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Paul continues his love affair with worldwide market share.  

Also, Paul, someone pointed out recently that the overall PC market share percentage includes Apple's growth.  That doesn't seem right.  You need to take out Apple's sales then see how much Windows' OEMs sales increased.  Of course you'll never do this.

Thanks, Paul.  Now I can feel properly restrained when I read a story or two in the Apple-following press.  All I really care about, though, is that Apple makes enough profit that I can continue using MacOS for most of what I do.

(And I just ordered a Vista upgrade package, as my need to run XP should end in a couple of weeks with an upgrade of our firewall.  That will leave me with 0 XP and 2 Vista--much nicer than one of each.)

Wow...3 and half percent. Snow Leopard should be add another .025 hopefully.

#1.  You've never even once demonstrated why anyone should care about worldwide share.  Never.

#2.  You've never even once proved how "huge growth is much easier when you're small."  I believe network effects make the exact opposite true in the computer business.

#3.  Your "analysis" which I could best describe at "meaningless 3rd grade arithmetic" doesn't address Apple's profit or compare it to other PC makers.

I think we all know this game.  Apple's worldwide share is the smallest marketshare number of all.  That makes it perfect fodder for pandering to the winCabal... which makes it perfect for driving traffic.  How lame.  Eat it up though, "weedmonk" and rest.  Nobody else with higher brain function looks at Apple performance in this crude, pointless way.  They notice that Apple's 3.5% share makes them more money than Dell.  And developers look at the trend lines and the growth rates, which is why WWDC sold out this year.

Use your brain, Paul.  I know you have one.  We all have calculators.

pingback from www.applebashingobsession.com

Simply said...congratulations, Apple, on another successful quarter. Regardless of how you carve up the numbers; this, along with the MS quarterly earning statement tells me that the PC industry is not hurting from the supposed "slow economy" that we keep reading about in the newspapers.

--tayme

Good post tayme.

Doc

Hi, this article may be of relevance here.

www.stuff.co.nz/4626722a28.html

@johnpapola

Market share is much easier to gain when you're small because if you are selling 1 million computers one month and then selling two millions computers the second month you have just posted a 100% increase, obviously. Dell or hp selling another 1 million, thats great, but its not that kind of phenominal growth that Apple is experiencing.  And besides Apple is small in the computer side of things but they are obviously not a small unknown company that would have trouble advertising.  

@knil I stopped reading when the computer genius could not figure out that he could use a free IMAP gamil account to move his email from his Outlook/POP to his Mail/POP account.  Or even a 60 day trial of MobileMe IMAP.  Maybe he should stick to his day job.

Thanks Paul. I appreciate that you take the time to average the Gartner and IDC figures. In an imperfect science, it seems like the right thing to do.

However ..... "Of course, as has often been pointed out, (by Paul!) huge growth is much easier when you're small"

It's time for you to step up to the plate ... i mean post a comment... and actually explain this particular argument in relation to Apple's market share.

Hint. If you buy a whole stack of 'penny shares'.... and a rumor hits the market ..... and next day your shares are worth .... TWO pennies ..... that is not the same as suddenly selling twice as many products.

So....  Please explain how this "huge growth" is so easy when you are little ol' Apple in the big bad PC market.

When the corporate IT world is handcuffed to Microsoft.

When all the PC OEMs, may not actually be cheaper, but certainly have many less expensive models in their range.

When Apple has fewer sales outlets in the less mature tech nations (the ones that are actually driving the growth)

When, 90% of consumers just replace their PC ... with yet another PC

(Another hint: Why do you think the 'Get a Mac' campaign targets PC users so strongly?)

Paul, I am not chastising you but, sometimes your reasoning... especially when it comes to the numbers game is a little suspect.

A lot of us here would really like to see an answer to my question. Perhaps there are some factors that we have not considered.

Is this www.stevejobsjiltedlover.com or winsupersite?????

Could we get a focus on the Windows world and drop the Apple hate sometime soon???  Its bad enough that Windows IT pro is so thin these days I mistake it for a magazine insert add.

Snap out of it Paul, your feeding the Apple press machine and not hurting it with your rants these days.

conclusion of the story: the Mac is still the main $ maker for Apple (for the joy uf us !), the ipod has still not peeked, nor has the iPhone of course. So still some good qurters to come for Apple.

