yeah, no kidding. by Matsu's price fettish logic, every designer clothing label would have been driven out of business by Kmart, Yugo would be the top auto manufactuer, e-machines would rule PC sales, Radio Shack would be the #1 consumer electronics retailer, and we'd all be eating Spam, drinking wine out of cardboard boxes, and swallowing PBR and black label beer by the case.
How many times have we reminded you that your whines will not be heard by Apple. . .
THere are factors that you and I aren't knowledgeable about. It's not as simple as you think. If Apple just lowered it's prices magically do you think it would be the trick? I doubt it. When you're up against a monopoly, price means little. You should know this.
I'd love to be an Apple apologist in this case, but I find myself agreeing overwhelmingly with Matsu. 2.7% marketshare isn't helping us at all. Now we cannot even claim that we hold 5%. We need now to convert not the "other 95%" of consumers but the "other 97.3%." The trend is clearly disturbing.
Many of you comment that it's acceptable for Apple to have such low marketshare. And I would agree with you, if Apple were a normal PC maker. Apple doesn't make normal PCs. Apple supports an alternative computing platform, and its alternative needs marketshare to be viable. If Apple were a Dell or a Micron, and it held 2.7% of the PC market, then that would fine. In such a scenario, Apple would just be selling PC hardware - hardware virtually identical to the hardware of its competitors.
Apple thankfully doesn't make Wintel boxes. Of course, the only thing that a PC maker stands to gain or lose with higher or lower marketshare is higher or lower profit. Yet, Apple stands to gain or lose not only profit - it stands to lose everything. We have limited hardware choice since Apple is the only game in town. And with a proprietary OS, our third party software base is limited by the marketshare the OS commands.
Apple isn't just competing against Dell or Gateway, it is competing against the marketshare of the entire PC industry! There is no doubt that Apple is so much more dependent on marketshare than any PC box maker. After all, if Dell goes away tomorrow, consumers have multiple Wintel vendors from which to choose. Wintel won't die if Dell, Gateway or even HP go under. Yet, if Apple goes away, not only is it gone, our entire platform is dead.
So one wonders what the upshot is. It's very simple to understand this issue, really. Just ask yourself - "Self, if I don't care that Apple is losing marketshare, how much marketshare do I think Apple could lose before I would be concerned?" Is it permissible for Apple to fall to 1% marketshare? How about a half a percentage? Obviously Apple couldn't live all that well with half a percentage point. The fact is, if marketshare is the lifeblood of Apple, then the company has been desperately anemic for quite some time.
What is Apple doing in response to the marketshare dilemma? Well, they're promoting the Switch campaign, and they're selling woefully under-powered, dangerously over-priced machines. I'm a fervent supporter of Apple and will always be, but I'm not blinded to our weaknesses and vulnerable position. It is indeed unfortunate that I cannot really justify the purchase of any current desktop or laptop offerings. (The best value is likely the iBook, but I'm not happy with its specs either.) If I as an eleven year Apple fanatic cannot find a reasonable value, then I have no reason to be bullish in the short term.
I concur with JYD that certain contemporary concerns will be alleviated when we finally cure the G4 plague with the GPUL. Yet, the GPUL certainly won't be a cure-all. I've been very enthusiastic about Apple's hardware offerings at certain points in recent history, but even with strong hardware Apple has failed to increase the platform's long-term marketshare. The iMac was the most popular computer model ever, but after the initial boom, our quarterly marketshare sunk back down. We need sustainable, long term gains in marketshare if our platform is to be secure. With security will yield greater third-party support, and greater support will yield continued marketshare gains.
The Apple Stores represent a concrete, aggressive step devised to increase Apple's marketshare. Purchasing those high end creative software developers is another aggressive move. Yet, much more could and should be done. Apple cannot afford to be complacent with 2.7% marketshare. It is the underdog and must fight like one. My minimum marketshare comfort zone would have to be around 10 to 15%. Apple has a long way to go before I can rest assured.
Big Mac, then the question is "Was Apple fine last year? The year before? The year before that?"
Apple has had 2.5-3.0% for the past 3 years. It fluctuates. Last quarter they increased their marketshare from the quarter before that. Apple's Q4 results should be out soon. They'll probably be down, but so will every other manufacturer's. It'll be interesting to see if Apple loses or gains marketshare.
Even marketshare numbers are deceiving, because I know Apple is gaining a lot of mindshare...especially with the geek world. With this build-up of mindshare, all Apple needs is a killer app to open that particular floodgate.
