cost the same as $400 US for other people in their own countries? Then blocking sales of the software in the USA, to people outside of the USA, based on IP address or shipping address?
Like who in the fuck do you think you are? You lying, gouging, thieving war mongering profiteers?
This is the management of Microsoft, making decisions like these, against the customers.....
Rigging the markets...
Lying about everything and anything...
Microsoft - it's simply a matter of time.....
Meanwhile I will continue to use Linux and Steve Ballmer - I ain't buying your product no more. In fact for the most part, if the software was given to me for free - I'd toss it in the trash rather than onsell it on Ebay or whatever......
Because I don't deal with scam artists who try to con me, lie to me or rip me off with shoddy software.
That's why.
In the comments you'll find he agrees Android sales find parity with full Windows this year. It's not included because there are only 3 years of Android data, and because it's athwart the purpose of comparing these longtime rivals. That's reasonable, and if someone wants to do the paper you're suggesting I would like to read it.
If the newcomer of only 3 years is about to reach parity with the 80,000 pound gorilla from 30 years ago, I think focusing on the 30 year old challenger is picking the wrong story. Cause if the claims for the 30 year old challenger are actually true on his behalf, and the current trend continues, by the end of next year the new comer is going to have wiped the floor with BOTH of the old farts.
Competition is good, but innovation is so lacking in the computer industry. There was so much more happening when there were more players in the computer industry.
Linux is good and bad, its cheapness and easily availability means nobody really bothers to create anything better and lets face it, it is rather retro kernel design.
BeOS was better than Windows, it just was always going to struggle due to it not running Windows software.
Monolithic kernels are an old way of doing things. A fast way of doing things of course, since everything is talking via memory addresses instead of using internal ports and messages.
The use of a monolithic design was the basis of the argument between Linus and Andrew S. Tanenbaum as his Minix OS used a microkernel.
So the point about it being "retro" is perfectly valid.
Monolithic kernels may be said to have passed the test of time ... at least if they're put together as well and as flexibly as Linux is. Point me at some other kernel architecture that works half as well. Yes, I'm aware of all the academic arguments in favour of microkernels. On paper, they are quite convincing, but I won't be convinced until I see one working well, across a range of workloads and system types, in the real world.
Personally I think Linux has a lot in common with Microkernels. Its software architecture is well modularised. New subsystems are easily integrated and existing ones re-engineered. it's just that the binding is done at kernel build time, not at runtime. It's a bit like the C++ versus script language argument. C++ is less easy to develop, but more efficient. A monolithic kernel is likewise less easy to develop for, but more efficient in production. A kernel is somewhere that efficiency DOES matter.
I have a big problem with neophiles. They think that "old" automatically means bad, without any actual comparison of the relative merits of the old and new products. They don't like "tried and tested and nearly unbreakable". They are also happy to disregard the vast amount of man-hours that are wasted, when a company like Microsoft replaces (say) the XP UI with the Windows 7 UI, and the Office 2003 UI with the Office 2007 UI. Sure, it may be only a couple of hours of lost productivity per user, but multiply that by maybe a billion users. Personally I think it's much higher. There's no accounting for the cost of the mistakes that are made while someone is thinking about the bloody new interface rather than the work he's trying to accomplish within it. Somewhere out there, I'm sure that the change to windows 7 has been the triggering event that destroyed marriages, killed companies, and caused deaths (by heart attack, probably). The right way to go is incremental improvement. Slip in th new features in a completely non-intrusive way, so that if you don't yet need the new stuff you never notice that it's arrived. That's what the Linux kernel has been doing very successfully for at least the last decade. (Unlike Gnome developers ... sorry!)
And almost as soon as we get used to Windows 7, Microsoft decides to Metro-ize us. That's a good neologism, by the way. To Metroize. To pull the rug out from underneath a billion users, in a misguided and doomed attempt to increase corporate revenue. To FUBAR by deliberation rather than by accident.
Considering the fact that the Linux kernel happily runs and runs and runs on devices ranging from skinny DSL routers (having 8MB of RAM) up to the latest, largest IBM Mainframes, I would call it excellently designed.
They did not make the mistake to roll GUI stuff into the kernel, which M$ did. Linux doesn't have kernel exploits because of a 20 year old buffer overflow in some font parsing code. Or bmp parsers and similar claptrap.
You can load and unload modules using insmod and rmmod.
And of course it does make little sense to change all the protection mechanisms (TLB and all that) of a CPU just to mashall data from the network card into a process. It would slow down things to a crawl and that is exactly the problem of systems like Minix.
Linux, many other Unixoid systems and many mainframe operating systems are still very modern in the sense that they almost perfectly do the job they were designed to do. Something you can't say of the hairballs from Redmond. At least if you consider their distribution strategy - I simply can't get a stripped-down NT kernel to use it for some special purposes, I have to take it with the whole package of abominations such as the registry, the GUI system and so on.
I would consider the NT kernel a serious competitor if it would run on 8M of RAM machines.
I don't think you understand what that word means. There isn't a business in the world that thinks *ONLY* selling 24x the number of units your next closest competitor sells is being "eviscerated".
And comparing IOS numbers to Windows numbers is ridiculous. There isn't a person in the world who does any *REAL* work that can get by with nothing but a phone or ipad. You might as well be comparing the number of Windows licenses sold to Logitech television remotes.
"There isn't a person in the world who does any *REAL* work that can get by with nothing but a phone or ipad"
I often do and I'm a DBA.
I can 'get by' It certainly wouldn't be my first choice, but I can do everything on an iPad that I can do on my laptop, including various flavours of VPN, ssh clients, RDP and access google docs.
Jumping in here; but his DBs probably are not running on Windows either. So what are you trying to say? How many serious applications are really running on UNIX or similar, while the administrators, developers and users use a Windows front end. I suspect, I know actually, that an increasingly large number use IPhones and iPads and even Macbooks as their front ends (not yet Android so much as security, software and official approval are harder to get).
I think you are a little behind the times.
The effect on the business depends on the business model. Apple make a good profit margins on smaller sales numbers because they concentrate on high end products. Microsoft make small profit margins on huge sales numbers because they essentially sell services for third party products. They really really need to be by far the biggest player. The big question here is who will be the first manufacture to tell Microsoft to stuff their restrictive contract clauses up their collective arse.
1. Regardless of whether iPad is used for "real work", remember that not every PC sale is goes to a business. Plenty of PCs are sold to consumers as well. Consumers generally use their computers for play (games, video catchup, music, shopping, social networks etc.). While there may always be traditional desktop, the amount of time most people spend using the desktop PCs may well decrease as users prefer mobile devices (arguably it already is). This is not good if you are Microsoft and your mobile solution has something like 3% market share.
