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Quote: "Microsoft was developing Windows XP during an era when there was fierce competition with Apple over desktop operating systems" I'm sorry, what? Talk ab

Quote: "Microsoft was developing Windows XP during an era when there was fierce competition with Apple over desktop operating systems" I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. Asia market was and still is dominated by Microsoft when it comes to desktop.

dboreham 6y ago
Perhaps he means "in the Bay Area"?
- qz2 6y ago
  That's about right. Here in the UK you were lucky to see a mac ever back then. A colleague bought the lamp style iMac unit in 2002 and we were quite frankly shocked at it. It was actually a pretty horrid machine compared to our windows 2000 PCs at the time.
bonaldi 6y ago
Think of it as "rivalry", perhaps. Think of a mass-market car company that outsells a luxury brands 5x or 10x but whose designers still swipe ideas from them.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Rivalry? In 2001? When only 2 years earlier Billy boy had to buy Apple's shares to keep them afloat? I know Billy boy did that to get off the hook with US govt., not like he was any saint - but from that to "rivalry" is a tall order.
  - jeromegv 6y ago
    You seem to have a beef with Apple but regardless of the difficulties of the company in the 90s, it was still a hugely influential company that popularized GUI interfaces and for sure was well known by engineers and designers of other operating systems.
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      You missed my point. I have a beef with all of them. In my eyes they are all shitty companies, past and present included.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    “Billy boy” adds nothing and IMO detracts from what is otherwise a good point.
    - milutinovici 6y ago
      Yes, please use William man
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Well, that’s also not true. Microsoft invested a grand total of $250 million in Apple. Apple turned around during that same quarter and spent $100 million on Power Computings Mac license. Apple didn’t become profitable until years later. The $150 wouldn’t have saved Apple.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Right but you can differentiate markets. Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India. But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. Which market do you think they care more about?
- amalcon 6y ago
  > But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. Not in the late 1990s, when Windows XP was being developed.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. I'm also dev in the West and no, it's not even close to being 95% MacBook Pro. Maybe in The Bay Area it's 95% but where I live(Europe) It's mostly Windows 10 + WSL or Ubuntu. And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Again, Maybe in the Bay Area they are but here nobody cares about what your job is or what expensive laptop you have.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    I live in Europe myself and it's MacBook Pros where I live. And I go to conferences all around the world and all I see is MacBook Pros everywhere. > And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Tech works who influence other tech workers. This is important because if everyone you see speaking at conferences is using a MacBook, and all the software available is for MacBooks, then other people are pushed to use MacBooks.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      By Europe I meant continental Europe, no the UK. The UK is heavily US influenced so there it's more popular. And by devs I mean all SW devs, not just Web Devs who seem to heavily favor Macs. Conferences are not relevant as they mostly draw huge enthusiasts/geeks of various niches who are very self conscious about their perceived status there(since you go there to network) and don't want to be judged by their high-value peers for using the wrong machine(yes, some developers can be very superficial and judgmental; we're not saints). It's like saying Everyone in my area owns fancy cars because every time I go to the regional car show I only see exotics. Also, the Macs or no Macs is a very regional/company thing varying greatly between country/city/company. For example, in Germany I never saw Macs at big industry giants, just Windows/Linux machines as the bean counters couldn't justify to management the extra cost when the same work could be done on a Lenovo with Ubuntu. Anyway, Europe as a whole is by no means like the Bay Area in terms of Mac adoption.
wyldfire 6y ago
Market share is often measured in both units and sales (or 'dollars'). Both of these are important to a company's future but when markets are segmented then the smaller number of units can be worth pursuing.
rbanffy 6y ago
> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. And that would make Apple the single largest PC manufacturer.
- Zenst 6y ago
  Depends upon how you define Personal Computer and what time-frame you look at. So if you define a personal computer as a computer people use for personal tasks as a tool, then a mobile phone fits that. In that definition and if you look at all the years history wise, It does look like Nokia have sold the most computers for personal use. At least going by the numbers sold per manufacturer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... and mobiles selling way more than other forms of computers.
  - laumars 6y ago
    Smart phones are not personal computers and the kind of dumb phones around in that year weren’t even smart enough to be computing devices. My phone back then was “amazing” because it had an inbuilt FM tuner AND supported custom ring tones (think PC speaker quality rather than MP3s). I think I could store a maximum of 50 text messages too and that felt like a lot. It’s sometimes hard to believe how young smart phones (and in fact portable mobile phones in general) are by just how much we now depend on them and take them for granted.
- qz2 6y ago
  They'd have to ship just over twice that to touch Lenovo now.
- ko9000 6y ago
  the big three have been Lenovo, HP and Dell for a long time, order of those has switched sometimes. so depending how you slice the share, you could find a niche where somehow it would appear as whatever you want it to be, usual thing when reporting market shares: "we are top in this is super-niche slice of the overall market"
Fnoord 6y ago
It is untrue. Microsoft kept Internet Explorer and Office for macOS. MacOS was Microsoft's joker card for arguing they were not a monopolist, and that card was valid when they were under antitrust investigations by US, EU, and others ie. when Windows XP was current.
acdha 6y ago
There’s an important distinction between what people bought for themselves and what they were given at work. Apple had a big lead on a quality GUI, and things like color matching, which made them preferred in certain fields and generally had more of a premium cachet (the PC market was still shaking the low-end image of things sold without sound cards, slacking on USB adoption, shoddy drivers, etc.). Microsoft was shooting for 100% market share and was trying to close every niche keeping Apple alive even if the inertia of all of those business sales meant their total market share was never in question.
bonaldi 6y ago
OK, here are the receipts: internal MS emails from just a couple of years after this (in the run-up to Vista) literally saying that they expect to be compared to Tiger and found wanting: https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsofts-vista-had-major-mac-envy-company-e-mails-reveal.htm https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsoft... Marketshare isn’t everything. You can have outsized mindshare with a tiny market share. You can compete for more than marketshare, too
- spideymans 6y ago
  iOS and Android demonstrate pretty succinctly that market share isn’t everything with regards to competition and market success.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Yeah, but Windows never had the money problem Android has. Windows had at least the same amount of money spinning on top of it, due to the sheer amount of enterprise apps, especially financial ones, running on top of it. Android is basically a loss leader for Google ads :-)

