Steve Ballmer: Safari a 'rounding error,' Mac losing market share

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  • Reply 161 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by star-fish View Post


    Quite a few large companies have. Including HSBC. Hasn't really made any difference.



    I'm sure I read somewhere that Mac sales are down this year. Maybe one day Apple will pull out altogether and stick to phones and media players



    That will be the day I get out of computers. I will never switch back to Windows, that was a very stressful time in my life & I like it being in the past.
  • Reply 162 of 219
    jazzgurujazzguru Posts: 6,435member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sprockkets View Post


    Ballmer is so dumb. He brags about netbooks selling all the while knowing that he is making less money selling XP on them and Win7 will not help that either, because he will sell a cut version of it. Kinda hard to hide the OEM Windows Tax when netbooks cost around $350, isn't Ballmer.



    OEMs don't make much off of netbooks either, nor do they make much of anything on $399 laptops. You and your OEMs can have your bottom feeder market Ballmer.



    Good point. How many netbooks have to be sold for Microsoft to make the same amount of profit that Apple makes from selling one Macbook?



    BTW, I don't get why they're making a watered-down version of Win 7 for netbooks. Maybe to keep the cost of the netbook down?



    I have Win 7 Ultimate RTM running on my ASUS EEE PC 900HA, 1.6GHz HT, 2GB RAM, Intel GMA video, and in my experience it runs more smoothly and zippy than Win XP did.
  • Reply 163 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by stokessd View Post


    1) There are lots of government agencies that use Macs. NASA has had a long history of mac usership. Nobody is only macs because macs don't have certain mission critical software. There is no hardcore CAD/CAM for the mac. There is no credible PCB layout for the MAC. the list goes on and on.



    2) Windows is software, and so much of a computing experience is interactions with the hardware. Apple makes nice hardware that I want to use. I end up running both XP and snow leopard on it to get work done. Regardless of what people say, windows does work and can work very well. I spend 8 hours a day on it at work and am very productive.



    3) I find it ironic that the mac hardware designs are done on Windows machines.



    Sheldon



    No need - just use the free version of Goole Sketch-Up
  • Reply 164 of 219
    tsatsa Posts: 129member
    I wonder when someone will tell Ballmer that unlike Apple, MS does not make PCs.
  • Reply 165 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jiminmissouri View Post


    I'm afraid I don't understand.



    If Apple's market share is "statistically insignificant", why then did Microsoft finally decide to pump millions of dollars into an ad campaign targeting people who might consider buying Apple computers?



    For that matter, why are reporters even bothering to raise the issue?



    Hmmm.



    And why is Microsoft still selling Office for Mac??
  • Reply 166 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mr O View Post






    ? this Ballmer guy is a first class stand up comedian!



    Steve Ballmer is a "Rounding error."
  • Reply 167 of 219
    bertpbertp Posts: 274member
    I'll probably get a lot of static for saying this ? but I don't think personal computers in terms of value are expensive. You can buy a good Apple computer between 2 and 3 thousand dollars. You can buy a good quality automobile for 25 to 40 thousand dollars.



    A quality computer with a quality OS is worth saving for just as an automobile with high reliability and low maintenance is worth saving for.



    Penny wise and pound foolish, I say, regarding less expensive computers. Furthermore, Steve Ballmer is a sales guy, and I would deal with him as such.
  • Reply 168 of 219
    His dismissal of growth by Apple and others on their industry stranglehold reveals how unqualified Ballmer has always been when it comes to leading a company.



    Dismissive of Macs, OS X, Linux and the rest falls on deaf ears, especially investor ears.
  • Reply 169 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sprockkets View Post


    Never going to happen. Apple not putting flash on the iphone is retribution to Microsoft for bundling Flash in IE back in the mid 90s to kill Quicktime.



    Payback's a bitch!



    That's not quite the point of what they're doing. Apple's overall strategy, as far as anyone can tell, seems to be to level the playing field so that their already kickass products will sell on their own merits, instead of being unfairly squashed by an inferior product that got a free pass early on. To accomplish this larger goal, they're willing to help others achieve smaller ones.



