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The constant comparison of iPhone vs. Android to Mac vs. Windows is tiresome. Mac never had more than 15% market share. Microsoft won 95% market share not on it

The constant comparison of iPhone vs. Android to Mac vs. Windows is tiresome. Mac never had more than 15% market share. Microsoft won 95% market share not on its merits, but on the back of IBM's pre-existing mindshare dominance. So let's just put that idiotic comparison to rest. It's just as obviously not iPod vs. Zune, right? (And despite never having had much market share, virtually every Windows program anyone uses started life as a Mac program and was ported to Windows, from Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark XPress, to the GUI version of Microsoft Word. Even Windows programs everyone hates, such as Flash, were developed on the Mac. Not DOOM though -- that was written on a NeXT Machine.) As it is right now, Apple enjoys well over 10% of the cell phone market (depending on how you measure it, they are the dominant vendor in the US), having aimed initially for 1% of the smart phone market. They have something like 70% of the app market (in dollar terms). And they're doing it with a BMW strategy, not a GM strategy. You may recall GM recently went bankrupt while having the largest share of the US auto market. (Oh and how about Mac vs Amiga? Amiga vastly outsold Mac for several years and then Commodore went bankrupt.) And most of this happened post-Jobs.

leoc 13y ago
The Mac vs. Windows comparison is imperfect of course, but as quick comparisons go I believe it's an excellent one and highly relevant. It doesn't necessarily imply that Apple is going to become unprofitable again (stock price declines are another matter): it's more likely to find itself back in its year-2000 holding position than it is to crash in the short or medium term. You're right about the influence of the Mac as an app platform. In fact, while people tend to think of Microsoft as an OS company thanks to MS-DOS in many ways MS is fundamentally a Macintosh ISV (a good Macintosh ISV, mind you) with delusions of grandeur. But then again, all these companies and pieces of software moved fairly happily to Windows-first when the platform and the market was there for them. You're right that the Jobs issue is largely a red herring at this stage.
- protomyth 13y ago
  Apple was never the big loser to Microsoft. Commodore was the true loser if you are looking at market share. We get to talk about Apple because they survived and successfully transitioned to a new product line. Commodore couldn't do that with the Amiga.
  - leoc 13y ago
    Likely yes, but what of it? The argument from the Windows/Mac analogy is that iOS is probably headed for some level of niche status. It's not even that Apple is necessarily toast (though they certainly came near to it in '97). That Commodore got toasted even harder shouldn't invalidate that argument. (Commodore's trajectory was weird anyway. They were gone before Win95, and they were arguably killed as much by the XOR patent, the Atari-Commodore bloodletting, Sega and Nintendo or DOOM as by the IBM PC or Windows 3.1.) Maybe RIM is the new Commodore? ;)
    - protomyth 13y ago
      I guess my argument is the Windows/Mac analogy was always false. The Mac was a machine that has kept trending upward in numbers sold for many, many years never starting with some dominant position to lose. The Mac never lost its market share to Windows because it didn't have it to lose. Beyond that, I really don't think any of the old thinking actually applies to the current cellphone market as the software exclusivity problems of the PC era are not really an issue these days. The whole environment has changed and the connections matter more. In other words, we are closer to cars than PCs since so much of what we do is actually standardized (text, call, web browse) like roads and gas.
simonh 13y ago
I think there is a good comparison to be made with Mac vs Windows. Which personal computer manufacturer would you rather be, Apple or any of the Windows licensees? In terms of profits Apple goes to-to-toe with all the Windows licensees put together. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_are_high_too_high.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_a... The difference is that in the Windows world it's Microsoft that makes all the money, but in the mobile world Microsoft and Google (willfully in the latter case) aren't profiting much either. Edit - What interests me about this is a thought experiment. Suppose that back in 2007 Google had decided not to license out Android freely, but to produce their own phones and follow Apple's business model. They would have been the exclusive real competitor to Apple in the mobile space for the last 6 years. How much money would they have been able to make if the only Android phones were Nexus phones? They wouldn't have near Android's market share, but IMHO they'd have a very solid, profitable business on their hands.
cromwellian 13y ago
Commodore went bankrupt unrelated to a low margin strategy, they were actually bankrupted by a patent troll during a risky attempt at entering the console market. The CEO and other executives mismanaged the company, but the story of Commodore's bankruptcy because a patent on the XOR Cursor (!) is one of the reasons I've had a lifelong hatred of software patents. I tell this tale often, but the Amiga was in every way, a better machine than the Mac, so much better it's not even funny. The Amiga 1000 was half the price of the Mac it competed against went it sold, it had higher resolution, color, more RAM, multitasking operating system, expansion slot, hardware accelerated co-processing for display lists, blitting, and a good sound chip. In fact, the Amiga custom chips were better than every other consume PC graphics display at it's time, and it was that way for several years. The Mac128k was a ridiculously overpriced and gimped machine, and for someone who was a kid or teen, migrating from something like a Commodore 64, totally boring. If you were a young kid learning to do graphics or sound programming, the Amiga was inspiring. I probably would not have gotten into computers the way I did had I not be influenced to learn 6502/68000 assembly programming to write demos on the C64 and Amiga due to the multimedia capabilities of those machines, not to mention the excellent games. BTW, while it is true that most productivity software originated on the Mac, most games originated on the PC, very very few games originated on the Mac and ported to the PC. iD games developed on NeXTs and SGI workstations were the exception, but again, still not a Mac, because until recently, Macs sucked for gaming, and have so since the era of the Amiga. I don't think Android is going to kill Apple, but I think the writing is on the wall for it to become a niche. Most of the advantages Apple had have now been commoditized as the market matured. If you look at how open source Linux has devastated the server-side market as well as the embedded market, there's no reason the same thing isn't going to happen in mobile in the long term. It was a nice run, but I don't think Apple's dominance is going to last forever. And the BMW analogy is apt, because while BMW survives, they are just one brand out of many, and do not control or dominate the market unduly.
- derefr 13y ago
  > iD games developed on NeXTs and SGI workstations were the exception, but again, still not a Mac, The point there was that Jobs was responsible for NeXT as well.