2. The problem isn't that Microsoft is selling 24x more "units" than their nearest competitor. That is not the problem at all - as you point out in most circumstance it is great. The problem is that just eight years ago they were selling 54x more "units".
At the end of the day that in itself is the wrong way to think about it.
Microsoft (currently) sells 0 computers. Apple sells 0 Operating System licences. For every PC sold, Microsoft gets ~£30 in license fees for every copy of Windows sold, whilst for every Mac, iPhone and iPad sold Apple makes considerably more profit. Which is probably why Microsoft is making its own hardware now.
"Which is probably why Microsoft is making its own hardware now."
I think you'll find they're branding their own hardware, not making it. Even the technical design will have had more input from the maker than from MS, albeit the overall design concept is entirely from MS, and that's what the world sees.
I don't think MS are doing this to move into hardware - they're doing this as a exercise in learning (for them) and piloting (for customers) the concepts of varied input/output methods via a core data processor. Together with Win8, MS are looking to evolve in a world where the conventional PC is no becoming less relevant. Technical advances are seeing smaller, more capable integrated devices, and the need for a whole tower of meccano is passing rapidly into history (gamers, nerds, us, not included...yet). Likewise the need for having separate devices is more a legacy than a design requirement. The phone in my pocket is easily the same procesing power as a Pentium III, and subsequent ARM quad core devices will take the next generation or two into the territory of Core 2's and above. Take Surface, project technology forward, and MS need to have a software offering that centres around your mobile device, and can fluidly adapt to the particular peripherals that you have to hand, mixed cloud and local storage, and increasingly universal wireless broadband (cue: Howls of complaint from the broadband deprived). On the hoof that I/O is the mobile device's screen alone, but it might be a tablet type of device driven by the "phone", and blow out non-touch peripherals for the desk based power user. The software and the hardware therefore needs to be capable of supporting both keyboard and touch, differing screens and peripherals for the same user etc.
I think the lesson they've drawn from Apple is the right one - not that they are currently losing share (which is a fact), but that they need to regain relevance in response to the evolution of hardware and user expectations. For a decade now, hardware has evolved, but MS have been churning out lukewarm makeovers of the same offering. Now they are getting their bottom into gear for the future. Whether that's the right future, and whether they will be successful only time will tell, but I'm pleased they're trying, because otherwise it is a straight fight between Apple and Google.
I'll call bull on that. I the last 2 weeks alone I have worked on complex spreadsheets, longish heavily formatted documents, UI design with code generation for a prototype iPhone app and countless amount of emails, lookups and various other tasks.
In fact, I used to carry my Mbp home every night, but with 'back to my Mac' I don't do that anymore either... Only if I will write/compile/debug non-apple apps. It even works out of the box when your home is double NATted.
OSX also has built in VPN server, so you can properly secure your in-transit data when linking the 2 systems.
/disclosure: I work for a tech company as software architect. If it works for me without hassle, even the non techies can hack it :)
"There isn't a person in the world who does any *REAL* work that can get by with nothing but a phone or ipad."
Correction:
There isn't a person in the world who does any *REAL* work that can get by with nothing but a phone, ipad or their existing PC."
This is looking at new sales, not installed base.
Everybody who needs a PC probably has one or more already, using it with something like WinXP or Win7 so probably doesn't feel the need to fork cash over to Microsoft unless they need to replace hardware. Apple on the other hand bring out new shiny devices every year, as well as taking a 30% cut on the on-going sales out of iTunes. Hence Apple business model and stock prices are looking pretty good right now.
Instead of hundreds of millions of people upgrading this year to Win8, if they stay with Win7 (and I think corporates will), then you will see the ratio of new sales for MS vs Apple drop even quicker. That's why MS feel they to get people buying new hardware as well.
Personally I think all MS have to do would be to release a cheap/easy downloadable upgrade to W7 that brings some improvements like the boot speed from Win8 (+ optional Metro) and they would get millions of people upgrading. Instead they force Metro.. :-(
Numbers do lie, people don't buy a new PC every year but for some reason they buy apple devices every year.
Apple remind me of the wash powder adverts "this one is better than our last one which was lets be honest, crap" Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.
Also quite a lot of people build their own PCs or have people do it for them. The number of ways you could rip this "data" apart is astounding.
> Apple remind me of the wash powder adverts "this one is better than our last one which was lets be honest, crap"
Did Microsoft make wash powder too? That sounds just like them:
"Windows 95 gets rid of the hated 3.1 interface"
"Windows NT failed 'the Ballmer Boys test'"
They didn't need to criticize Vista when 7 came out.
Unlike Microsoft, which stated that Vista's UI was hideous. Now they're saying Windows 7 is looking outdated and long in the tooth. I wonder how they might define Windows 8, once Windows 9 comes round (which, of course, will look almost exactly like Windows 7 in order to reclaim all those lost customers).
"people don't buy a new PC every year but for some reason they buy apple devices every year."
Nonsense. The appeal of Apple gear is that it outlasts everyone else's hardware by years and years. I used to have to buy a new mp3 player every year or so until I got an iPod Touch (v2, which is now about 4 years old I think). My PCs at work last about 2 years before something in them dies - a friend of mine ran his music studio on an old powermac G5 for about 5 years till the disk died recently - and it was secondhand to begin with.
What are you DOING to your PCs?
I only ditched my 7 year old (entry level) Acer lappy last year as it was getting slow and I didnt really have enough room on the (no longer easily sourceable) IDE HD to dual boot. Apart from that its fine.
My six year old desktop is on original parts, was a refurb when I got it and is a Packard Bell, so nothing special. Still runs Linux Mint and XP perfectly well for everything except gaming though.
re: Mac hardware: My G5 imac is a pretty much a useless brick, there are no further updates to the OS and haven't been for ages, it's got problems with its fan and cracks forming around the edge of the screen (it has been moved four times!) for the one and a half grand it cost, it has hardly been a good buy. My HP workstation from the same time is still going strong, it has Win7 on it, having previously had XP and vista. It cost £350, admittedly I already had the monitors.
That's funny because my older Macs are doorstops.
Whereas my older PCs are better supported by commercial developers and can be upgraded. I can use a cruddy old Compaq to replace a shiny and new Mac simply because the cruddy old Compaq has a video slot.
Stop swimming in the kool-aid. There are a few of us with enough money to know better and call you out on it.