As said by an financial analyst, the most amazing part is that the Mac is making big $ for Apple, and it's also where its prospect of growth is the bigger: "every additional 100,000 Macs sold adds about $140 million in sales and 2 cents a share in earnings"

Knil:

Yep unfortunately Macs are machine that run software. As such they behave badly once in a while. But I can tell you from years of use of both OSX and XP/Vista, the fix is usually simple on OSX and will ALWAYS leave your files unaffected. Reformat/reinstall doesn't exist on the Mac.

And even if you're a noob, there still are these genius bar to help you restore things for free (one of the big drive for people to switch). Having the peace of mind to know that whatever happens there always is someone to help you not far is priceless.

@runner

"because if you are selling 1 million computers one month and then selling two millions computers the second month you have just posted a 100% increase, obviously. Dell or hp selling another 1 million, ... etc etc"

That's what I am talking about. Where do you guys get this, perpetuating, completely flawed logic?

That said, thanks runner, you make my question even simpler to understand.

What is harder to do?

Increase your sales by 100%

Or increase your sales by 17.5%

Oh and being small is all relative... When you sell millions of computers are you still considered small ??

Voodoo PC have < 1% market share, so they should be growing faster too no ? Maybe they do actually !

I'm not that concerned with the global market share metric, but some people seem to like it, so that's okay.  I'm generally more concerned with earnings growth, fat profit margins, and quality products that people seem to want to buy.  Apple's got all those in spades.  

Microsoft, BTW, also has good earnings growth, fat profit margins, and good products, so that's okay too. This is no a zero sum game between Apple and Microsoft.  Both can grow, both can prosper.  For Apple to win, Microsoft does not have to lose. Remember that.

The odd thing to me is that a lot of people talk about market share as if it correlated to some inherent superiority.  It does not.  If it did, then Bud Light would be arguably superior to Anchor Steam, Folgers somehow intrinsically better than Peets.  In my experience this is not the case.

In my view it is not Microsoft that should be worried about the Mac (they make a boatload of money off of Office Mac and retail Windows sales for virtualized installs) but Lenovo and Acer and folks like that.  Microsoft gets revenue from every Windows PC, just like Apple gets the revenue from every Mac sale.  It's the hardware vendors slugging it out in the trenches that are getting pinched.

Just goes to show you - US Mac marketshare means very little in the global picture.

Likewise, it shows you there are more suckers in the US than elsewhere in the world.  ;)

MaryW,

Let nothing I said take away from Apple's accomplishment.  I think at this time the momentum Apple has gained from the perception that Vista is absolutely horrible(i like it) and the funny and simple switcher ads(and all the press attention...not that its completely unwarranted) are driving their sales.  But I'm no expert and I'm not going to act like one. And I probably shouldn't have said market share bc the rest of the industry is growing too so the market share wouldn't go up quite as much.  It's not easier per say but it would look like huge growth if you look at he percentages.

@daveinla

yeah definitely relative but small I suppose in the area of computer oems(Dell and HP are selling TONS of computers).  Their influence has helped the other manufacturers design prettier computers(dells m1530 and 1330 are pretty sweet).

What a great thread.  Paul, take note here.  These are all reasonable requests for expansion on the theories you state as fact.

Many of you know I've attacked these posts with massive breakdowns of why Worldwide share is meaningless except as a trend indicator.  I've had these same discussions with Paul in email directly.  His response has been this:

"I just like worldwide market share"

Hard to swallow, right?

MaryW, your post is especially great.  Those are just a few of the reasons it's not "easy" for Apple to grow.  Add to that the software network effect.  This can't be understated as it was one of the driving forces behind the meteoric rise of the Windows PC.  Everyone's mantra in the early 90's was "IBM Compatible".  That was the mindshare that drove PC adoption and drove developers to Windows, which drove more PC adoption etc, etc.

How Paul can overlook this and continue to play so fast and loose with things is beyond me.  It sure does play well for the Apple-bashing crowd though.  that's honestly the only thing I can conclude.  Paul is pandering.  He seems too smart to be capable of such brain-dead, rainman-like repetition quarter after quarter of the same broken "analysis".

