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Douglas Schweitzer's picture
Douglas Schweitzer

The Security Sector

What does this really mean?

I read with great interest Greg Keizer's article "Windows market share dives again as Mac nears 10%" because I've been waiting for Mac to garner just that kind of market share.  I was doing Pascal programming in college on a Mac back in 1984 and while the screen was monochromatic, it did have icons and a mouse. Remember, that was almost a decade before the boys up in Redmond introduced the Windows operating system.

GUI aside, more and more people are starting to dispel with the preconceived notion that Macs are "only for graphic artists" or ‘those in the publishing field," as I've heard countless times. Even if we disregard gaming and programming, as far as the general public is concerned, Macs are a great alternative; the un-windows, if you will. Before I get a ton of hate mail from my Windows-loving brethren, I like Vista better than any previous incarnation of Windows, but hands down, OS X is just perfect for me.

What People Are Saying

Um...not quite a decade before Windows

Windows 1.0 was definitely shipping by the end of 1985. It was crude and clunky compared to even that 1984 MacOS, but "the boys up in Redmond" (who didn't move to Redmond until 1986) had certainly introduced their knockoff within a year or two of the original Macintosh.

You kidding me?

That version was so awful It's not even worth mentioning....it's was years before Windows 3.0 the first usable verion (my opinion) was out.....don't even go there with 1.0.

It doesn't mean much, because..

Net Applications measures internet usage, not actual sales.

On a different report, Net Applications points out:

"IMPORTANT: The December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage...Therefore, all December usage statistics should be read in that context."

And Apple's Sales are way Below 10%

SEC filings by Apple show they produce between 3 to 4 % of PCs globally. The sample of websites by NetApplications is likely biased towards Europe/USA where Apple is very popular. In the rest of the world, GNU/Linux does very well and Apple is just beginning to take hold. It could also be that a lot of PCs are installed with Apple's OS against Apple's wishes. I do not think 10% of PC users in the USA are that geeky. Perhaps a few %, though.