dboreham 6y ago

Perhaps he means "in the Bay Area"?

qz2 6y ago
That's about right. Here in the UK you were lucky to see a mac ever back then. A colleague bought the lamp style iMac unit in 2002 and we were quite frankly shocked at it. It was actually a pretty horrid machine compared to our windows 2000 PCs at the time.

bonaldi 6y ago

Think of it as "rivalry", perhaps. Think of a mass-market car company that outsells a luxury brands 5x or 10x but whose designers still swipe ideas from them.

unnouinceput 6y ago
Rivalry? In 2001? When only 2 years earlier Billy boy had to buy Apple's shares to keep them afloat? I know Billy boy did that to get off the hook with US govt., not like he was any saint - but from that to "rivalry" is a tall order.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  You seem to have a beef with Apple but regardless of the difficulties of the company in the 90s, it was still a hugely influential company that popularized GUI interfaces and for sure was well known by engineers and designers of other operating systems.
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    You missed my point. I have a beef with all of them. In my eyes they are all shitty companies, past and present included.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  “Billy boy” adds nothing and IMO detracts from what is otherwise a good point.
  - milutinovici 6y ago
    Yes, please use William man
- scarface74 6y ago
  Well, that’s also not true. Microsoft invested a grand total of $250 million in Apple. Apple turned around during that same quarter and spent $100 million on Power Computings Mac license. Apple didn’t become profitable until years later. The $150 wouldn’t have saved Apple.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Right but you can differentiate markets. Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India. But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. Which market do you think they care more about?

