steve_hill4 said:I hope that was meant as a stupid question, because I think their share actually decreased during the clone program. It certainly didn't come near the levels that they would have liked or would have got had they opened up their OS to all comers early on.
Yes, it did drop. Essentially, the cloner-makers gobbled up a chunk of Apple's hardware market share but didn't add anything overall to the Mac market share. The way this was reported in the media was really frustrating -- that Apple's market share was plummeting. This is what they said, even though the Mac market share was more or less stabile. I think this episode really led the the decline of the Mac during the late '90s for the principal reason that the Mac market was seen by the public to be shrinking rapidly, even though it really wasn't, at least not at first. It turned into a double-whammy.