4 of my unix geek friends have bought iBooks since December 2001. 2 years ago, they probably would have never considered a Mac. When Apple was stuck with OS 9 people had more reason to switch to Windows. If the desktop unix paradigm ever takes off, guess who's going to be at the forefront?
Computers are not like other consumer goods. The depreciation and built-in obsolescence is stunning when compared to clothes or cars. But also, computers for the most part cannot become status symbols because they are fundamentally anti-social technologies. You cannot really use them to display yourself like people do with cars, houses, clothes, restaurants, and trips. To a degree, sure, but still nothing like those other consumer goods/expenditures. That's why price matters so much in computer sales: the item itself has little value besides it's use value. Coupled to rapid depreciation it is perhaps the technology/consumer item people are least likely to overpay for.
<strong>check out this recent thread on slashdot entitled <a href="http://slashdot.org/articles/02/09/26/0058238.shtml?tid=107"; target="_blank">flirting with mac os x</a>. Note the number of people doing real work on their macs (lawyers, game programmers, sysadmins and academics) and note that only a tiny proportion complain about speed and those are mainly running early versions of X on old portables. And slashdot is all about complaining, whatever the topic.
If you have been reading slashdot for the last few years then you will agree the turnaround in opinion is nothing less than startling. The FUD used to be unbelievable but now even Cmdr "one-button-mice-suck" Taco is considering switching.
The one big concern is price but even the slashdot crowd can figure out that Mac laptops offer value for money and most of them are getting their employers to spring for them.
Yeah these guys are geeks but their mindshare is worth a lot to apple.
While yes, it's true that many unix and linux people are switching over to X, the problem is that it's nothing more than a small niche attracting users from another small niche. Creating a slightly less smaller niche.
<strong>Computers are not like other consumer goods. The depreciation and built-in obsolescence is stunning when compared to clothes or cars. But also, computers for the most part cannot become status symbols because they are fundamentally anti-social technologies.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, that depends. When the original iBook came out, reviewers routinely described getting mobbed by curious people every time they went out in public. This went triple for the one reviewer who took the Tangerine model (which I still consider to be one of the most gorgeous computers ever) out for a spin.
The current models are more subdued, but they still attract attention.
Anyone expecting GPUL - or anything like it - to suddenly double Apple's marketshare is deluding themselves. It won't hurt, and it will do a little to rejuvenate the highly profitable PowerMac line (but then, until the problems on the software end are sorted out, the professional printing market wouldn't buy 12GHz 16 processor monsters with 16GB RAM and 1TB hardware RAID-50 if Apple offered them for $1599 apiece, because it still wouldn't run their AppleScripts, or Quark, or print to their large format printer). Apple has a lot of work to do on a lot of fronts. They're working hard. But there is typically a lag of a year or two before any effort really makes waves, in education especially. By and large, I think they're doing the right thing.
Mindshare doesn't translate into marketshare immediately. Computers are not cheap, and people don't replace them that often (certainly not as often as any PC vendor would like!). When they do, Apple's gain in mindshare will start to pay off.
<strong>Computers are not like other consumer goods. The depreciation and built-in obsolescence is stunning when compared to clothes or cars. But also, computers for the most part cannot become status symbols because they are fundamentally anti-social technologies. You cannot really use them to display yourself like people do with cars, houses, clothes, restaurants, and trips. To a degree, sure, but still nothing like those other consumer goods/expenditures. That's why price matters so much in computer sales: the item itself has little value besides it's use value. Coupled to rapid depreciation it is perhaps the technology/consumer item people are least likely to overpay for.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Built-in obsolescence is a good thing, I thought? The faster turn-around = more reasons to buy again and again.
If the Mac isn't a status symbol, why do I have Apple stickers on my cars. Why does my sister's PowerBook turn more heads than a Toshiba Satellite when she's reviewing notes at a sidewalk café?
Why furniture catalogs and TV shows use Apple computers more often than PCs? They're closer to art than a typical tower PC. What group does stereotypical art cater to?
Actually, a real cynic (and capitalist) would say that built-in obsolescence is exactly what the computer industry should design towards. As someone posted before, printers are highly lucrative, not for the printers per se (poor Dell), but for the ink. The computer industry is suffering precisely because there isn't enough obsolescence and they don't use up enough resources.
A sa tangent, if Microsoft figures out a way to make computers need a certain resource to run, they will be 10x richer than they already are! If Apple does it on the other hand, they will be out of business.
