Zune Thoughts: Windows 7 Market Share After One Month Surpasses Entire Apple OS X Installed Base

Be sure to register in our forums! Share your opinions, help others, and enter our contests.


Laptop Thoughts

Loading feed...

Windows Phone Thoughts

Loading feed...

Digital Home Thoughts

Loading feed...



Thursday, November 26, 2009

Windows 7 Market Share After One Month Surpasses Entire Apple OS X Installed Base

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 06:00 AM

http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...rket_share_race

"Windows 7 passed the 5% market share milestone last weekend, which put it, if only temporarily, above the total market share of all versions of Apple's Mac OS X, a Web measurement firm said today. Last Saturday and Sunday, Windows 7 powered an estimated 5% and 5.14% of all computers that were online those days, according to Internet metrics vendor Net Applications. The two-day average of 5.07% was higher than the 5% of the market that Net Applications said Apple's operating system averaged for the week of Nov. 15-21."

This is a welcome reality check. I know that Apple has tremendous mind-share because they spend an ungodly amount of money on prime-time TV advertising telling us how much Windows "sucks", but at the end of the day only 5 out of 100 computers on this planet are Macs running OS X. The market share for Windows that same week was 92.64%. The numbers say a lot - and no amount of reality-distortion field spinning is going to change that. Macs might be the perfect computing solution for some people, but they're not a mass-market product, no matter how hard the Mac faithful want to believe that.

There's also a weird reality distortion bubble in the media - many people in the media/blogging tech world use Macs. A far higher percentage than the rest of the world; just look at figure 2 in this article. I don't know whether it's techno-savvy people who got sick of Windows, or the uber-geek's desire to try the next shiny and new thing, but at many tech events I'm in the minority using a Windows laptop. At that Mobius event OS X had 53% market share; in the rest of the world, 5%. Funny things can happen when you get a bunch of Mac users in the room: they think their platform always matters, even when it doesn't. Sounds harsh, right? Let me explain.

One of the things I hear brought up over and over again is "Why is there no Zune client for the Mac?". The math tell us the story: take 5% of the computer market as potential buyers for the Zune who are running OS X. What percentage of those people are open-minded enough to try a Microsoft product instead of an iPod? In my experience, people who buy a Mac also buy into the ecosystem, often owning an iPod or an iPhone. So, what then, 10% of that total 5%? So we're looking at 0.5% of the total market, and I think even that's a big stretch.

Now put yourself in Microsoft's position: you have limited developer resources for the Zune software client. There are lots of features you want to add, but if you need to make an OS X client you'll have to curtail development on the Windows version. Are you willing to do that for a potential 0.5% of the market? Probably not. And keep this in mind: you don't need the OS X users in order for your product to become a success. You need, and want, Windows owners to buy your product. If you get enough of them, you'll be laughing. So why waste any resources on an OS X client?

The iPod would never have become the success that it is today if Apple hadn't released a Windows version of iTunes. Apple needed, desperately, the Windows platform as a host for iTunes - without it they'd only have OS X users, which represented a small percentage of the market. Microsoft doesn't need Mac owners buying Zunes, so they're not going to waste the resources developing for OS X - no matter how loud tech bloggers whine about it.


Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Sponsored links