How Apple can gain significant OS market share

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/opinion-apple-os-marketshare.ars

by ryanwaggoner • 18 years ago

7 13 18 years ago

What is there to say about this that Gruber hasn't already said?

From http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/31/reisinger

It doesn’t matter how well Apple is doing, how remarkably profitable the Mac has become, how remarkably fast Mac sales are growing — the idea that Apple “must” or “should” license Mac OS X to other computer makers will never die.

gojomo• 18 years ago

There was another time Apple was "remarkably profitable" and had an even higher market share than it does now -- the early 90s -- and they somehow lost that position. And the strategy that drove Apple to the margins -- and that built the largest financial success of the PC era -- was Mirosoft's broad licensing.

Then again, Apple tried a form of licensing their OS to clonemakers in the late 90s, and did not get the hoped-for benefits at that time.

So it's more complicated than Gruber's simplistic "Apple doing great right now -- licensing silly" sentiment. Different eras require different strategies, and Apple may yet hit (or already be at the point) where the winning move is to put MacOS on others' hardware.

I suspect if Jobs announced a licensing program tomorrow, we would hear from Gruber how brilliant of an idea it is.

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

Sure, different eras require different strategies. That's what makes this argument so funny: It's hopelessly mired in a bygone era. They're debating the best move in a game that Apple stopped playing two or three games ago.

Apple doesn't care much about desktop marketshare. That game is old. They care about desktop hardware profits, which are doing nicely -- they've got one of the most profitable segments of that market sewn up, and it's a nice cash cow. And they care about control, the control that enables them to coordinate their hardware and software better than anyone else in the industry, and to ensure that any new thing they bring out (like the iPhone) fits seamlessly into at least one major operating system in its first month of release.

But the focus has long since moved off the desktop OS. First it moved to the music hardware and content business, but by now even that has arguably become a cash cow -- Apple owns the most profitable slice of the music hardware market, and is one of two or three major content players, and they're running out of music industry to dominate. Growth is slowing. So, having sewn that up, they're on to game #3: the mobile hardware industry, with side plays in the "Web OS" business (Safari and iTunes run on Windows -- that's just about the only "Apple on PC hardware" play that the company cares about) and some latent TV and movie stuff that is seemingly waiting for a chance to break out.

These days Apple thinks about Google and Nokia and RIM and Amazon and the cable companies. Microsoft is not much of a player in the games that Apple plays today. Let them keep their big fat Windows marketshare. It's not making them any more nimble.

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

Sorry, this dudes just a blowhard. I just read his "Can Blockbuster be Saved" article, as well, and it's just painful how far behind the curve Reisinger's opinions are.

It's just not very interesting to see someone who is less informed than me on these topics (and that is truly uninformed, because I couldn't care very much less about Apple or Blockbuster) spewing random opinions.

mixmax2• 18 years ago

If the company wants to capture significant market share from Microsoft and see Mac OS X become more ubiquitous, it needs to stray from its comfort zone and start making more innovative decisions.

GUI(1), mouse(1), air, ipod, iphone, dock, linuxbased - need I say more about Apple innovation?

I wouldn't take stock recommendations from this guy.

(1) Yeah I know it was originally developed at Xerox Parc, but Steve Jobs was the one that managed to get it into a real product.

jauco2• 18 years ago

First of two small corrections:

* The 'parc' (Xerox's computer, with mouse and GUI) was built and shipped and actively used, just never sold commercially.

* Apple is BSD-based, not linux based. being BSD-based is most certainly not innovative ;-)

Most of the 'innovations' you mention are rather successful implementations of existing technologies. Apple ships good products but none of the ones you mention solve an entirely new use-case, like the mouse did, or the photo-copier, or the walkman. First you weren't able to listen to your music while walking on the street or commuting in the subway, then suddenly you were.

mixmax2• 18 years ago

Thanks for the correction, and sorry for being a Noob :-)

Your comment spurs me to address the question: what is innovation? I would say that innovation is about successfully bringing a technology to a mass-market that has previously been unaware of it. Note that according to this definition the innovator doesn't necessarily have to be the same entity as the original inventor. I think Skype, Amazon, twitter, etc. are innovative even though they didn't invent their core product (except for Amazons patented one-click shopping system of course ;-)) they just brought it to the masses.

I think that being an innovative company has a much broader scope than simply being an inventor.

DabAsteroid• 18 years ago

Apple is BSD-based, not linux based. being BSD-based is most certainly not innovative

http://www.google.com/search?q=apple+osx+nextstep

"It would be an understatement to say that OS X is derived from NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. In many respects, it's not just similar, it's the same.

chaostheory• 18 years ago

From a technical standpoint Apple were to do this again, it would impact OS X's reliability - having to deal with an infinite number of hardware combinations as opposed to a select limited few is not easy...

From a financial standpoint, hasn't this already happened before? If I remember correctly, it didn't do wonders for the company's bottom line nor did it do much to make inroads vs. Windows marketwise.

The way things are now, Apple is making good market share gains vs. MS and it doesn't have to worry much about software piracy either.

dconti• 18 years ago

Totally agree. There is a huge cost to supporting hardware combinations and a huge perception problem that it generates (what if mac osx takes 3 seconds longer to resume on a given hardware platform? what impact does that have on their image?)

Also what about the software maintenance costs? Right now Apple has all sorts of shortcuts they can take with servicing because they have < 15% share, low penetration in enterprise, etc. The costs on that will go way up if their share increases dramatically.

I think the problem with articles like this is they come from this altruistic "osx seems nice so it should be everywhere" idea. This is exactly the idea that has made life hard for windows - that it must support a huge software and hardware ecosystem, and it must work everywhere, and MS must pay the costs associated with that.

And at the end of the day MS makes less money per PC sold than Apple makes per Mac.

ryanbooker• 18 years ago

It's a surprising article from Ars. Apple is a massively successful and profitable company. They don't need to commoditise OSX. They're not trying to compete on market share. They're trying make money by making better computers. Something they are doing very well thank you very much.

Hutzpah• 18 years ago

Thanks for understanding the problem space. Just one addition: the Mac competes in some markets for market share. Just not for overall PCish OS installations world wide.

How Apple can gain significant OS market share

Related Stories