I don't have anything against built in obsolesence, I just think that because computers really don't have a lot of other things going for them, obsolesence makes it harder to sell expensive machines that will in 2-4 years be just as obsolete as cheaper units. A few things conspire to make the computer market unlike other markets, and rapid depreciation is just one of them, and probably not the most important either. Computers have progressed to the point where (for some tasks at least) any hardware is more than adequate. Office springs to mind immediately. I run Office 2000 and '97 on Windows machines as old as a P2 266. And they run perfectly. It took a good decade but any machine sold today is more than a master of Office. What's next? Video? Hi-res 2-D? Mayeb 3-D photorealism. A few orders of magnitude less people do those things than e-mail and office. When even cheap machines have the power to do that, what's left to recommend expensive hardware? Maybe a decade, maybe a touch more? Expensive machines will only become a tougher and tougher sell as technology marches onward. If you think the computer is a commodity now, just wait another decade.
And yes, I admitt, this isn't just a problem for Apple, far from it. Computers will be even cheaper, and all makers will have to cope. The so called price wars of the last 2-3 years will seem like a skirmish. But that's still a long way off (in computer years).
Comments
How many times have we reminded you that your whines will not be heard by Apple. . .
THere are factors that you and I aren't knowledgeable about. It's not as simple as you think. If Apple just lowered it's prices magically do you think it would be the trick? I doubt it. When you're up against a monopoly, price means little. You should know this.
Many of you comment that it's acceptable for Apple to have such low marketshare. And I would agree with you, if Apple were a normal PC maker. Apple doesn't make normal PCs. Apple supports an alternative computing platform, and its alternative needs marketshare to be viable. If Apple were a Dell or a Micron, and it held 2.7% of the PC market, then that would fine. In such a scenario, Apple would just be selling PC hardware - hardware virtually identical to the hardware of its competitors.
Apple thankfully doesn't make Wintel boxes. Of course, the only thing that a PC maker stands to gain or lose with higher or lower marketshare is higher or lower profit. Yet, Apple stands to gain or lose not only profit - it stands to lose everything. We have limited hardware choice since Apple is the only game in town. And with a proprietary OS, our third party software base is limited by the marketshare the OS commands.
Apple isn't just competing against Dell or Gateway, it is competing against the marketshare of the entire PC industry! There is no doubt that Apple is so much more dependent on marketshare than any PC box maker. After all, if Dell goes away tomorrow, consumers have multiple Wintel vendors from which to choose. Wintel won't die if Dell, Gateway or even HP go under. Yet, if Apple goes away, not only is it gone, our entire platform is dead.
So one wonders what the upshot is. It's very simple to understand this issue, really. Just ask yourself - "Self, if I don't care that Apple is losing marketshare, how much marketshare do I think Apple could lose before I would be concerned?" Is it permissible for Apple to fall to 1% marketshare? How about a half a percentage? Obviously Apple couldn't live all that well with half a percentage point. The fact is, if marketshare is the lifeblood of Apple, then the company has been desperately anemic for quite some time.
What is Apple doing in response to the marketshare dilemma? Well, they're promoting the Switch campaign, and they're selling woefully under-powered, dangerously over-priced machines. I'm a fervent supporter of Apple and will always be, but I'm not blinded to our weaknesses and vulnerable position. It is indeed unfortunate that I cannot really justify the purchase of any current desktop or laptop offerings. (The best value is likely the iBook, but I'm not happy with its specs either.) If I as an eleven year Apple fanatic cannot find a reasonable value, then I have no reason to be bullish in the short term.
I concur with JYD that certain contemporary concerns will be alleviated when we finally cure the G4 plague with the GPUL. Yet, the GPUL certainly won't be a cure-all. I've been very enthusiastic about Apple's hardware offerings at certain points in recent history, but even with strong hardware Apple has failed to increase the platform's long-term marketshare. The iMac was the most popular computer model ever, but after the initial boom, our quarterly marketshare sunk back down. We need sustainable, long term gains in marketshare if our platform is to be secure. With security will yield greater third-party support, and greater support will yield continued marketshare gains.
The Apple Stores represent a concrete, aggressive step devised to increase Apple's marketshare. Purchasing those high end creative software developers is another aggressive move. Yet, much more could and should be done. Apple cannot afford to be complacent with 2.7% marketshare. It is the underdog and must fight like one. My minimum marketshare comfort zone would have to be around 10 to 15%. Apple has a long way to go before I can rest assured.