In other news....

Ed Bott seems to find a crapware-free PC to be "amazing".

blogs.zdnet.com/Bott

Ed's great, but is this really the state of the PC industry?  Selling a machine that's not polluted with junk is cause for excitement?  No wonder Apple's growing so fast, especially among consumers where even their world-wide share is estimated to be 10% or more.

How is Apple moving all those PC's?

Which country buys most of them?  Whats it's share in that country?

Wae and Dipsh, my nephew did not want a Mac, so I configured an HP dv9700t as we had a $500 off coupon and he wanted a 17in screen, so I got the Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo Processor T8300 (2.40GHz), 4GB RAM, 240GB 7200RPM SATA Dual Hard Drive, Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1 (64-bit) and a bunch of other stuff, all for around $1,275. He'll love it. My older brother was happy to save $500, but our mom wants to pay for it. She'll be able to afford as I'm buying her a new car this year. Dipsh, I want to get the "C" class, as she needs a small car.

I found this interesting:

>>It appears iPod sales have reached a state of equilibrium with approximately 10 to 11 million units sold per non holiday quarter and 20 plus million during the holidays. Thus far, the iPhone does not appear to have cannibalized iPod sales, though the lower-priced iPhone 3G may change that beginning with the current quarter.<<

@Lindy

This is Winsupersite.  Paul writes about stuff that affects Windows users.  Last time I checked, Windows runs on a computer which is being counted in the numbers Paul is referring to.  Like I said before, if you don't like it, don't read it or at least don't b__ch and moan about it.

@kalewallace,

How exactly does repeatedly posting about the worldwide marketshare of Apple's macs affect Windows users?

Oh.  Right.  It doesn't in any way, shape or form.

That makes you Windows guys a bunch of lemmings.

@Waethorn:

"Just goes to show you - US Mac marketshare means very little in the global picture.

Likewise, it shows you there are more suckers in the US than elsewhere in the world. "

Yeah... I guess that's why Apple's growth was 4 time the PC industry in Europe, almost 5 times in Japan, and 2 to 3 times in Asia Pacific. (from a summary at ars).

And I'm sure it makes tons of sense to look at marketshare numbers that include PCs sold for everything from retail POS to niche industrial manufacturing applications.  But then, that gets back to the whole "deriving actual meaning from numbers" which neither Paul and certainly not you are interested in as it pertains to Apple.

Interesting stuff. I use Windows as well as a Mac. I'm not sure if that makes me a lemming,

Maybe half a lemming perhaps, perhaps I sould grow some green hair like a Lemming. (as in the game)

Or maybe I won't be defining my person and being through what  computer programs I use, but rather the other things like hiking :-)

I personally take from this everyone is still doing well, even in this time of suposed economic turndown.

"Oh.  Right.  It doesn't in any way, shape or form."

Hehe... Love the subtle irony between the sentences.

Wow.

To John & the rest of you morons asking Paul to explain why its easier for a small entity to post huge percentage gains - learn math.  Seriously, most of you seem as if you've had some schoolin', so you should still remember division and percentages, right?

Amazing.

Some iFriends asked why mac affect Windows users. Amazing, isn't that mac "do windows" too? "It doesn't in any way, shape or form." yes, maybe apple can stop the silly switch ads now.

Seems to me that the point of contention here is not with the math, but rather with the terminology that's in play.  Obviously, when you have a small market share, there's a lot more potential for growth than when you have a massively dominant position like Microsoft's.  But I would argue that growing any business by 40% YOY cannot rationally be described as "easy."

What tayme said.

Paul, please focus on Windows more, like the others just said earlier.

Apple makes wonderful products, trend-setting devices, but this is not an Apple forum. I'm reading your sites since 2001 looking for info regarding Windows. You say that Apple is relevant, and for this reason you have to review some (or all) Apple products. Fine. May I suggest to do that on that long forgotten Internet Nexus blog? :P

Regards,

Dan

@befusion,

"learn math" isn't a response.  MaryW and myself have laid out many reasons why growing an alternative platform computing business isn't "easy" in a world dominated by Windows.  You've offered nothing to refute that and neither has Paul.  There's nothing worse than zealots making very bold and clearly arguable claims as fact and then making no effort to back them up.  