    An example of where this is already working is in the smartphone market, where the iPhone is quickly becoming the dominant player, not because Apple used illegal and predatory practices to prevent competition from taking place, but because the iPhone competed successfully.



    On the Web, the main problem is that "rich" content (i.e. more than just words and pictures) is mostly tied to Flash right now, which is a completely proprietary browser plugin controlled by one company alone, and which is not interoperable with other parts of the Web. (I think it's only within the last year that I even heard murmurs about making Flash content searchable by search engines. This is after over a decade of sitting pretty thanks to Microsoft's "leg up".) Essentially, Adobe makes Flash especially for Windows ? nobody can argue that the Mac version of the plugin isn't horribly crippled in performance, and Adobe doesn't appear to want to improve that situation. (Much like their other desktop software, come to think of it.)



    Apple could:

    a) plead with Adobe to develop a Flash plugin capable of running on the iPhone platform, hope they someday decide to deliver, and from then on be slaves to Adobe's whims as far as web content goes, OR...

    b) work to undermine Adobe's stranglehold on rich Web media and applications by pushing open standards that anyone can use, using a cross-platform browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit, now being adopted by myriad other browsers as well) that stay on the cutting edge of such standards to make them more attractive.



    They've obviously gone with Option B, and you can see new developments in WebKit all the time that gradually make bits and pieces of Flash seem redundant. JavaScript that performs fast. CSS that now lets you do animation and 3D effects with anything on the page, even retaining text's ability to be selected and copied without requiring any extra developer legwork. Support for HTML5 stuff like video tags, gradually (through adoption) obviating the need to use Flash just to deliver video.



    By pushing (and helping to develop) these standards, Apple is trying to make the web a platform where everyone with the know-how, not just those who've shelled out for a Flash license, can create and deliver interactive web-based media and applications that compete on their own merits. And competing on their own merits is something Apple happens to be good at. I'm sure you can draw the parallels to the situation between Apple and Microsoft without too much trouble.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by GrumbleGus View Post


    Balmer has become the post turtle of the computer industry.



    "When you're driving down a country road and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle. You know he didn't get up there by himself and he can only see in the direction he has been turned. He doesn't belong there; he can't get anything done while he's up there; and you just want to help the poor, dumb thing down."



    THIS. I LOVE THIS.
  • Reply 170 of 219
    I'm amazed this news makes it up on an Apple forum. But it just shows that this forum is totally unbiased I am guessing.



    Why is it that whenever I try to access emails on hotmail.com, I can't actually open the emails but only list them? The comment on Safari in this article is vague but realistically that browser does not seem to work very well if it can't open a simple hotmail message. Idc if apple hates microsoft or vice versa, but why put out a product that can't do something that freaking simple? That is just nonsense.



    Apple's gotta do a lot better to hook me in to their products. Their laptops seem ok but they cost about 2x as much as a PC vendor can make (using very similar hardware, come on Apple uses Hynix ram and Fujitsu hard drives both of which are extremely cheap as well as I read they switched vendors from Intel to Nvidia to cut costs on main boards inside macbooks). So all I see Apple doing is cutting costs and maybe lowering prices a touch but keeping them up high and basically price gouging the consumer for 'aesthetics' and a few little bells and whistles such as the neodynium magnets holding the power supply onto the macbook, light weight portability, and maybe a couple other things I can't think of.



    When I bought my laptop, it would have cost me $600 more for a macbook with all of the same features, down to the processor core, graphics chip, same exact brand of RAM too and now these days the type of laptop I have costs even less and apple's offering costs about double what I can buy one for. Now it is starting to look like Fujitsu possibly makes one of the best quality laptops, I knew someone with one of those and it worked exceptionally well.



    I think if Apple wants to make it really worth spending the extra bucks on a macbook, they should use a brand name ram (Hynix? come on guys.. spending $1800 for a low end laptop and popping open the chassis to find this is just disgraceful on your part but then again, the ram works...) and plus you can buy a high end gaming laptop with SLI these days for around that much or maybe even less. I've seen them go on sale for less than that, but it is rare.



    The only other thing that'd get me to buy one is if they priced it according to what other vendors price their systems with equivalent hardware at. After all, a Macbook is just an Intel laptop that looks different and possibly is lighter than everyone else's laptop.



