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Apple Marketshare and 'Sales Guys'
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I'm not seeing it as some are perceiving, it's not so much about market share but rather innovation. Microshaft doesn't never has and never will make superior products, just champion mediocrity to the masses who consume the bile on the plate and ask for seconds. How'd they succeed? Sales sales sales, they marketed the hell out of their craptacular product Windblows in 95, snake oil yes, but one the easily swayed masses could latch onto. They also did it through price as Apple's prices were really high at the time. I remember a friend at an agency I worked at buying a Apple laptop (5300?) for five grand, FIVE GRAND! You could get a clunky junky peecee laptop for half that. And yeah, it was clunky ugly stupid and incredibly inferior but many people when there's a huge price difference go cheap, there's no accounting for taste. Point being that Apple should never do the sales guy route but they still need to stay competetive price-wise.
And whomever/wherever those numbers, the whole 1.88 or 1.99, uh, yeah, okay, right. Just remember figures dont lie but their liars sure figure.
And whomever/wherever those numbers, the whole 1.88 or 1.99, uh, yeah, okay, right. Just remember figures dont lie but their liars sure figure.
Anyone who really, and I mean really thinks Microsoft has been complacent is living in a reality distortion field and like Apple, they can't see beyone their own desktop.
I don't think anyone seriously thinks that though. Close knit groups tend to share a tighter bond when they share a common enemy. It's a sociological phoenomenon. Microsoft will always be the bad guy to some groups.
I personally thought that the comments were from a guy who is very scared. I have no opinion on whether or not he should be. But, if you took a good look a everything happening at CES, it's a good time to be a consumer, technology is enabling a lot of cool stuff, there's lots of opportunity for innovation and new markets.
I would find these comments troubling if I were an Apple shareholder. Now's not the time to worry about what Gates and Co are doing. You can't control that, and they are doing quite a bit. Nor is it the time to make excuses for past failures. Now is the time to charge ahead and prove to everyone that you and your company are the best at whatever it is you claim you're the best at.
JM2Cts
Actually DirectX wasn't really a Microsoft idea. Way back around '92-93 in the heyday of OS/2 IBM came up with an api called DIVE (direct interface video extension) which allowed games and multimedia apps direct access to video hardware. Microsoft came up with Direct X shortly afterwards.
Originally posted by johnnyjibbs
So Jobbs is predicting Microsoft becoming complacent...
Depending on which angle you view Microsoft from, they're anywhere between complacent and scared out of their wits.
Windows XP was expected to milk a bit more out of the market, but people aren't upgrading in numbers large enough to let MS stay complacent about its old cash cow. Windows in its current incarnation is getting a bit long in the horn...
"I wonder ..."
I wonder what the future holds for Apple. If Apple keeps up the current track with regards to innovation, why couldn't they gain market share? I believe that Microsucks will still be around for a long time, but not hold the monopoly like they have now. I have seen a lot of migration from Windblows to "alternative" OS's, such as Linux. The Mac may never be the dominant OS, but I don't believe that it will ever go away.
I wonder what the future holds for Apple. If Apple keeps up the current track with regards to innovation, why couldn't they gain market share? I believe that Microsucks will still be around for a long time, but not hold the monopoly like they have now. I have seen a lot of migration from Windblows to "alternative" OS's, such as Linux. The Mac may never be the dominant OS, but I don't believe that it will ever go away.
the number1 reason they arent gaining marketshare is a very poor performing consumer line(old & slow G4s) bottom tier video chips and forcing monitors on consumers.
reason number2 they dont have the product on the shelf in any store but those Kaliifornia Apple stores.
To fix these poor marketing decisions they have to have a fast consumer line and they have to have them where people will see em. Its that simple.
reason number2 they dont have the product on the shelf in any store but those Kaliifornia Apple stores.
To fix these poor marketing decisions they have to have a fast consumer line and they have to have them where people will see em. Its that simple.
DirectX was a reaction, not an innovation. After Microsoft abandoned the OS/2 partnership with IBM, they copied the DIVE concept. (I'm only superficially familiar with both, but the DIVE API looks a whole lot cleaner than the DirectX one. It looks like an example of MS doing what they appear to do best -- creating and promoting clunky clones of other people's ideas.)
Market Share
Some companies buy hundreds or more Wintel PCs at a time to be used as barely more than dumb terminals. It takes a lot of people going into a store buying a Mac one at a time to equal this. You never see these purchases because they just show up at the loading dock of the company. When these cheap computers start to fail they buy more new ones. As long as they don't fail too much faster than the depreciation schedule no one cares too much.
Also, there "per unit" market share and "$" market share. I think the value most often quoted is "per unit" so that a single $500 el cheapo counts the same as a dual 2GHz G5.
Lumping everything called "a computer" into the same market is patently stupid. A lot of these are used as little more than smart typewriters and calculators. There is office equipment and there are computers. Apple doesn't sell much office equipment.
