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

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Jul 21, 2006, at 12:53 AM, Alex Jones wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 08:23 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > 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.

The current upward sales trend began in Q1 2005.  
<http://daringfireball.net/2006/07/mac_os_x_tipping_point#fnr1-2006-07 
-08> (You can mentally add "Q3 2006: 1,327,000 units" to the end of  
that list.)

But the overall PC market has also been growing, so Apple's market  
share has been pretty static since 2001.  
<http://pegasus3d.com/macmarketshare.gif> (figures from IDC)

(That Daring Fireball article addresses a couple of other points raised  
in this thread. First, Jeff is perhaps an example of people thinking  
that "people at conferences I attend are switching to Macs" => "Mac  
market share is increasing substantially", when it ain't so. Second, it  
agrees with Havoc's music that the Mac user base of today is largely  
similar to the Mac user base of a decade ago.)

> > This doesn't mean they suck, but I think it does speak strongly to  
> > Havoc's point- just being differentially better will not win big  
> > market share; we need to think about how to change the game  
> > completely if we're going to 'win' in any meaningful way- i.e., more  
> > than 5% market share.

Agreed. Merely having better-in-degree software and hardware is not a  
practical way of achieving 10x10, because it will take until at least  
2010 even to get the software to that stage (let alone to start selling  
it as being better), and the only way you could have hardware that's  
better would be for a company to make it specially targeted at a  
Gnome-based system.

> ...
> Take OpenOffice.org for example. It is quite evident that the aim is  
> to make a free alternative to Microsoft Office. It has barely any  
> unique features of its own.

Look on the bright side: the radically different and highly detailed  
design of Office 2007 will force the OO.o team to do *something*  
different eventually, albeit probably five years later. :-)

> While I was running an idea past IRC last week, somebody mentioned  
> that it would confuse people who are used to the way that other  
> software behaves. This is, IMO, exactly the reason that many people  
> see no benefit to using Linux and GNOME over Windows.

Perhaps you could raise the problem on the usability@ list? Until then,  
here's a vague solution to that vague problem: Differences in behavior  
can be explained by differences in appearance.

> ...
> The fact that Ubuntu bundles Firefox (and turns off automatic session
> saving, as Firefox is incompatible with it) kind of saddens me.  
> Session management is one of the benefits of GNOME, yet they sacrifice  
> it in order to bundle something which Windows users are more familiar  
> with.
> ...

Join the Epiphany team then. :-) We have loads of unimplemented ideas,  
and browser wars are always fun.

Epiphany vs. Firefox, and Abiword+Gnumeric vs. OpenOffice.org, are  
contests parallel to Gnome vs. Windows -- it's not enough to be better,  
you have to be *so* much better as to outweigh the familiarity people  
have coming from Windows (where, if they're using Gnome now, they were  
probably using Firefox and OO.o before). Being saddened won't change  
that battle. But it's not an impossible one: witness Safari vs.  
Internet Explorer for Mac.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/