Apple has had 2.5-3.0% for the past 3 years. It fluctuates. Last quarter they increased their marketshare from the quarter before that. Apple's Q4 results should be out soon. They'll probably be down, but so will every other manufacturer's. It'll be interesting to see if Apple loses or gains marketshare.
Even marketshare numbers are deceiving, because I know Apple is gaining a lot of mindshare...especially with the geek world. With this build-up of mindshare, all Apple needs is a killer app to open that particular floodgate.
4 of my unix geek friends have bought iBooks since December 2001. 2 years ago, they probably would have never considered a Mac. When Apple was stuck with OS 9 people had more reason to switch to Windows. If the desktop unix paradigm ever takes off, guess who's going to be at the forefront?
[ 09-27-2002: Message edited by: Eugene ]</p>
<strong>check out this recent thread on slashdot entitled <a href="http://slashdot.org/articles/02/09/26/0058238.shtml?tid=107"; target="_blank">flirting with mac os x</a>. Note the number of people doing real work on their macs (lawyers, game programmers, sysadmins and academics) and note that only a tiny proportion complain about speed and those are mainly running early versions of X on old portables. And slashdot is all about complaining, whatever the topic.
If you have been reading slashdot for the last few years then you will agree the turnaround in opinion is nothing less than startling. The FUD used to be unbelievable but now even Cmdr "one-button-mice-suck" Taco is considering switching.
The one big concern is price but even the slashdot crowd can figure out that Mac laptops offer value for money and most of them are getting their employers to spring for them.
Yeah these guys are geeks but their mindshare is worth a lot to apple.
[edit: their and there, d'oh]
[ 09-26-2002: Message edited by: stupider...likeafox ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
While yes, it's true that many unix and linux people are switching over to X, the problem is that it's nothing more than a small niche attracting users from another small niche. Creating a slightly less smaller niche.
<strong>Computers are not like other consumer goods. The depreciation and built-in obsolescence is stunning when compared to clothes or cars. But also, computers for the most part cannot become status symbols because they are fundamentally anti-social technologies.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, that depends. When the original iBook came out, reviewers routinely described getting mobbed by curious people every time they went out in public. This went triple for the one reviewer who took the Tangerine model (which I still consider to be one of the most gorgeous computers ever) out for a spin.
The current models are more subdued, but they still attract attention.
Anyone expecting GPUL - or anything like it - to suddenly double Apple's marketshare is deluding themselves. It won't hurt, and it will do a little to rejuvenate the highly profitable PowerMac line (but then, until the problems on the software end are sorted out, the professional printing market wouldn't buy 12GHz 16 processor monsters with 16GB RAM and 1TB hardware RAID-50 if Apple offered them for $1599 apiece, because it still wouldn't run their AppleScripts, or Quark, or print to their large format printer). Apple has a lot of work to do on a lot of fronts. They're working hard. But there is typically a lag of a year or two before any effort really makes waves, in education especially. By and large, I think they're doing the right thing.
Mindshare doesn't translate into marketshare immediately. Computers are not cheap, and people don't replace them that often (certainly not as often as any PC vendor would like!). When they do, Apple's gain in mindshare will start to pay off.
[ 09-27-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
<strong>Computers are not like other consumer goods. The depreciation and built-in obsolescence is stunning when compared to clothes or cars. But also, computers for the most part cannot become status symbols because they are fundamentally anti-social technologies. You cannot really use them to display yourself like people do with cars, houses, clothes, restaurants, and trips. To a degree, sure, but still nothing like those other consumer goods/expenditures. That's why price matters so much in computer sales: the item itself has little value besides it's use value. Coupled to rapid depreciation it is perhaps the technology/consumer item people are least likely to overpay for.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Built-in obsolescence is a good thing, I thought? The faster turn-around = more reasons to buy again and again.
If the Mac isn't a status symbol, why do I have Apple stickers on my cars. Why does my sister's PowerBook turn more heads than a Toshiba Satellite when she's reviewing notes at a sidewalk café?
Why furniture catalogs and TV shows use Apple computers more often than PCs? They're closer to art than a typical tower PC. What group does stereotypical art cater to?
A sa tangent, if Microsoft figures out a way to make computers need a certain resource to run, they will be 10x richer than they already are! If Apple does it on the other hand, they will be out of business.
And yes, I admitt, this isn't just a problem for Apple, far from it. Computers will be even cheaper, and all makers will have to cope. The so called price wars of the last 2-3 years will seem like a skirmish. But that's still a long way off (in computer years).