    The reason why people still buy these things is because somehow Apple brainwashed society into thinking that if you put an apple logo on anything, it automatically makes it not crash. And this is not true because there is absolutely no such thing as a computer that never crashes and also again these are basically the same equipment as other vendors provide for retail sale. Then again I can recall in the distant past where whenever I let an iMAC idle and tried to type or use the mouse the whole computer was froze including the mouse cursor. That...just didn't set in well with me for the product.



    ..and don't get me started on ipod shuffles. $80 for 2 gigs of storage?



    But anyway Apple will continue going on the way they are I'm sure while the rest of us will bargain hunt. After all even Apple themselve said the typical lifespan of a computer is 3 years and when you calculate it out, you can probably buy 3 PC laptops for the price of one 17" macbook pro which has specs that aren't very impressive. So I'm talking 9 years versus 3. Do the math.
  • Reply 171 of 219
    zoetmbzoetmb Posts: 2,654member
    All I know is that at home, I was able to use my Mac G4 Tower for seven years before giving it up. It still works perfectly, I just can't edit video with precision or edit super large Photoshop files with a little delay, so I finally bought a new laptop.



    At work, I go through a PC laptop every year or two. Even if the laptop is still usable, it generally has to be reformatted to make it work and it requires hours of work from a tech or from myself. I'm also on my second desktop at work and I don't think they ever got my old one working again, even after reformatting.



    The Mac requires almost no support.



    When I had Vista on the Lenovo laptop, in spite of adding more memory, the machine took about 20 minutes to boot up. Before going to a client for a meeting, I'd have to boot up the machine and put it in sleep or standby or we'd be 20 minutes into the meeting before I could demo our product.



    I'm sure there was a way to configure Vista so it wasn't so annoying and lackluster as a performer, but I really don't feel I should have to read a 600 page book to get it to work. The Mac just works.



    Every Mac OS update has worked perfectly. About two weeks ago, Microsoft sent down an update that caused every NT machine in our offices not to work until you unplugged the network cable and rebooted (rebooting without unplugging the network cable didn't work), but it took us a while to figure that out. Things were so bad, we thought we were seriously infected with a bad virus.



    So yes, you can buy a Dell or a Lenovo for relatively little money as compared with a Mac and they'll even have equivalent memory, hard disk space and screen size.



    But in the long run and especially in terms of productivity, the Mac costs far less. But I don't want the Mac to achieve mass scale anyway. Haven't we learned by now that when you produce something for the masses, it's usually crap? I'm perfectly happy letting the masses eat in McDonald's, watch bad reality shows and use PCs. The Mac truly is "for the rest of us" and I would hope it stays that way. I'm not looking for Apple to be Ford, I'm looking for them to remain BMW.



    It's not that Apple does everything right. And there is still a bit of arrogance in the organization. But they get it right most of the time and the majority of my annoyances with the Mac are actually Microsoft Office based.
  • Reply 172 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by GrumbleGus View Post


    Balmer has become the post turtle of the computer industry.



    "When you're driving down a country road and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle. You know he didn't get up there by himself and he can only see in the direction he has been turned. He doesn't belong there; he can't get anything done while he's up there; and you just want to help the poor, dumb thing down."



    This needs to be a sticky.



    Duly cut and pasted into Evernote for future laughs. Thank you!
  • Reply 173 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rooket View Post


    I'm amazed this news makes it up on an Apple forum. But it just shows that this forum is totally unbiased I am guessing.



    Why is it that whenever I try to access emails on hotmail.com, I can't actually open the emails but only list them? The comment on Safari in this article is vague but realistically that browser does not seem to work very well if it can't open a simple hotmail message. Idc if apple hates microsoft or vice versa, but why put out a product that can't do something that freaking simple? That is just nonsense.



    Apple's gotta do a lot better to hook me in to their products...



    Monkey Boy, is that you!?



    I don't use hotmail, but I'm guessing your problem is because hotmail is using non-standard "features" invented at Microsoft. Or, maybe you just have JavaScript disabled. Perhaps someone will come along to help you out.



    As for the rest of your post, the secret to why Macs are better is the software. Shhhhh! No one is supposed to know!



