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Jobs talks about "A Decade of Upgrades" as Apple builds market share, now 3rd

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#1 ·
Jobs talks about "A Decade of Upgrades" as Apple builds market share, now 3rd

As Apple Gains PC Market Share, Jobs Talks of a Decade of Upgrades

As Apple Gains PC Market Share, Jobs Talks of a Decade of Upgrades




New York Times said:
Published: October 22, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 — It may have dropped the word “computer” from its name, but Apple is certainly selling plenty of Macs.

Driven in part by what analysts call a halo effect from the iPod and the iPhone, the market share of the company’s personal computers is surging.

Two research firms that track the computer market said last week that Apple would move into third place in the United States behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell on Monday, when it reports product shipments in the fiscal fourth quarter as part of its earnings announcement.

“The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now,” said Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a telephone interview last week. “It is outpacing the industry.”

On Friday, Apple will start selling the new Leopard version of its OS X operating system, which has a range of features that in some cases match those in Windows Vista and in others surpass them.

Mr. Jobs said that Leopard would anchor a schedule of product upgrades that could continue for as long as a decade.

“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”

That pace suggests that Apple will continue to move more quickly than Microsoft, which took almost seven years between the release of its Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems.

Vista has had mixed reviews, and corporate sales have been slow so far. Mr. Jobs declined to comment on Microsoft’s troubles with Vista, beyond noting that he thought Leopard was a better value. While there are multiple editions of Vista with different features at different prices, the top being the Ultimate edition, Apple has set a single price of $129 for Leopard.

With Leopard, Mr. Jobs joked, “everybody gets the Ultimate edition and it sells for 129 bucks, and if you go on Amazon and look at the Ultimate edition of Vista, it sells for 250 bucks.”

Microsoft has said that it will release an update, or service pack, for Vista in the first quarter of 2008. But it has also said that it intends to offer a service pack for Windows XP in the first half of the year. That, analysts said, could further delay adoption of Vista as computer users wait to see how XP will be improved.

Microsoft has also hinted that its next operating system, code-named Windows 7, would not arrive until 2010. At Apple’s current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then.

Apple has not been flawless in its execution. Early this year, it delayed the introduction of Leopard for four months. Mr. Jobs attributed this at the time to the company’s need to move programming development resources to an iPhone version of the OS X operating system.

Several analysts said they thought that Leopard would have only an indirect effect on Macintosh sales.

As for Vista, it has clearly not pushed up demand for new PCs as much as computer makers hoped. Last week, the research firm Gartner said PC shipments in the United States grew only 4.7 percent in the third quarter, below its projection of 6.7 percent.

That contrasted sharply with Apple’s projected results for the quarter. Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 percent based on expected shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1 percent share of the domestic market.

Apple has outpaced its rivals in the United States, particularly in the shift to portable computers. While this is the first year that laptops have made up more than 50 percent of computer sales in this country, Mr. Jobs said that two-thirds of Apple machines sold in the United States are now laptops.

Apple has also outperformed rivals in terms of market share by revenue, because its machines are generally more expensive.

According to Charles Wolf, who tracks the personal computer market in his industry newsletter Wolf Bytes, Apple’s share of home PC revenue in the United States has jumped in the last four quarters. In the second quarter, for example, the Macintosh captured a 15.8 percent share, almost double its share of the number of units sold.

He added that Apple had a significant opportunity now in terms of visitors to its stores. Apple is now reporting 100 million annual visitors, and Mr. Wolf estimated that 60 million to 70 million of them were Windows users drawn by the iPod or the iPhone, who could potentially shift to Macs.

Although Apple may be able to grow briskly by taking Windows customers from Microsoft, the two companies face a similar problem: the industry is maturing and there have been no obvious radical innovations to jump-start growth.

Indeed, many of the new features in the Leopard operating system version are incremental improvements. But Mr. Jobs said he was struck by the success of the multitouch interface that is at the heart of the iPhone version of the OS X. This allows a user to touch the screen at more than one point to zoom in on a portion of a photo, for example.

“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.

He contrasted it with stylus interfaces, like the approach Microsoft took with its tablet computer. That interface is not so different from what most computers have been using since the mid-1980s.

In contrast, Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.

There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.

The Apple development team worried constantly that the approach might fail during the years they were creating the iPhone, he said.