How about "learn the scientific method".  Or "learn business".  As WebGuy said, growing any mature business by 40% YOY isn't "easy".  If it were, then the PC vendors that are smaller than Apple should be "easily" exploding their growth.

Fine, John.

Learn logic and reason.  Moron.

Oh for chrissakes.

If I only sell 1 of something, then I can double my share, by selling an extra 1 item.

If I'm selling a billion of something, then I'd have to sell an additional billion to double my share.

Finding one more customer is easier than finding a billion.

kapeesh?

Thank you!  Though, that still might be prohibitively difficult to understand for "some", apparently.

@Papola

I just noticed something from Ed Bott's blog that you linked. He also is plagued by insufferable Macboi's on every single blog post. They rival and surpass the variety here.

Like pungent flatus, iBoi's permeate the web.

@Waethorn Mac sales are going great in the US, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Europe.  Apple does not have much of a presence in Africa, South America and most of Asia.  Apple is doing very well in the places where it chooses to compete and the places that for the most of us, it really matters.

If I were in the car business and I looked around the world, I would conclude that the Toyota HiLux truck is the ideal vehicle for everyone.  Not true.

No-one is saying that either system is the ideal solution for everyone though. We're not kicking your grandmother, or passing risque remarks about your sister. We're just talking figures.

Why does this seem to offend people?

@gorath & befusion & the rest....

First of all, "befusion", you're insults only make you look even more pig-headed and ignorant.  You come at us with insults, are confronting with debate and retort with "moron".  Pathetic.

You people have such arrogance and certitude it's truly amazing.  You're making this very arguable claim and backing it up with nothing.  Just fourth-grade Lemonade-stand math.  This isn't simple arithmetic, though perhaps that's all you people are capable of.  We're talking about rates of change and derivatives on top of derivatives in a market with many barriers to entry and network effects.  Perhaps you don't know what "Network Effects" are.  Go look it up.  The Windows ecosystem and overwhelming marketshare has a self-reinforcing effect that makes the barriers to entry of competitors very high.

And Apple isn't selling "one" of anything.  They're selling millions of macs into a highly competitive and generally price-sensitive near-commodity market.

There is a reason why economics and it's principals separate between Micro and Macro level scale.  Market forces aren't linear.  There are levels of resistance to growth that depend on the market itself and the nature of the products.  Marginal growth isn't "easy" in mature markets for anyone.  There are also tipping points where network effects kick in and accelerate growth.  Apple's "halo effect", which is a theory and not a proven phenomenon, is an example of this.  Causality vs. Correlation.  Learn the differences and you'll be a hell of a lot smarter than every pundit and politician.

For Apple to be growing rapidly in saturated first-world markets where Windows in 95% is NOT EASY.  PERIOD.  Convincing a life-long Windows user to switch to the mac which is a different interface with all new software is NOT EASY, which is what these growth numbers require.  It's not like there's this massive market of first-time PC buyers in the US, Europe and Japan.  The barrier to entry for Apple to grab share from the Windows market is much higher than for one PC maker to steal share from another... which is basically a matter of price.

This, my friends, is what we call "thought".  Looking at an issue and doing your best to consider all the variables.  What you guys and Paul are engaged in by stating theories as fact and then calling people like me a "moron" for disputing them is called "zealotry" and "ignorance".

You are the same kind of zealots that claim marketshare is king.  Please read this paper from Wharton on the Myth of Market Share and get some friggin education on reality and business:

marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/.../myth_of_market_share.pdf

If the best you guys can do is "moron" I truly feel sorry for you.

And for the record.   I'm not "offended" by honest disagreement or anyone's preference.  You are all entitled to love Windows and hate the Mac.  You can argue reasonably that Apple's approach to products is right or wrong.  But the key is honesty... not snarky, hackneyed half-truths and outright misrepresentations.

Oh... and read this:

marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/.../myth_of_market_share.pdf

oops.  Wrong post. sorry.

I personally think the squealing over market share is a bit infantile.

I mean, the more Macs that are sold, the better it is for Microsoft given that Windows runs on Macs pretty well and Office is the most popular productivity app on the OSX platform. So Microsoft is still laughing all the way to the bank either way.