Macs are just PCs with the same spare parts built in the same Foxconn factories. If anything, Apple designs are more problematic because they are prone to cook themselves. Being tiny and having no fan doesn't come for free.
And well done to the three thumbs-down who don't like hearing the facts of actual experience. Tossers!
"..for some reason they buy apple devices every year." - maybe because people realise how good they are at what they do, and have given up on buying new plastic rubbish every year as a bad job. As in "hey this iPod is great, now I want an iPad" and "hey, these devices are way good - I think I'll replace my creaking plastic junkpile of a 2-year-old PC with a shiny iMac that will last me 4 times as long for only 1.5x the money".
Thumbs-down *that*, if you will :)
Eviscerated: Having vital organs or large parts of body mass removed. Much like selling only twice as many devices that use your OS when you were selling over 60 times as many previously. Hey where did my overbearing sales difference go? Kinda vital to the biggest bully in the tech market.
Apple and Android devices have proved that the future is no longer having its balls squeezed in Balmer's vice like grip. Good.
I do real work, I manufacture plastics along with about 200 other people in the same workplace. Only a tiny fraction of them have computers on their desks and the majority of the office workers use their smart phones for the day to day communication of their business, even a laptop is too bulky for the amount of running around they do. So "real" work to us doesn't mean staring vacantly at the Dell crapbox in the corner while it fails to do what you asked it 5 minutes earlier.
I was sitting in a wifi equipped motorway service station cafe answering work email on my iPod Touch when I spotted a woman working next to me on her laptop, then she pulled out her Blackberry, then her social phone to chat with friends, and finally her iPad to do her own project (not work related). So she needed 4 devices to do her tech thing (or at least she thought so) and only a quarter of them were M$ run.
I'll just carry an iPod Touch and an ancient Motorola Razer thanks....
Why Paris? Cos she is doomed to be superseded by slimmer smarter shinier eye candy too.
The AC is absolutely right. While there are a lot of people out there who could do their jobs on an iPad, who'd want to? I COULD do my work on a tablet, but I promise you my productivitiy would plummet without my dual monitors, a decent IDE, and a real keyboard. Comparing iOS and Windows is like comparing apples to oranges. They both have their strengths, but in a real world scenario there sales of one should only have minimal impact on the sales of the other. This only looks bad for Microsoft if you buy the hype that tablets are going to kill off desktops, which is a pretty ridiculous idea. They may replace desktops for those people who only use their computer for web browsing and email, but for the rest of us it would be pretty painful to give up our desktops for tablets.
And what's this nonsense about Windows falling out of its throne? Seriously, a 2:1 ratio would leave Windows in a pretty dominant position. Think of it in terms of sports. What would you think of a game that ended with a score of 6-3? And when you look at the only Apple product that really directly competes with Windows in its area of dominance the ratio is 19:1.
> it would be pretty painful to give up our desktops for tablets.
Who has suggested that you 'give up' your desktop. You can keep it. What is actually happening is that, given most people have a budget or a limit on spending, they could either buy a replacement desktop machine for their 3 year old one or could decide that the old one still works well enough and they will buy an iPad and have both.
In this way desktop sales will fall and tablet sales will rise _WITHOUT_ having to 'give up' the desktop. Of course over time people may find they need to use the desktop less.
I think the point is that the "area of dominance" is losing relevance. MS seems to be acknowledging this with its phone/Surface/Metro strategy, but this attempt to shift focus is hampered by a failure to understand how the various applications have to be tailored to satisfy their individual use-cases rather than trying to cram them all into a "Windows is your solution" marketing message. Apple sells each of its devices for a particular purpose, MS sells "Windows for everything".
I see pains are made to point out that the Apple numbers include all iOS devices (IE iPods + iPad's + iMac's etc).
Therefore I wonder do the Windows numbers include all Windows mobiles (admittedly this is currently not that many, 2-3% currently as a market share isn't it?) but also - and this is a shit load of devices - all those embedded/industrial devices (cash registers, cash machines, various machines in factories etc that all have a UI that are usually running Windows CE)?
I've bought/used many industrial devices over the years that use some sort of PLC within them, but the user controls are exposed as a touchscreen UI... most have been Windows CE based.
They compared os x to windows first (19 to 1) and that in itself is quite amazing given it was at least twice that not too long ago. The reason iOS makes some sense especially compared to wince is because iOS devices are replacing laptops or desktops for some people. Wince and windows mobile will never do that.
I don't believe tablets are replacing PCs. They're being added as well as PCs. PCs for work that requires serious inputting. Tablets for leisure (and some work) that is almost all output. Also because the tablet is a new device class, there's a huge sales surge going on at present. Just like there was once a huge sales surge for the now moribund netbook format. It lasted until everyone who wanted one had got one. In the fairly near future, everyone who wants an iPad will have got one. Microsoft will probably arrive in competition just as the market is saturated.
It probably wouldn't change that much because Microsoft have only sold 67million XBOX 360 consoles worldwide since its launch in 2005.
Whilst good it is not massive by consumer electronics standards. It is only 3 million ahed of Playstation 3, which has been on sale for a year less.
By comparison, Apple has sold 365 million iOS devices since 2007, including 55 million sales of iPad.
Still be thankfull their technology and competition result in the fact that you can buy such advanced hardware for such reasonable price today to run your penguin thingy on it.
I wonder how the graph would change if you simply invert it, Apple would go from "something very small" to 1/2. Not impressive enough for an article. Lets keep it that way then.
> Still be thankfull their technology and competition result
> in the fact that you can buy such advanced hardware for
> such reasonable price today to run your penguin thingy on it.
What competition? There's only x86. There used to be things like PPC and Alpha and 68K that wiped the floor with Intel crap. Getting my first PC was actually a step down as x86 is a primitive kludge in some ways. It was an archaic design when it was created and it accumulated more cruft over the years.
I'm glad to see another microprocessor option for a change.
Because after years of struggling we're finally reaching a point where technology is becoming a consumer market. Average Joe Public just wants to walk into COMET/PC WORLD walk out with a internet enabled device, just like they buy a fridge, dishwasher or vacuum cleaner. They want a gadget to work and it's companies like Google and Apple, simplifying certain gadget types, not dumbing down, but simplifying them. You're obviously some techno snob with a chip on your shoulder 'cos you have nothing to feel smug about anymore in the tech game. Too bad I'm afaid, that's progress.
Nearly 30 years in IT and I am glad to say I welcome this, it's such an amazing time to be alive and see this huge growth of technology being put to so many uses by so many different types of people. When I was a kid of 8 years old with my first micro computer there must have been me an 5 other kids in the entire school of 400 kids who had a computer at home, we were freaks and geeks but we knew where it was going and so did our parents.
