Funny Old World
Strange to think that in all the time I've been a Mac lover, Mac user, Mac Moonie, they've been considered an irrelevant pimple on the arse of the IT landscape. They still have a minute market share, in terms of sales, and I've never been sure how that translates in terms of users*, but it looks as if 2006 is going to be huge for them: Apple a 'big mean cash machine' - analysts.
Problem is, of course, these are the same analysts who called Apple a basket case in 1996, wrote it off as a company, and caused its shares to drop through the floor as rats deserted the sinking ship.
Now they have an operating system that's nowhere near as different as the old one was in terms of its look and feel, and now they're moving onto exactly the same hardware as the vast majority of PCs, and because Windows has had such bad publicity with regards to viruses and spyware, everyone's getting excited about them.
It's a sign, I think, that the market is finally maturing past yah-boo posturing, as people wake up to their choices and realise the difference they can make. Internet Explorer, the dominant browser in the world, is on the slide. It once commanded around 93% of the Mac market, but end of this month it's dead on the Mac. And on the other platform, people are waking up to superior experiences. One of these days, on-line banks etc will realise that this is happening.
Few financial analysts would have believed that Netscape, in the form of Mozilla, would make a comeback. None of them thought that the Apple of Gil Amelio could command the column inches and headspace that the Apple of Jobs and Ives now does. So now they're all saying the sun is going to be iPod coloured and the Mac is back, I think we have to take it with a pinch of salt.
For some of us, it never went away, of course.
*Recently, a publishing group sent us a bunch of their older Macs for storage before disposal. They've just replaced them all with new. In the IT world, they're supposed to be around 3 years old, but they were much older than that. Some of them were models from '98 and '99, others from 2000 and 2001. That's longevity. My previous two Macs are still being used, by the people that I gave them to. That's a kind of market share that doesn't get recorded in sales figures.
Problem is, of course, these are the same analysts who called Apple a basket case in 1996, wrote it off as a company, and caused its shares to drop through the floor as rats deserted the sinking ship.
Now they have an operating system that's nowhere near as different as the old one was in terms of its look and feel, and now they're moving onto exactly the same hardware as the vast majority of PCs, and because Windows has had such bad publicity with regards to viruses and spyware, everyone's getting excited about them.
It's a sign, I think, that the market is finally maturing past yah-boo posturing, as people wake up to their choices and realise the difference they can make. Internet Explorer, the dominant browser in the world, is on the slide. It once commanded around 93% of the Mac market, but end of this month it's dead on the Mac. And on the other platform, people are waking up to superior experiences. One of these days, on-line banks etc will realise that this is happening.
Few financial analysts would have believed that Netscape, in the form of Mozilla, would make a comeback. None of them thought that the Apple of Gil Amelio could command the column inches and headspace that the Apple of Jobs and Ives now does. So now they're all saying the sun is going to be iPod coloured and the Mac is back, I think we have to take it with a pinch of salt.
For some of us, it never went away, of course.
*Recently, a publishing group sent us a bunch of their older Macs for storage before disposal. They've just replaced them all with new. In the IT world, they're supposed to be around 3 years old, but they were much older than that. Some of them were models from '98 and '99, others from 2000 and 2001. That's longevity. My previous two Macs are still being used, by the people that I gave them to. That's a kind of market share that doesn't get recorded in sales figures.
posted by Anonymous at
Friday, January 20, 2006
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