leoc 13y ago

The Mac vs. Windows comparison is imperfect of course, but as quick comparisons go I believe it's an excellent one and highly relevant. It doesn't necessarily imply that Apple is going to become unprofitable again (stock price declines are another matter): it's more likely to find itself back in its year-2000 holding position than it is to crash in the short or medium term. You're right about the influence of the Mac as an app platform. In fact, while people tend to think of Microsoft as an OS company thanks to MS-DOS in many ways MS is fundamentally a Macintosh ISV (a good Macintosh ISV, mind you) with delusions of grandeur. But then again, all these companies and pieces of software moved fairly happily to Windows-first when the platform and the market was there for them. You're right that the Jobs issue is largely a red herring at this stage.

protomyth 13y ago
Apple was never the big loser to Microsoft. Commodore was the true loser if you are looking at market share. We get to talk about Apple because they survived and successfully transitioned to a new product line. Commodore couldn't do that with the Amiga.
- leoc 13y ago
  Likely yes, but what of it? The argument from the Windows/Mac analogy is that iOS is probably headed for some level of niche status. It's not even that Apple is necessarily toast (though they certainly came near to it in '97). That Commodore got toasted even harder shouldn't invalidate that argument. (Commodore's trajectory was weird anyway. They were gone before Win95, and they were arguably killed as much by the XOR patent, the Atari-Commodore bloodletting, Sega and Nintendo or DOOM as by the IBM PC or Windows 3.1.) Maybe RIM is the new Commodore? ;)
  - protomyth 13y ago
    I guess my argument is the Windows/Mac analogy was always false. The Mac was a machine that has kept trending upward in numbers sold for many, many years never starting with some dominant position to lose. The Mac never lost its market share to Windows because it didn't have it to lose. Beyond that, I really don't think any of the old thinking actually applies to the current cellphone market as the software exclusivity problems of the PC era are not really an issue these days. The whole environment has changed and the connections matter more. In other words, we are closer to cars than PCs since so much of what we do is actually standardized (text, call, web browse) like roads and gas.

simonh 13y ago

I think there is a good comparison to be made with Mac vs Windows. Which personal computer manufacturer would you rather be, Apple or any of the Windows licensees? In terms of profits Apple goes to-to-toe with all the Windows licensees put together. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_are_high_too_high.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_a... The difference is that in the Windows world it's Microsoft that makes all the money, but in the mobile world Microsoft and Google (willfully in the latter case) aren't profiting much either. Edit - What interests me about this is a thought experiment. Suppose that back in 2007 Google had decided not to license out Android freely, but to produce their own phones and follow Apple's business model. They would have been the exclusive real competitor to Apple in the mobile space for the last 6 years. How much money would they have been able to make if the only Android phones were Nexus phones? They wouldn't have near Android's market share, but IMHO they'd have a very solid, profitable business on their hands.

cromwellian 13y ago

Commodore went bankrupt unrelated to a low margin strategy, they were actually bankrupted by a patent troll during a risky attempt at entering the console market. The CEO and other executives mismanaged the company, but the story of Commodore's bankruptcy because a patent on the XOR Cursor (!) is one of the reasons I've had a lifelong hatred of software patents. I tell this tale often, but the Amiga was in every way, a better machine than the Mac, so much better it's not even funny. The Amiga 1000 was half the price of the Mac it competed against went it sold, it had higher resolution, color, more RAM, multitasking operating system, expansion slot, hardware accelerated co-processing for display lists, blitting, and a good sound chip. In fact, the Amiga custom chips were better than every other consume PC graphics display at it's time, and it was that way for several years. The Mac128k was a ridiculously overpriced and gimped machine, and for someone who was a kid or teen, migrating from something like a Commodore 64, totally boring. If you were a young kid learning to do graphics or sound programming, the Amiga was inspiring. I probably would not have gotten into computers the way I did had I not be influenced to learn 6502/68000 assembly programming to write demos on the C64 and Amiga due to the multimedia capabilities of those machines, not to mention the excellent games. BTW, while it is true that most productivity software originated on the Mac, most games originated on the PC, very very few games originated on the Mac and ported to the PC. iD games developed on NeXTs and SGI workstations were the exception, but again, still not a Mac, because until recently, Macs sucked for gaming, and have so since the era of the Amiga. I don't think Android is going to kill Apple, but I think the writing is on the wall for it to become a niche. Most of the advantages Apple had have now been commoditized as the market matured. If you look at how open source Linux has devastated the server-side market as well as the embedded market, there's no reason the same thing isn't going to happen in mobile in the long term. It was a nice run, but I don't think Apple's dominance is going to last forever. And the BMW analogy is apt, because while BMW survives, they are just one brand out of many, and do not control or dominate the market unduly.

derefr 13y ago
> iD games developed on NeXTs and SGI workstations were the exception, but again, still not a Mac, The point there was that Jobs was responsible for NeXT as well.