    (Although, the inside of a Mac Pro is really a beautiful place.)
  • Reply 174 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by zoetmb View Post


    All I know is that at home, I was able to use my Mac G4 Tower for seven years before giving it up. It still works perfectly, I just can't edit video with precision or edit super large Photoshop files with a little delay, so I finally bought a new laptop.



    At work, I go through a PC laptop every year or two. Even if the laptop is still usable, it generally has to be reformatted to make it work and it requires hours of work from a tech or from myself. I'm also on my second desktop at work and I don't think they ever got my old one working again, even after reformatting.



    The Mac requires almost no support.



    When I had Vista on the Lenovo laptop, in spite of adding more memory, the machine took about 20 minutes to boot up. Before going to a client for a meeting, I'd have to boot up the machine and put it in sleep or standby or we'd be 20 minutes into the meeting before I could demo our product.



    I'm sure there was a way to configure Vista so it wasn't so annoying and lackluster as a performer, but I really don't feel I should have to read a 600 page book to get it to work. The Mac just works.



    Every Mac OS update has worked perfectly. About two weeks ago, Microsoft sent down an update that caused every NT machine in our offices not to work until you unplugged the network cable and rebooted (rebooting without unplugging the network cable didn't work), but it took us a while to figure that out. Things were so bad, we thought we were seriously infected with a bad virus.



    So yes, you can buy a Dell or a Lenovo for relatively little money as compared with a Mac and they'll even have equivalent memory, hard disk space and screen size.



    But in the long run and especially in terms of productivity, the Mac costs far less. But I don't want the Mac to achieve mass scale anyway. Haven't we learned by now that when you produce something for the masses, it's usually crap? I'm perfectly happy letting the masses eat in McDonald's, watch bad reality shows and use PCs. The Mac truly is "for the rest of us" and I would hope it stays that way. I'm not looking for Apple to be Ford, I'm looking for them to remain BMW.



    It's not that Apple does everything right. And there is still a bit of arrogance in the organization. But they get it right most of the time and the majority of my annoyances with the Mac are actually Microsoft Office based.



    Or one could take their Dell laptop and use Norton Ghost to back up a complete image of it and when there's a major issue, just restore the image. Then again, Windows has a feature built in where when you go in safe mode, you can choose a restore point to roll back to. I haven't used it much but when i did use it, it worked well. I'm always learning new things.



    Apple to remain bmw? Have you seen what kind of a car you get for 40 grand from BMW? no thanks! lol and plus the maintenance on those things is absurd. A ford lasts just as long (probably longer) than a BMW. Ford is going to be the number one manufacturer by 2012 anyways. BMW will never be that high. I guess it is a fair comparison then since it appears that Apple with their high prices wants to always be the under dog.



    But then yeah at least an apple is affordable so those who want to toss their money at it can. I guess it comes down to whether or not u think aesthetics are worth several hundreds of dollars for a piece of equipment that does exactly the same thing as anything any other vendor offers.
  • Reply 175 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by xwiredtva View Post


    Nice rant... People in India are people too though. However the People Mac users speak to aren't reading out of the same manual or Help file you just read hours ago. They are actually thinking.



    I never dissed Indian people in my "rant"



    The last person I talked to in India for Dell support was helpful, albeit limited in how he had to do what he was told/"programmed" to do. However, I wanted to beat him over the head when he said the cd writer/DVD reader couldn't read DVDs; that was why it couldn't read them, and the DVD read only drive was for that purpose. I gave up on trying to get it replaced under warranty because it took 2hrs plus to get him to replace the motherboard for faulty USB ports.
  • Reply 176 of 219
    nasseraenasserae Posts: 3,167member
    He means like the Zune 1% rounding error?
  • Reply 177 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Smurfman View Post


    And why is Microsoft still selling Office for Mac??



    Office is one of two major money makers for Microsoft Might as well!
  • Reply 178 of 219
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Shunnabunich View Post


    That's not quite the point of what they're doing. Apple's overall strategy, as far as anyone can tell, seems to be to level the playing field so that their already kickass products will sell on their own merits, instead of being unfairly squashed by an inferior product that got a free pass early on. To accomplish this larger goal, they're willing to help others achieve smaller ones.