Time was that once I could keep up with it all as it was so small an interest now it so huge I don't stand a chance, my kids can run rings around me and I'm glad they can, they will need to be able to keep up else they will be left behind. I will do my best to keep my head above the water in the areas I need to but I wanted a world like this when I was nipper, my geeky mates and I knew it would happen we just didn't think it would be so soon.
You can't fight consumer tech, too much momentum behind it now. I stand at the sidelines and just marvel at it all and wish it well for the future!
If Microsoft tried to do what Apple has done every court in the Western World would have crucify It. Apple is the only manufacturer (appointed by Apple) who can use Apple's operating system. No one else can manufacture parts without Apple's consent.
Even now if Microsoft went to a closed system (like Apple is) the courts would make them open up.
If you look at the article, you will find that MS has fallen to "If you factor in iOS devices, the ratio drops to less than 2-to-1". So basically if you include all Apple devices: desk-top computer, laptop, tablet and phone, they are still a minority compared to Windows.
That is why no one has investigated Apple. Yet. The time will come I hope...
Except for the fact that apple don't operate like ms who is a software company while apple are still primarily a hardware company. Even then they allow you to other operating systems on their hardware where as ms' Xbox is completely closed off to the point of having no free internet access via a browser and developers can't even freely decide to give content away which caused problems with the 360 Orange box. So by your logic the convicted monopolist should be back in court over that.
"Except for the fact that apple don't operate like ms who is a software company while apple are still primarily a hardware company."
Apple is a marketing company, not a hardware company. Apple manufacturers no hardware. They even outsource and offshore the process of assembling their "products" which are manufactured by Samsung, Asus, and others.
"Apple is a marketing company, not a hardware company. Apple manufacturers no hardware. They even outsource and offshore the process of assembling their "products" which are manufactured by Samsung, Asus, and others."
..............And then sue them for it when they have similar looking devices which is inevitable when you make it for them in the first place!
The problem for you is that computer manufactures did exactly what Apple does. That is make the hardware and software. Here's a few examples :
Atari (Atari 400/800/ST) , Commodore (PET, VIC-20, Amiga) Sinclair (Spectrum, QL), Acorn (BBC model B, Archimedes), Next (Next box) Sun, Dragon, Oric, Amstrad
And those were just some of the ones sold in the UK. The difference between Apple and those other companies is that Apple didn't go bankrupt or get taken over. If someone wants to build a computer with their own OS, they can, it's not illegal and never was. It's just very risky. Apart from Apple the only major computer manufactures from the 80's that are still in business and spring to mind are IBM, HP, Dell and Fujitsu. The default in computers wasn't, someone build the hardware, someone else build the OS. It was "you do it all in one". The only reason the PC industry developed the was it did was because IBM didn't think the PC would sell much and so never gave the PC designers the time or budget to do the normal "all in-house". That and a sloppy license deal with Microsoft.
"Even now if Microsoft went to a closed system (like Apple is) the courts would make them open up."
Yet the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune (RIP) and Windows Phone 7.5 are all closed and the courts have remained silent. For that matter every single counsel since the NES has been closed and the court have never cared.
It is also worth remembering that until Apple created the original iPod it was on the verge of bankruptcy itself. With just 2~4% of the PC marketplace.
I wouldn't mind betting the main reason for Mac selling more today is entirely due to the fact that you cannot develop iPhone software without one. Sort of a monopoly there...
PS: The drop in Windows boxes is also probably nothing to do with iAnything, it is the fact that in the last 5-10 years businesses have found that running server with Windows costs a lot more than doing the same on Linux.
Just 5 years ago getting a Linux box into a big bank was hard work as they only used Big Blue, HP, Sun and Windows. Now they prefer Linux just about everything else as it save them money and is deemed good enough.
Leap seconds seems to have caused some mega- linux systems to go tits-up. Pretty piss poor actually, and I laughed loud and long when Amadeus, SYD and other places went down. Serves them right.
None of the traditional mainframe OSs seem to have suffered. I did not see OS390 (whatever IBM calls it these days), OS400, VMS, NonStop, HP/UX.
To complete the full circle, when the IBM 360 came out, IIRC IBM did not offer an OS with the machine. There was an active market in OS's for a while for the 360 architecture, until IBM came along with its offering
> To complete the full circle, when the IBM 360 came out, IIRC IBM did not offer an OS with the machine. There was an active market in OS's for a while for the 360 architecture, until IBM came along with its offering
You have that exactly backwards.
The IBM 360 came with a selection of IBM OSes: TOS/360 (TapeOS), DOS/360 (DiskOS) or OS/360. Versions for smaller machines included BOS and BPS. These were all by IBM.
Other manufacturers copied the IBM 360 architecture, such as the RCA Spectra 70, ES EVM, Armdahl, and others. These either used IBM's OSes or cloned them.
"It is also worth remembering that until Apple created the original iPod it was on the verge of bankruptcy itself. With just 2~4% of the PC marketplace."
Although I wouldn’t say that Apple’s finances were in rude health, by 1998, the company was in far better shape –the success of the iMac, which was announced that year meant that it was unlikely that Apple would go belly-up, which had been widely assumed was going to happen before that.
Although Gil Amelio’s tenure of CEO isn’t highly regarded, arguably Steve Jobs benefited from more of few things his predecessor did (e.g. cutting costs, reducing workforce) to put the company on a better footing.
I agree totally with what you say. I think it is absolutely disgusting that my Onyx 3900 still does not run Mac OS X or indeed Windows. Both Apple and Microsoft should be sued into the ground for restricting me from running their OS on any machine I want to and if I want to run a Flame system on an Xbox 360 then I should damn well be able to.
The Asymco article ends, "Realizing that Windows is not a hegemony will unleash market forces that nobody can predict."
That's the interesting point. The unassailable Windows hegemony has been broken and nobody really knows what's going to happen next, except that it will be different and interesting.
And that is the important thing. As for the "new boss, same as the old boss" mantra: no, the new boss is not the same as the old boss. The old boss was a bully with lots of power because we made him the bully and gave him the power by being scared and/or assuming everybody else was scared. Time to grow up, we're not in the school yard anymore. There is no new boss and thank god Higgs for that.
(The same goes for the equally lame "best stick with the devil we know" mantra: no devils around, just machines and hardware and software that may do some useful work for us if we know how to make them do that.)