amalcon 6y ago
> But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. Not in the late 1990s, when Windows XP was being developed.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. I'm also dev in the West and no, it's not even close to being 95% MacBook Pro. Maybe in The Bay Area it's 95% but where I live(Europe) It's mostly Windows 10 + WSL or Ubuntu. And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Again, Maybe in the Bay Area they are but here nobody cares about what your job is or what expensive laptop you have.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I live in Europe myself and it's MacBook Pros where I live. And I go to conferences all around the world and all I see is MacBook Pros everywhere. > And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Tech works who influence other tech workers. This is important because if everyone you see speaking at conferences is using a MacBook, and all the software available is for MacBooks, then other people are pushed to use MacBooks.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    By Europe I meant continental Europe, no the UK. The UK is heavily US influenced so there it's more popular. And by devs I mean all SW devs, not just Web Devs who seem to heavily favor Macs. Conferences are not relevant as they mostly draw huge enthusiasts/geeks of various niches who are very self conscious about their perceived status there(since you go there to network) and don't want to be judged by their high-value peers for using the wrong machine(yes, some developers can be very superficial and judgmental; we're not saints). It's like saying Everyone in my area owns fancy cars because every time I go to the regional car show I only see exotics. Also, the Macs or no Macs is a very regional/company thing varying greatly between country/city/company. For example, in Germany I never saw Macs at big industry giants, just Windows/Linux machines as the bean counters couldn't justify to management the extra cost when the same work could be done on a Lenovo with Ubuntu. Anyway, Europe as a whole is by no means like the Bay Area in terms of Mac adoption.

wyldfire 6y ago

Market share is often measured in both units and sales (or 'dollars'). Both of these are important to a company's future but when markets are segmented then the smaller number of units can be worth pursuing.

rbanffy 6y ago

> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. And that would make Apple the single largest PC manufacturer.

Zenst 6y ago
Depends upon how you define Personal Computer and what time-frame you look at. So if you define a personal computer as a computer people use for personal tasks as a tool, then a mobile phone fits that. In that definition and if you look at all the years history wise, It does look like Nokia have sold the most computers for personal use. At least going by the numbers sold per manufacturer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... and mobiles selling way more than other forms of computers.
- laumars 6y ago
  Smart phones are not personal computers and the kind of dumb phones around in that year weren’t even smart enough to be computing devices. My phone back then was “amazing” because it had an inbuilt FM tuner AND supported custom ring tones (think PC speaker quality rather than MP3s). I think I could store a maximum of 50 text messages too and that felt like a lot. It’s sometimes hard to believe how young smart phones (and in fact portable mobile phones in general) are by just how much we now depend on them and take them for granted.
qz2 6y ago
They'd have to ship just over twice that to touch Lenovo now.
ko9000 6y ago
the big three have been Lenovo, HP and Dell for a long time, order of those has switched sometimes. so depending how you slice the share, you could find a niche where somehow it would appear as whatever you want it to be, usual thing when reporting market shares: "we are top in this is super-niche slice of the overall market"

Fnoord 6y ago

It is untrue. Microsoft kept Internet Explorer and Office for macOS. MacOS was Microsoft's joker card for arguing they were not a monopolist, and that card was valid when they were under antitrust investigations by US, EU, and others ie. when Windows XP was current.

acdha 6y ago

There’s an important distinction between what people bought for themselves and what they were given at work. Apple had a big lead on a quality GUI, and things like color matching, which made them preferred in certain fields and generally had more of a premium cachet (the PC market was still shaking the low-end image of things sold without sound cards, slacking on USB adoption, shoddy drivers, etc.). Microsoft was shooting for 100% market share and was trying to close every niche keeping Apple alive even if the inertia of all of those business sales meant their total market share was never in question.

bonaldi 6y ago

OK, here are the receipts: internal MS emails from just a couple of years after this (in the run-up to Vista) literally saying that they expect to be compared to Tiger and found wanting: https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsofts-vista-had-major-mac-envy-company-e-mails-reveal.htm https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsoft... Marketshare isn’t everything. You can have outsized mindshare with a tiny market share. You can compete for more than marketshare, too

spideymans 6y ago
iOS and Android demonstrate pretty succinctly that market share isn’t everything with regards to competition and market success.
- oblio 6y ago
  Yeah, but Windows never had the money problem Android has. Windows had at least the same amount of money spinning on top of it, due to the sheer amount of enterprise apps, especially financial ones, running on top of it. Android is basically a loss leader for Google ads :-)