    An example of where this is already working is in the smartphone market, where the iPhone is quickly becoming the dominant player, not because Apple used illegal and predatory practices to prevent competition from taking place, but because the iPhone competed successfully.



    On the Web, the main problem is that "rich" content (i.e. more than just words and pictures) is mostly tied to Flash right now, which is a completely proprietary browser plugin controlled by one company alone, and which is not interoperable with other parts of the Web. (I think it's only within the last year that I even heard murmurs about making Flash content searchable by search engines. This is after over a decade of sitting pretty thanks to Microsoft's "leg up".) Essentially, Adobe makes Flash especially for Windows — nobody can argue that the Mac version of the plugin isn't horribly crippled in performance, and Adobe doesn't appear to want to improve that situation. (Much like their other desktop software, come to think of it.)



    Apple could:

    a) plead with Adobe to develop a Flash plugin capable of running on the iPhone platform, hope they someday decide to deliver, and from then on be slaves to Adobe's whims as far as web content goes, OR...

    b) work to undermine Adobe's stranglehold on rich Web media and applications by pushing open standards that anyone can use, using a cross-platform browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit, now being adopted by myriad other browsers as well) that stay on the cutting edge of such standards to make them more attractive.



    They've obviously gone with Option B, and you can see new developments in WebKit all the time that gradually make bits and pieces of Flash seem redundant. JavaScript that performs fast. CSS that now lets you do animation and 3D effects with anything on the page, even retaining text's ability to be selected and copied without requiring any extra developer legwork. Support for HTML5 stuff like video tags, gradually (through adoption) obviating the need to use Flash just to deliver video.



    By pushing (and helping to develop) these standards, Apple is trying to make the web a platform where everyone with the know-how, not just those who've shelled out for a Flash license, can create and deliver interactive web-based media and applications that compete on their own merits. And competing on their own merits is something Apple happens to be good at. I'm sure you can draw the parallels to the situation between Apple and Microsoft without too much trouble.







    THIS. I LOVE THIS.



    Yeah, I meant that too, but it wasn't as funny to post



    It's also nice to know that Apple's comeback is let's use an open HTML5 standard and not be tied to stupid middleware. That's the difference btw real innovators and lazy stupid monopolies.
  • Reply 179 of 219
    Quote:

    Or one could take their Dell laptop and use Norton Ghost to back up a complete image of it and when there's a major issue, just restore the image. Then again, Windows has a feature built in where when you go in safe mode, you can choose a restore point to roll back to. I haven't used it much but when i did use it, it worked well. I'm always learning new things.



    Dell uses that, but the problem with images is that they destroy all the data on the hd partition, meaning you can't save personal data on the main drive. OSX allows an archive and install option to reinstall the OS without losing programs and data. Linux can also run with specific locations for your personal data to be on a separate drive, and does not have to be on "c\"



    System restore does mostly work, but the fact that it exists should tell you something about the fragile nature of Windows and the stupid registry.



    One time in Linux I had print issues. I went to the software installer tool, told it to reinstall the CUPS package, and the problem went away. No need to reset my printers either.



    What do you do when with my brother in law's laptop, it just could not print? No KBs were available for the error code, reinstalling the printer didn't help, and since of course the windows install was years old it was time to fix winrot. I did a complete reinstall. Fixed the winrot issue and other crap, but took him a few days to get everything back in order.
  • Reply 180 of 219
    Quote:

    Apple to remain bmw? Have you seen what kind of a car you get for 40 grand from BMW? no thanks! lol and plus the maintenance on those things is absurd. A ford lasts just as long (probably longer) than a BMW. Ford is going to be the number one manufacturer by 2012 anyways. BMW will never be that high. I guess it is a fair comparison then since it appears that Apple with their high prices wants to always be the under dog.



    I think a better analogy is PC OEMs like to make Neons; let's cut corners everywhere we can to save on $; after all, why not make a car that lasts only till the warranty ends?



    All the American car makers coasted in the 70s and 80s, and the underdog Japanese took over. Now they understand that people don't like junk. I wish Chrysler went under for all the crap they've made.
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