As far as companies go, there is no good and evil, sometimes we just end up giving one actor more power than is healthy (and by some margin I might add). The nice thing is we're just starting to recover from one of those episodes.
Kill Windows 8, and by that Train of thought kill that *#@&'ing Ribbon as well.
In short quit screwing 'round with crappy touchy-feelly UI that nobody ever asked for and leave us to our Keyboards and Mice. Thank you very much.
It might also be added that M$ implantation of the HTPC has also failed miserably as well. What with no support for DVB-C and or the Common Interface Decryption systems in their OS. I think it only took'em to Widows 7 to get to DVB-S2 and I forget if CI was implemented there or not.
I have since given up trying and have gone Linux and have been in HTPC bliss ever since with VDR & XBMC.
Games on the PC are a joke and IMHO are losing credibility on this Platform faster the what's implied here.
The only thing that still keeps me tied to them is Office.
And woe betide them if everyone ever starts to get tired of that then it really will be Game Over for M$.
As it is the only thing I hate more the Metro UI is Apple, so I'll just have to stick with Tux.
Yes, I suppose Apple's market share looks better if you graph the reciprocal of it. It's a pity for the fanbois massaging the numbers that Apple started making an OS before Microsoft, otherwise they could extend the graph back to Apple's founding and watch Microsoft's relative market share plummet from infinity down to 19, instead of from 56.
I am not at all surprised that Apple has been as successful as they have been in consumer. The surprising thing that they were so successful in consumer that users raised a coup in their organizations, overruled IT, and forced Apple into their organizations. Apple wasn't even trying to go after the enterprise market with iPad and iPhone.... I think even Apple assumed that IT was not going to budge on their love affair with MS. This doesn't mean that Apple is going to supplant MS as the dictator, or benevolent leader in the eyes of the MCSEs, of IT, but it is likely that most IT shops will start writing apps and buying management software that make the end client device largely irrelevant. Allowing choice is a huge loss for MS... especially because it is so apparent that, given the choice, users are going to select Apple or Android and not MS.
...Microsucks would lose about 85% of their existing sales and installed customer base. Getting mainstream Windoze based software makers to produce Linux based software is unlikely until their is a practical Linux solution for mainstream users.
User friendliness - or lack thereof - in whatever Linux distro be your preference is probably the biggest contributing factor that Windows managed to get as entrenched in the nineties as it did, and the "by geeks, for geeks" mindset is something the Linux development community still needs to get out of.
The day the word "compile" is excised from the basic help files for Joe Luser is the day Linux stands a chance as a consumer OS.
> User friendliness - or lack thereof - in whatever
> Linux distro be your preference is probably the
> biggest contributing factor that Windows
> managed to get as entrenched in the nineties
Idiot. WinDOS was already entrenched in the 80s. The die was already cast. Linux was a reaction to Microsoft already being a dominanting and stiffling force in the industry.
DOS made VMS look easy. No one cared about easy. Otherwise they would run Macs. They were all worried about Lotus123 or AutoCAD or the latest version of Civ.
Just take Ubuntu or Mint. Already more user-friendly than Windows, because there is a single, unified method for installing new applications. The installer simply works with one reboot in 30 mins.
But as a hardcore Windows masochist, you will now certainly tell me that w/o RIBBON, there is no user-friendliness. Or without C:\ etc etc.
User friendliness is quite the relative term here, it a different OS just like OSX and anything else you could think of. The big headache is that there are no Apps worth using on Linux.
i.e. No:
Photoshop
Acrobat
Illustrator
(Insert further Adobe Products HERE)
And worst of all NO OFFICE, now I'm sorry but, yeah there's Gimp and I do believe that Acro-Reader may be available on Linux but not full Acrobat as I'm aware of. and let us not get started on Open Office / Libre Office what ever it's called these days. If my time spent searching for a useable Office alternative on Linux and or Android has taught me anything. THERE ISN'T ANY. At the least not when your forced to work in (or on), Office Formatted Forms like I have to.
And where are the Games? Wine might be nice till you get the boot from Diablo 3 for running inside of it.
Linux as an Embeded System on HTPC's and Phones however are where it's at.
Hopefully if we ever see the fabeled Ubuntu Phone thing might slowly change in these things.
You are basically repeating the M$ line here: As long as something doesn't run MS Office (and some more Windows-based stuff) it is not "complete".
The MS Office Approach itself is highly broken and should be used only for short documents. For these, OpenOffice will be perfect.
If you need to perform heavy-duty stuff, teach yourself LaTeX and actually control what you do, instead of swearing and praying at the computer. Then there are various PDF viewers, latexpdf, Gimp, Inkscape and a ton of scriptable generators (e.g. for drawing diagramms).
Many of these require some serious learning, but after that you are in control as opposed to some shitty Spearphishing API from Adobe Incraporated.
For Games, buy yourself a console.
Latex + LyX is vastly superior to any word processor. It's a WYSIWYM editor. What You See Is What You Mean. You get to see a rendition of the markup as you type and edit, but it's an approximation to the better rendition you'll get when you print it. You don't have to type markup language control sequences. It is vastly superior to Word, where inserting another paragraph (or even another word) on page 2 can wreak havoc with the layout of any subsequent page. The longer the document, the more mathematics, or the more inserts, the worse Word gets.
Lyx uses LaTeX behind the scenes.
LyX is free and available for Linux and Windows alike. Try it.
Photoshop - GIMP
Acrobat reader - Evince. PDF creation - print to PDF via CUPS (or on Windows, PrimoPDF) from your content creation program of choice.
Office - OpenOffice or LibreOffice
The alternative products are similarly capable, and the ones I've mentioned above are all available to run on Windows as well, for zero cost, so you don't even have to go to Linux.
Oh, but the interface is different. So it's OK if Microsoft completely changes the interface from Office 2003 to 2007 and again for 2010, but you rule out any other software that's not bug-for-bug compatible with your favoured expensive product? If you were arguing the value of the UI you already know well I'd tend to agree, but when it's ripped out from under you at the next upgrade, why not just say no and go to Open-source alternatives?
I know I'm wasting my bytes, though. For some folks it's better the devil I know, than the angel I don't.
Do you know Acrobat can create pdf files that Acrobat Reader can't print, but which Evince has no difficulty with? (Both on the same Windows system).
Microsoft's problem is a lack of imaginative leadership and novel intelligence information from any right at the top of their executive administrative tree. So who does that single out as being the cuckoo in the nest? And what does it tell y'all about the real savvy of Gates, Allen and Ballmer, apart from their having filled a feed rather than created a need.