“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.”
 
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#3 ·
Interesting reading. Very accurate the comments about Vista - one of my buddies wants a new laptop, but he's aprehensive about buying Vista. Unfortunately his program demands PC-specific software, and he doesn't want to go the Mac + Bootcamp route (that is, he's been talked out of it by foolish Pc-based IT guys!).
 
#4 ·
One must remember that the IT guys have to defend their turf ~ their jobs are at stake ~is a less work for em in a non Windoze environment!

Now, I wonder if Apple will hit $180 today?
Possible if it climbs 6% today ... and it could do so in after hours trading! Hang on for what should be a most stimulating quarterly report.
 
#9 ·
It's a bit harder to grow when you are the 90 percentile. Decline is inevitable. However, you are right that when it comes to a finished software product, there is not much innovation on M$ part (exception of Office and some Xbox related stuff).
 
#16 ·
Thoughts on Market Share

I dont' think that Microsoft has ever really been about innovation, but rather about adoption of the innovation of others (Mac particularly); and the steady improvement over time of the products they've adopted. We have to remember that with MSDOS (another "adopted"-absconded? product) they basically seized control of what was then the vast majority of the market share for personal computing. It's a funny thing about installed base-if you have enough of it you're pretty hard to knock off independent to some degree of your product quality.

As to IT guys and job preservation, I've been running IT departments for lots of years, in PC, Mac, and mixed environments. There is little to no difference to the end user in their need for techies and support. What mostly makes things cheaper to support is stability and standards, independent of the hardware and OS. This whole thing about not needing techies in a Mac environment is a myth, IMHO-one only need take a look at the MAC support forums on the internet to dispel it.

All that said, I am so glad I switched. I am learning Mac, a little more each day, and I truly love the way these things are designed.
 
#17 ·
I am a setup tech for a teaching company. Solaris / Sparc based systems are a must, along with pc. All the mac users at my office together total 3 including me. No one requires mac support there :\.

But the best way to get a job is to specialize in the unknown.
 
#18 ·
As a one-person office, the time I spend on computer maintenance and related issues is negligible. For the last couple of years it's amounted to running software updates and occasionally rebooting.

Is it just because I've been using Macs for over 20 years? I don't think so. I've known other small Windows-based offices where the users are quite experienced, but they still had to have a freelance computer specialist come in occasionally. The time commitments for maintaining Windows setups made it worth their while.

So, there may be little difference when you're dealing with larger setups, special requirements, novice users or all of the above, but the Mac is a godsend for very small businesses, IMO.
 
#19 ·
I thought it was an interesting comment from one of the analysts how the market is saturated and there aren't any major innovations coming up. I wonder if for a lot of PC users the Mac is becoming a possible point of innovation for them. I really don't see much "value-added" in Vista. Performance is the same or worse than XP, usability is way worse (especially for XP experts) and there isn't really any extra bells & whistles. [just for a data point, in my small office, the two users who got new laptops with Vista have both asked me to reinstall XP after several months.]

So maybe the consumer who just wants a new computer, but something fancy and cool (which is ultimately the driving choice behind most consumer choices these days, even tools like computers) will look to the Mac OS, with its elegant physical design, ease of use, efficient hardware/software integration and all the shininess associated with ipods as that innovation.

I think the future looks okay for Apple for the next couple of years.
 
#21 ·
Mac support

I couldn't agree more, that for a small company, particularly when we're talking about a few users only, that Macs are WAY easier to support and cheaper to operate.
My experience has been (for example) at a major newspaper, where the installed base of Macs was 200+ running Quark networked for page layout and design, and a host of other software for processing images and pulling files from a variety of sources to build the paper daily on the usual unbelievably tight timelines.
There is no question that Macs were the best choice for that business, but providing support was far from trouble free.
The reality is that as the complexity of the usage goes up, so do the support requirements. What differentiated the Macs from PCs in the newspaper world was their stability-it is a MUCH more bullet proof OS than any of the Windows variants.
I'm a newbie as a Mac owner, and I am rapidly becoming a huge fan.

All I'm saying is that I've always had enough work to keep lots of tech staff employed, whether in a sole platform or mixed environment. The nature of the work and the types of problems change, but the need for on the ground expertise and customer responsiveness doesn't.
 
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