Some companies buy hundreds or more Wintel PCs at a time to be used as barely more than dumb terminals. It takes a lot of people going into a store buying a Mac one at a time to equal this. You never see these purchases because they just show up at the loading dock of the company. When these cheap computers start to fail they buy more new ones. As long as they don't fail too much faster than the depreciation schedule no one cares too much.
Also, there "per unit" market share and "$" market share. I think the value most often quoted is "per unit" so that a single $500 el cheapo counts the same as a dual 2GHz G5.
Lumping everything called "a computer" into the same market is patently stupid. A lot of these are used as little more than smart typewriters and calculators. There is office equipment and there are computers. Apple doesn't sell much office equipment.
Well, of course, thats how they have always stayed on top, is that they are such great salesmen they always have some way to extract money out of thier monopoly. They definitely are not complacent on that front (just witness thier barrage against linux..), but on the other hand, most of what they have been doing is simply extending thier monopoly or finding new ways to lock in their customers with new licencing deals ect, they are maybe complacent in the area of "new ideas," IOW Linux is comming, and theres not much they can do short of assimilating it.
Re: Give me a break
as per this article on MacWorld
and I quote:
In the grand scheme of things, he's got a point. Do you want to half ass your way into a huge market share or do it right for people who appreciate high quality, at a higher cost, systems?
This is coming from a switcher mind you - and not just any switcher but a guy who makes his money off of Intel based hardware and is dang good at it. I've owned Compaq Presarios, HP Pavillions, and then stuff I built as well. I've held/do hold certifications on every major operating system (Novell, Linux, Windows Nt/2K) for them as well. So I would like to think I know a few things about them.
no matter who I got it from, and whether or not I built it or bought it built my daily experience with the machine on Windows *or* linux on Intel has not been as pleasant as it has been on my wife's iMac or my Powerbook. It's not that one set of hardware is more reliable. it's that one set of software is more reliable (except maybe Quicken) than the other. The OS 'just works' on Mac. (OS X in my experience) and Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP always has something go goofy on you in that requires you either find new drivers, find a patch, do something and it suddenly breaks with no warning leaving you no clue as to what caused it.
I've not had that happen on my Macs - even the 10.2.x update debacle of a while back didn't bother me.
my $0.02.
as per this article on MacWorld
and I quote:
In the grand scheme of things, he's got a point. Do you want to half ass your way into a huge market share or do it right for people who appreciate high quality, at a higher cost, systems?
This is coming from a switcher mind you - and not just any switcher but a guy who makes his money off of Intel based hardware and is dang good at it. I've owned Compaq Presarios, HP Pavillions, and then stuff I built as well. I've held/do hold certifications on every major operating system (Novell, Linux, Windows Nt/2K) for them as well. So I would like to think I know a few things about them.
no matter who I got it from, and whether or not I built it or bought it built my daily experience with the machine on Windows *or* linux on Intel has not been as pleasant as it has been on my wife's iMac or my Powerbook. It's not that one set of hardware is more reliable. it's that one set of software is more reliable (except maybe Quicken) than the other. The OS 'just works' on Mac. (OS X in my experience) and Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP always has something go goofy on you in that requires you either find new drivers, find a patch, do something and it suddenly breaks with no warning leaving you no clue as to what caused it.
I've not had that happen on my Macs - even the 10.2.x update debacle of a while back didn't bother me.
my $0.02.
It's Market Share, stupid. No, profits. No, Market Share.
From http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2004/tc20040126_9608_tc055.htm :
"According to Gartner's preliminary market-share data, Apple held just 1.8% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2003. And some think Apple's share will fall further, if it can't keep pace with surging overall PC demand. Salomon Smith Barney analyst Rich Gardner expects Apple to post PC unit growth of 6% in 2004 this year, vs. 11% for the entire PC industry. One reason is price. Gardner says the average price of a Mac is $900, although half of PC buyers now spend less than $600."
But here's my real problem with Jobs. First, he says (in the article that leads into this thread) that Apple made the critical mistake of focusing on profits instead of Market Share during his absence. Then, in this Business Week article, he says exactly the opposite:
"Judging from Jobs's comments, he has no intention of letting Wall Street down. But he wouldn't mind if those analysts would start measuring the Mac by the profits it produces, rather than by its market share. "We've got 25 million customers that want the best computers in the world. If our market share grows, we're thrilled. But we've held our own, while our rivals were losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year," he says. "We're in pretty good shape." "
So which is it, Steve? You can't have it both ways.
From http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2004/tc20040126_9608_tc055.htm :
"According to Gartner's preliminary market-share data, Apple held just 1.8% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2003. And some think Apple's share will fall further, if it can't keep pace with surging overall PC demand. Salomon Smith Barney analyst Rich Gardner expects Apple to post PC unit growth of 6% in 2004 this year, vs. 11% for the entire PC industry. One reason is price. Gardner says the average price of a Mac is $900, although half of PC buyers now spend less than $600."