Being adept at the latter is that which provides for the former and is an Immaculate Phormer Operation which only a chosen few are blessed with? And please consider that as pretentious tosh on a par with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's, God's work pronouncement ....... Doing God's Work
It would be foolish though, and one would be doing oneself and everyone else a great dis-service, to not realise that the former pretentious tosh consideration allows a stealthy cloak of virtual invisibility and plausible deniability for the latter IPO which is honestly oh so very true too, but just so incredibly difficult for so very many to believe.
However, clearer enlightenment is simply a matter of explaining it in IT and Media channels with a smart choice of understandable words in a string/thread. Control of Worlds is not Alien to Those and/or That with Control of Words. IT is their Natural Default Gift.
I've used Microsoft since DOS 2.0: 2.1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 3.0, 3.1, 95,98,SE, 3.5, 4.0, 2K, XP,
and to my users, Win 7 on Dell is not obviously better than OSX on Apple.
It's not just that Apple is no longer obviously inferior and over-priced: it is also that MS is no longer obviously superior and better value.
I do have Linux and Apple users and sysops who's sense of the superiority of their own OS is proportional to their ignorance of other OS, I'm not talking about that. I also have users who only use applications and wouldn't know what OS they were on if you changed the splash screen, I'm not talking about that.
In small business there are some people who have been specifying their own computers and managing their own software for the last 20 years, they know what they need and how much effort and money they are willing to spend to get it. MS has not made any interesting advances in the last decade. That is a very long time to be standing still.
I tried to give a Mac to the missus. The "oddness" of it still put her off. She ended up going back to Windows because of obscure Windows-only apps that none of you've ever heard of.
She was less bothered by Linux but Apple doesn't play nice with it (iPhone).
It's not the big brand names that are a problem. It's the obscure stuff for industries you may never even have heard of that will be the big problem.
Are they counting all Mac sales as Apple OS sales?
I thought a lot of Macs were used to run other OSs. You often see people with a Macbook running Windows. The bloke on the plane next to me a couple of weeks back was running CentOS on one. I seem to remember one of the Linus stories with him complaining about one or other distro recently were he said he was using a Macbook.
Just coz you buy the HW doesn't mean you run the SW.
I was tempted to buy one of the new actual high res screen macbooks, because I want the screen. I don't need to learn another OS, it wouldn't have run Apple's OS no matter how good - I'm stuffed, life means I have to suffer Windows, I can't do my job without it. My job however is focussed on Linux, but the admin parts of the company is focused on Windows.
This is a pointless story, it doesnt include all windows devices. I see no mention in here of Windows CE (pretty much every satnav device on the market, Every Point of Sale device on the market, 60% of all Car code readers sold for car diagnostics. i could go on and on and on) windows mobile figures etc, yet all ios and osx devices are mentioned. Count these figures in, and i think youll find their not doing as bad as you think.
Isn't it rather early in the month for the Register's regular MS-bashing article to surface?
Pun intended.
In all seriousness, it's as obvious as the nose on your face that this was always going to happen during the rise of Apple to the giant it is today, to say nothing of Google.
As sad as I am to say it, companies come and go - we may be witnessing the autumn, if not winter of Microsoft, and it will be a very interesting next 10 years to watch what happens. I love Microsoft, and I'm not remotely bothered what people make of that; I freely admit I've based my entire career on supporting their systems and software - I don't want them to go, why the hell would I?
Apple are enjoying the fruits of their labour (there goes my pun'ing again) and it will continue for some time to come - but they, and others such as Google will have their time in the sun, and they will fade eventually, just like Microsoft will.
The world moves on, never more so than the world fo technology - I wonder how long they can all keep moving on with it?
Goose, meet Foie gras. MS could introduce FruitBoot, enabling execs to DualBoot Win7 and OsX, in a semi deperate bid to remain relevant. At least thats what Rickay thinks, and Pat seems to believe the tablet market is going to get really big, like her asre ... chuckle chuckle. It'll cost them only an arm tho ..
Are intel and Ms clutching each other fearfully, wondering what this new Google, Apple,Samsung driven world is going to do to their Loved Duopoly
To all the people saying you can't include iOS sales alongside OS X sales because 'you can't get any real work done on iOS' well you need to open your eyes...
Productivity tools for iOS are getting better and better all the time and if you haven't noticed Windows 8 is getting dumbed down to iOS style levels, so will that mean we won't be counting all the Windows 8 shipments?
Clearly, if the peanut gallery only sees iThings being used as oversized iPods then they are obviously justified in calling iThings as overpriced toys for suburbanites with money to burn and a need to show off to the neighbors.
You don't get to depend on wishful thinking regarding your particular brand fetish.
It has to prove itself yet and that simply not happened yet.
PhoneOS "sales" are irrelevant when compared to Windows. Lumping them in with MacOS sales to give yourself some sort of ego boost is simply out of touch with reality.
Microsofts's strengths are in server, client and office licences. Look around your office. While there may be people who have iPads, and many, many who have iPhones, how many have (or are allowed to have) a mac as there standard desktop machine? Not many, if any, I expect. And as long as that remains as it is, Microsoft's bottom line is safe.
We do have people who use iPads to connect to the terminal server while travelling. If Apple has cannibalised anybody's markets, it is that of Nokia and laptop makers. For those who want to check their email and internet access, then an iPad is far more agreeable than a laptop while underway.
I see. So any company with 20-50 employees, already running Office and Exchange, should just run Linux because it is 'open'? You seem to be forgetting that outside of the rarified strata where Google and Deutsche Bank reside, there's a far larger swathe of companies which have no interest in 'getting the most bang out of the hardware'. They want to hire someone, have him come in and setup a server, then occasionally swing by for maintenance. In that regard, I expect the new Server 2012 and SharePoint 15 to do really well.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, especially Server Core and Powershell 3.
You seem to forget that, as a rule, techies don't decide what platform or software they use, management does and management likes the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Management, it seems to me, is reassured by the immense cost of the software and the licences. It doesn't have to use them. It prefers Excel and PowerPoint.
So dream on about your typical company migrating away from MS to Unix. It's not going to happen soon.
And because there are many more jobs offered in MS technologies than in Unix technologies, people end up learning said MS technologies, regardless of whether they are the best or not.
Not all of us are clever enough or lucky enough to be able to work for Google or die Deutsche Börse.
Adding OSX + iOS together against Windows?
That's like comparing numbers for SQL Server to Oracle, and then adding in Microsoft Office in just to show how bad things are for Oracle.
You might as well compare Android activations against Apple iOS/OSX and conclude they're fininshed too.
