Re: Mac shipments up 12% [Was: focus!]

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 22:57 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Luis Villa">
> 
> > > It's the growth and potential that worries me. :-)
> > 
> > They've had better software and better hardware than Windows for a full
> > five years, and have still not cracked 5% market share, so I don't see why
> > you're scared now- they've had good quarters before, and they end up
> > getting lost in the noise.
> 
> They haven't had better software/hardware *momentum* for five years.
> 
> Their platform is now at a point that Mac developers can be *extremely*
> effective with vastly less work than Windows or Linux developers - which
> means more software, more developers, more polish, a bigger ecosystem...
> 
Sorry Jeff, I simply don't see it. Neither the momentum you are seeing
or the sudden incredibility of their platform. If anything it seems the
major Mac software developers like Adobe and Microsoft is still trimming
down their MacOS X support, slowly but surely. Just my perception of
things of course, but looking out the window on my side of the pond I
simply don't see the big Apple waves anywhere.

So the general market was up 11% and Apple beat that by 1%. On the the
other side it would be natural to think that at least a couple of
Apple's percentages came from customers who boosted the periods sales
due to having been waiting on the Intel based Mac's before doing their
planed purchase. If that is the case then Apple's 'normalized' sales for
the period would be up 9%-10% which means they lost market share to the
PC market relatively speaking.

Anyway, Apple's fortune's are a bit off-topic for this list. My original
point was simply that we should be very careful about fan boying Apple
and believing that mimicking Apple is our way to success. We are part of
a community of people who tend to value computer related things quite a
bit differently from the market at large. I am sure that among GNOME and
GNU/Linux users we will find many people who thought things like OS/2,
Amiga OS and BeOS was the next big thing back in the day based on the
technical qualities of said systems. When I hear people singing MacOS X
praises today it seems to me its using the same tune as the praises sung
to those operating systems of yesteryear.

Christian