John, first of all, learn to read.  Its not hard, actually.  Give it some time, and you'll figure it out.  Probably.

And you can toss around all sorts of your special and beloved marketing terms all you want.  In fact, including such things alongside other pseudo-related mathematical terms furthers your facade, and probably fools many into believing that what you say is motivated by intellect, rather than ignorance and ineptitude.

But the truth of the matter is, you're wrong.  Paul is making a simple, concise and correct statement.  He's not over-analyzing the issue.  He's pointing out an obvious and very relevant aspect to the market share topic.

Where he went wrong, by you at least, is in talking poorly about Apple.  Because, obviously, God forbid anyone say anything negative about the company whose logo no doubt is emblazoned on the pillow on which you rest your narrow-minded and astoundingly biased noggin every night.

As I've pointed out before - you're on a damn Windows site, man!  If you love Apple so damn much, great.  But no one really cares, least of all most here.  You're nothing more than an Apple fan who simply cannot rest until every anti-Apple (save for a few - hey, even you have to attempt to maintain some semblance of objectivity on which to fall back once in a while) comment, article or thought is thoroughly "debunked" using whatever partial-truths and half-assed logic you can muster.

Do yourself, and everyone else here (save for Paul and his advertisers, obviously) a favor, and go play on an Apple site.

@cesrjr

Since Paul "Would never" do the pc share growth computation without the Mac, you can do it yourself. It's really very simple 4th Grade arithmetic.

(SPOILER: It changes the growth rate by less than 1% because even big growth in a tiny segment doesn't change the overall very much)

You can now put the tin foil hat back on and explain why this is a dark secret that's being hidden from the world.

Make a deal with you John. We'll explain why market share matters (which you ask about every time it comes up) if you'll explain why we should care about share price (which you bring up at least every third article that involves Apple)

@Mike,

You seem like a knowledgeable guy.  I'd like nothing more than to have a civil, hyperbole-free debate.  There can be areas where we agree and ones where we disagree.  If you go to my website and read my personal tech bio, you'll see I started on the PC.

I would love to have a great dialog about this.  Maybe we can aim to elevate the debate from either side of the fence and show Paul what REAL analysis is.

I don't disagree with him that the numbers are often used to hype the impact of the mac beyond what is rational.  No question.  But his focus solely on outright worldwide share is the opposite extreme.  I hate "fight your extreme with my extreme" polarized debate.  It's not intelligent.

So if you want to temper the flamebait (OSX updates are service packs, etc), I'll cool off the aggressive rebuttals and we can really have some mental fun.

@befusion.

You've provided nothing to demonstrate that "huge growth is much easier when you're small".  Nothing.  Your rant is just an attack on my character and intentions.  I've employed no "marketing speak", so I have no idea where you're getting that.  Business and Economics isn't simple and it's isn't clear cut.  How you grow sales of a product is not a function of "simple math".

Saying something is "obvious" or a "fact" does not make it so.  It is incumbant on the person making a claim to provide the backup.  That statement is VERY debatable.  You're just not willing or capable of having the debate.  Neither is Paul.  That sucks.

So go ahead... plug your ears and go "la la la, I can't hear you" like a child.  Tell me that I should just go away because "this is a windows site" while ignoring the fact that I keep my criticism directed at Paul's wrong-headed analysis about Apple.

I challenge you to find even a single post of mine where I claim Vista sucks or tell people to get a mac.  I'm not here to convert people and you can't pretend that I am.

MIke, to you ubergeeks, market share is paramount. To we in business or any smart investor, it's profitability, and almost nothing more, except for sustainability as well. MS has done good on both fronts. Unfortunately, their shares are less then when I purchase just before XP rolled out. If you've purchased MS stock in the last several years, you actually lost money [obviously if you sold]. This is obviously bad in the world of investors. I have two close friends and another person that I know are financial planners. While Gate's best buddy Warren Buffet claims it's a 'buy' or top ten or whatever, as expected, no financial planner that I know does, even though it's rated high. Feel free to put it in your portfolio, but it won't make you a nickle. Buy Apple stock and you can afford an expensive Vista PC:) [just kidding] The market runs the economy, not Windows market share. Obviously, gas prices are what they are because of market speculators, more than OPEC.