As others have pointed out, OSX and iOS figures have been combined to make things look "worse" than they are. Every one I know who owns an iPhone and/or iPad also owns some sort of proper computer, be that a windows PC/Laptop or an Apple machine.
Secondly, as far as my quick bit of googling showed, Windows sales are not falling, they are just not rising as fast as OSX. What this might mean is that Microsoft are keeping the section of the market they already had and the Apple devices are filling in where the market is expanding.
Thirdly, the graph is complete shit as it hides the details in the numbers and projects a false image, it is clearly made for the shock factor. The Daily Mail actually manages better:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2087928/Why-PC-soon-piece-history-Android-projected-eclipse-PC-sales-THIS-YEAR.html
Mr Ballmer and Mr Gates seem to be shit-scared by the success of the smartphone and *pads. Just look at their plans for Windoze 8.
They have the fear instilled that people will attach their Android phone to a random keyboard and to a random LCD monitor and then fire up office applications to create office docs. M$ Chief Monkeys know that it is technologically fully possible, that we don't really need these heavy, hot and ugly boxes called "notebooks".
Everybody could have an Android device in their pocket and not need anything else (except the random keyboards and display devices at the workplace and meeting rooms, airports, cafes).
So PCs and mobile devices are different only on the first look.
Mr Torx
I would not argue with the view point that people could get away with only having the one device. But devices like the padfone are only just coming to the market now and it will take time for the non-tech savvy buying majority to catch on to the idea of having a single device.
I would say that we are a couple of device generations away from hitting mass market appeal for single device solutions for casual users and even further away for more serious users (even of the non-technical type) who want the real flexibility in application use that a full blown pc/laptop provides. I would not like to have to juggle multiple emails, spreadsheets, word documents and anything else that I need open at once on an iPad or Android device
No, they included both figures.
OS X on its own is 19 to 1 and including iOS is 2 to 1. Either way, Microsoft is losing.
But if people want to get picky about numbers, the windows numbers don't tell you how many people are putting Linux on their machines and which are actual Windows users. Yes, the number of Linux replacements are probably small but the inclusion of my laptop I'm using now in those numbers would be wrong. I'm using Ubuntu as I have done for quite a few years now.
How many of you work for companies who have Mac servers?
How many of you work for companies with Windows servers?
Even amongst the Mac users I know who actually work with their macs, rather than just dicking around on the Internet, I don't know a single one who uses a Mac server. Even the typographers I know (about ten, from uni days) all use Linux or Windows servers and they are die hard Mac fans.
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"OS X and iOS available to those who prefer the security of a walled garden": Time to drop this nonsense.
1. Learn the difference between OS X and IOS. The former has got no restrictins on what one can put on or remove from it, being a full UNIX (unlike Linux) and allowing any kind of fiddling you like, whether through yor own programming, something by an acquaintance, iTunes, macPorts, GNU or whatever good or dodgy source you fancy - limited only by your storage space.
2. Most products in most fields are "walled gardens", i.e. the guarantee tends to be invalidated once you open the box or change the software or equivalent. Do you think the garage would mend your brand new car under guarantee if you had changed its control firmware or "improved" the gear box? Even Android mobiles have got bits yuo should not touch or the supplier will leave you out in the cold. Have n't I heard the term, "root" or "jail break" used in connection with Android 'phones as well as IOS, for certain levels of software and functionality change?
The walled garden around washing machine firmware is infuriating. I'm sure I could devise a better washing cycle.
So the old sell of "Wait a year and get a more powerful laptop" stopped being relevant, so people started to invest in ones that were good and would last.
At the time - and now - Apple made the best laptops - they looked good, lasted a long time and never went out of fashion.
So buy an Apple and have it last 5 years *and always look good* or buy (at the time) a Dell, have it break in 2 and look meh by 12 months old.
Lots of other factors of course but I think this had a major effect.
My Dell 2005 notebook is still running fine (tempting fate!). Running Windows 7. Meanwhile a 2005 MacBook (remember PowerPC before Intel) lost support for new versions of OSX back in 2007.
Just because people keep repeating this Apple lasts longer mantra doesn't make it true.
If experience changed the general rule, I'd point to many Apple products that I've known that have lasted vs. many cheaper ones have broken.
I can't stand the cult but they make some good stuff.
I just wish MS had a better answer. Some of the stuff Apple gets a pass on MS would be eviscerated for.
The thing is. Back in 2004, the internet was a lot slower, there were a lot less people with an internet connection and so there wasn't such easy access to pirated copies of Windows (at the time, XP).
However today in 2012, nearly everyone has the internet, most connections are more than 2mpbs, quite a proportion of the country are now using 'Superspeed' fibre-optic connections. Not only that but its a lot easier to get access to pirated content - click, click, click, wait a few minutes, click, disc, eject - done.
I know a lot of people that don't see the point in buying MS licenses anymore - because it is just so easy to get hold of a 'free', but illegal, copy.
Yes you can also download Apple OS' with similar ease - but the operating system is limited to mainly work on Mac's - and also most people rather use Windows because they feel more comfortable with it as most of us have already been brought up on MS.
The article is deeply flawed, as I hope anyone reading the excellent Register would have the wits to think obvious though clearly a few ...well.
Firstly: The graph and stats are used as ‘evidence’ of a Microsoft freefall, yet does not pertain to Microsoft. it compares sales of NEW Apple HARWARE (that can run OSX and/or Windows), against sales of hardware that can only run Windows. Microsoft does not PCs.
GIven an adequate pot of cash and valueing aesthetics as much or more than absolute power (or power-per-buck)... why would anyone buy anything but the machine that does BOTH? What would be interesting would be a survey of just how many OSX machines end up with a Boot Camp dual boot.
I own both the Apple and exclusively Wintel computers. and lack the quasi-religious faith some hold for one or other. I swallow none of the nonsense that comes out of either camp.
My work demands the greatest performance on a budget so I build my own PCs. At home however I choose Apple and will until a PC case manufacturer grasps the mad idea that quality is cannot measured in black paint, blue lights and pointless fins. But here's the thing - I mostly boot into Windows despite the fact that I would be thought by most as Apple 'core' - i.e. I work in graphics.
But OK. Let us ignore the misunderstanding of the articles author. Let us look at those new hardware sales. Let us pretend nobody puts Windows on an Apple product.
Consider Apple's attitude to offering upgrade paths – ( I can hear G5 PowerPC victims spitting pips). I have one beside me.... to rest my coffee on. This means that the new Apple purchase is not inherently a new computer user but an existing owner replacing and discarding an obsolete machine. In short no growth in Apple footprint.