But here's my real problem with Jobs. First, he says (in the article that leads into this thread) that Apple made the critical mistake of focusing on profits instead of Market Share during his absence. Then, in this Business Week article, he says exactly the opposite:
"Judging from Jobs's comments, he has no intention of letting Wall Street down. But he wouldn't mind if those analysts would start measuring the Mac by the profits it produces, rather than by its market share. "We've got 25 million customers that want the best computers in the world. If our market share grows, we're thrilled. But we've held our own, while our rivals were losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year," he says. "We're in pretty good shape." "
So which is it, Steve? You can't have it both ways.
Speaking as someone whos daily income is affected by Intel Server sales and Intel systems in general.
Windows XP and Windows 2003 are not the driving marketing force (at least in 2003) that say Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 were.
People are not rushing to upgrade to Windows 2003. They're just now getting around to Windows 2000.
What drives our market right now is Linux and it's adoption. lots of people buying systems to kick the tires, not near as many doing that for Windows.
From our perspective as an Intel server provider Microsoft has become complacent and was expecting to 'ride the wave' of upgrades to 2k3 - and that didn't happen. Same can be said about Office 2k3 or whatever it's called. The 'versionitis' that people used to suffer in the MS world has worn off.
Re: Re: Market Share
You are exactly right. And I'll bet companies that primarily depend on server sales don't like being lumped in with $500 "things" either since it makes their market share look even worse than Apple's.
You are exactly right. And I'll bet companies that primarily depend on server sales don't like being lumped in with $500 "things" either since it makes their market share look even worse than Apple's.
Everyone is dreaming up all kinds of things except the fact that Apple's consumer line is selling like crap. why is that? why such meager sales of what should be the strongest segment. the above poster is 100% correct.
And don't forget (although I don't have figures to hand) that the number of computers sold in total has risen massively even taking account of the .com crash.
So if your unit sales are increasing by 10% a quarter you can still have a falling (percentage) market share.
This number represents the current sales % of Apple of all new computers. Their installed base % is of course higher but over time this is also drawing down.
As for Jobs losing market share. In the first few years it actually went up with the intro of the iMac. Then the motorola PPC fiasco and Apple got bogged down so then again share started to fall as the PC vendors again caught up to and passed the PPC chip productivity.
Now with the G5 chips coming on line and the production and innovation by IBM and the maturing of MAC OS X we will see an upsurge again in the mac sales. Especially when all the systems run with G5's .
Although I agree that Microsoft is not "complacent" -- they will do what they always do to maintain profits without any doing anything truly innovative -- the claim that Jobs is "scared" seems odd. Anyone who has paid attention to Apple since the time Jobs returned to the company knows that it is in a far stronger position today. Last year was incredible in terms of the momentum generated by new products. Apple's mindshare is growing again. Six or seven years ago, the media were reporting that Apple was dead. No longer.
Keeping this momentum going is the big challenge. I am optimistic that it will happen.
MS has changed it focus in the last ten years as the move by Gates shows. They have become a very diversified company and it may well be that their OS will be slowly replaced in the next 10 years. The server market is not dominated by MS software. IBM , INTL , SUNW and others still control the server market.
IBM is slowly removing Windows OS from all its client systems.
Longhorn will bring about a large and very difficult change within microsoft especially when Linux and MAC OS and Solaris are well established and don't need all the extra effort to bring in the change. This is actually a great opportunity for Apple to spread their system to consumers.
Apple is publicly not saying to much about it but the OS is becoming more and more compatible with the other OS's as a client.
Any sales of their servers will make the macs instantly compatible in those environments.
As for MS complacency it is hard to really know or see. They have not taken over as many companies as in the past for new technology. But then who has in these tough times of the last 3 years.
MS has worked hard to keep their products up to date but when did they release their last great new product that has had an impact. I cannot think of one in the last few years.
Maybe the move to PPC in the xbox will be groundbreaking ..
I disagree, keep the same price points they have now but give the consumer something at those price points. Emac can be running a lot faster we know that by the overclocking threads on it. It should at least have been 1.25 6 months ago. Imac cant go much faster because they got that cpu covered up by harddrive and burner so apple is letting a slow imac hold back the Emac. Stupid.For some stupid reason Imac is being held behind laptops. again stupid. speed sells in the consumer world as does video cards. To say to the consumer you have to have our monitor, you have to have a slower G4, you cant up the video and then want the consumer to hand over 2 grand. to top it off the consumer cant even walk into a nearby store to check out this slow hardware. Consumers are voting with their dollars and combined Imac/Emac sales were only 200,000 this qtr. They sold as many Protowers as these 2 combined.