In contrast, the upgrade path of a PC is in a different order. A PC never dies – it just get upgraded. That every machine ends up quite different to every other, used to cause a reputation of OS unreliability, but over time has led to a back/ and forward compatability of hardware and software that is less clearly enjoyed by Apple customers.
Such upgrades commonly include a purchase of a Windows update, so while an update sale is not a "new" MIcrosoft footfall, the longevity of older PCs does suggest that NEW PC purchases are to a greater extent - adding to overall footprint.
I track the platforms/OS accessing my websites and the clear results demonstrate that anyone claiming tablets have brought a 2:1 ratio is dreaming. 19:1? Dreaming. Windows using visitors swamp the statistics with visitors from almost every nation and province (though for some reason Dakotans avoid me.)
Lastly the article's Heading is Microsoft v Apple not OSX - Windows. Microsoft to date has admittedly made a hash of the handheld but the article cannot state this area of apple dominance and then entirely ignore the Microsoft XBox products and Apples vacuum in this area. Gaming on an Apple? Angry birds.... and tumbleweed!
Interesting way of looking at it and perfectly true. I have built my PC's since 1991 and every few years when the technology leaped, I would invest in 'the whole new machine'. However, my machine as it stands now with it 3 screens, Hex Core Processor, 4Tb of storage, 16Gb RAM, and of course Windows 7, is now a couple of yrs old and still beats in terms of performance the average off the shelf box in what I need it to do (Graphics, 3D Modelling, CAD).
Now if I wanted to go down the Apple route, I wouldnt be able to do what I need it to do, and I would have to consider parting with a large sum of money for the next 'upgrade'. Apart from the fact I couldnt purchase the software I needed or even find a close equivalent. With the PC, and everyone forgets this, I can just upgrade the machine without having to spend large amounts of cash which will improve storage or performance depending on what I want to do with it. Ok, the average home user who bought their PC from PC world etc. doesnt realise this and thinks they need to buy a new machine.
Most of my clients have happily for them been shown that they can keep their PC's going for much longer than they realised, many are over 5yrs old, but with the right upgrades they still run very well. Yes they have bought their iPhones and a few bought iPads, but in all cases, they have kept their PC's as they realise they cant do everything they want to do without their PC. Yes they could do it on a Mac, but at the cost of buying such hardware, they always go for a PC or laptop everytime.
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Something always goes wrong...
It always seems like a rule of nature. Companies build up dominance in a market, people start spouting about how "no-one ever got sacked for buying xxx" and then something goes wrong and they fade again. Yet its something people want to believe...
I'm a little confused as to the relevance of comparing windows PC sales to iphone / ipad sales. I can see why it would be compared to a mac os sale of course but not a phone or tablet.
You can use the same rational used to show apple gaining on windows to show whatever you like, skoda is the best selling car in the world because ikea sold fewer sofas...
So this is an article about Micrsoft's decline in the 00s and there is no mention of the Longhorn/Vista debacle? At the time, XP was seen as a stopgap (and a somewhat cheesy one at that), and MS kept shooting themselves in the foot until Vista came out ... then they started shooting themselves in the hands.
So this guy starts his statistical analysis by comparing PCs running Windows to Apple Macs. Ok, this I get and is a fair balance, but he states that the sea change was really when stuff like the Ipod came in.
So he's gone from "PCs vs Macs" to "PCs vs (Macs + Apple Mp3 players)" at a time when it was quite possible for a household to have have 1 desktop/laptop and 3 or 4 MP3 players. MP3 players are an individual & consumable item, I mean this is hardly comparing Oranges with Oranges is it?
IF (and I do mean if) I'm reading that right, to me, as an engineer, that makes his stats and his conclusions utterly bollocks.
"Ok, this I get and is a fair balance, but he states that the sea change was really when stuff like the Ipod came in."
Actually, Dediu doesn't mention iPod once in his article - it was Rik for El Reg who did. However...
The iPod made Apple into a trendy hip and happenin' company, daddy-oh - there was a halo effect with the iPod, which lead to an increased demand for Macs. Because of the iPod, some punters got a lot more interested in Apple products.
Also, as Rik said, Apple enjoyed success with consumer electronics with the iPod - this has continued with the iPhone and the iPad, and arguably, it was the iPod that kicked it all off. Dediu did considered iOS devices, so I think Rik was correct to show when Apple got into the market that such products belonged to.
I've watched every Android and BB user accept 2 in the office switch to iPhone 3GS, 4 or 4S. Both students and staff members (including me) are rocking MBP's. The IT Department has added Apple to it's list of supported vendors (finally) and everyone that has a tablet here, has an iPad (no Android). This is a medical school. We're still running XP on the desktop, so on the desktop, Windows still dominates, but Apple is creeping into this medical school at an alarming rate. Even the students here have MPB's and iPhones.
They became the king of the dung heap, by playing dirty and monopilising everything and everyone, and their main focus was and has been on revenue instead of quality and customer retention through high quality service.
Now because they have been such arseholes, delivering such shit software, on such shit operating systems, that rely upon 100 other service providers to make it safe(r) and to make it useable... people just got tired of all the bullshit and ALL of the fucking time, effort and expenses just to keep it all fucking running.
I use Linux full time and I have to go work build up some dual boot systems and I am fucking regretting even having to have Microsoft and their bullshit on anything.
Linux = get working and keep working - with almost never any problems ever...
And Microsoft = never ending resource hungry, multivendor, megabuck fucking crapware.... A never ending upgrade path just for the quarterly stock holder reports, instead of making stuff that is so good and so rock solid that people never want to quit using it....
Fuck Microsoft....
Add in their scam with the ISO approval Docx bullshit and many versions of their OS.. Win 3.11, 95, 98, the abysmal Millenium, XP, then that piece of shit Microsoft Fister, and and and and and and
I there is nothing but never ending bullshit and cash cow upgrades with fucking Microsoft...
I just want really good tough hardware and a good tough operating system... and Linux does it for me....
No more fucking stupid for stupids sake - aka Microsoft.
It's no wonder every one is bailing from them and their idiot bullshit.
@Oh4FS. Its been disappointing the last few years to see how the promise of Linux on the desktop has come to nothing. Lies and rants like yours are part of the problem, the whole deal is tarnished by the popular association of Linux advocate with ADHD and other mental conditions. Grossly unfair since majority of those working with Linux are rational people. If you are not paid by Apple or Microsoft to propagate this vision of Linux = deranged, better if you can keep quite.
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