@DRWAM,

Ah, that breath of fresh Jersey air.  ;)  See, this is what discourse is like.  Find agreement where it's clear.  Disagree respectfully.  It's frankly amazing that in a slow economy with serious consumer confidence trouble, Apple with it's higher ASP computers are among the fastest growing of all the vendors.  This is completely counter intuitive and demonstrates that their value proposition is resonating despite their lack of bargain-basement computer models.  Selling $399 desktops is not a business anyone should want to be in and Apple isn't.  The volume may be there, which drives marketshare, but the profit is not.  This is what hurt Dell and why Rollins got the boot.  Marketshare doesn't pay the bills for the company or it's shareholders.

Microsoft stock is terribly undervalued and that's because Wall Street consistently misunderstands how the industry works. I mean, Microsoft's experiencing it's fastest growth in 10 years, is making exceedingly high profits and yet the share price is still low.

Even Steve Jobs has admitted he never quite understood how Wall Street works. I mean, just look at how ridiculously high Google's share price has been for the last few years - and their only profitable business is search and that has recently showed signs of plateauing growth. Which all points to one thing: the tech stocks are driven by media hype. The popular media darlings: all things Apple and Google have obscene stock prices, whilst the consistently growing giant, Microsoft, with no great media hype of any real note, and whose profits and market capitalisation are much higher than its media darling competitors, has a share price that is consistently disappointing. Dumb.

JP, what further hurts the cheap PC market is support. They make low to no money in profit, then must pay support. While I don't know the cost, it must ad to fixed cost, lowering profit more, or creating loss. Apple, as you have stated is becoming more dependent upon revenue from gadget sales, so it MUST continue to be innovative. The Zune looks like a good rival as an MP3 player and it, as well as others continue to improve. Apple needs to stay on top of the curve more than MS to sustain it's earnings, so Apple has a much more difficult job.

I wish I had a dollar for every market analyst that placed MS at the top of it's list of favorites, only for it not to perform. I'd be even wealthier and probably retired at my young age. I purchased my stock before a split for 90/share I think because it was 50 shares and cost $4500 [I like to play with money sometimes], and now with the split at 100 shares, it's worth $2500 and change. Now I have seven figures in investments with a large portfolio. Nothing in my portflolio, as well as the 44 available funds in my pension plan, comes close to that pathetic performance, or lack there of.

I think the clever thing behind Apple's strategy, DRWAM, is the fact that it continues to focus on consumer electronics where the profit potential is much higher than the commoditised computer hardware market. Despite the more than 100 million iPods sold, there are no signs of the juggernaught slowing down even though they are pretty expensive devices. The iPhone is the same. And as you said, innovation potential is and must be greater in order for their to be a demand for such expensive products. Kudos to Apple. In my view, Apple views any growth in its computer business as more of a bonus than anything else - there's much more fat to be had in gadget land.

@ All Apple apologists with strained math skills:

Small Company sells 3 computers a year. Big company sells 90 computers a year. Both sold 3 more computers this quarter. Small company increased its sales by 100%. Big Company increased its sales by.. 3.33%.. :(

100% growth in sales for the small company is a drop in the ocean in terms of the overall marketshare. That's all that is being said.

You guys give Apple fans a bad name with your touchy feely crap about everything Paul posts.

Rod, I agree on all. Especially about the Wall Street comment. How in the heck can MS stock be so flat? It just baffles me. There are so many MS products that not even you ubergeeks know them all. Lost headlines should read MS improves Medical care and Saves Lives- MS is helping to develop apps to decrease fatal medical errors, but up to 50%. Other software will improve patient access to their own medical records and secure them as well...see article below... If Wall Street is on top of every fart that Steve J makes, where is the justice for MS stock? I"m sorry for the rant. It certainly is not anti-Apple. but I have a passion for improving patient care and medical quality. Considering Wall Streets lack of response on this obvious Medical reform just bewilders me. I mean, the presidential race seems to have this at or near the top of the debate list.

@ Robert C

You're right, lets see..

AAPL @ 154 per share is valued at 135 with a float of 880 million shares

Goog @ $472.70 per share Is valued at 145 billion with a float of 314 million shares

MSFT @ 26 per share is valued at 235 billion with 9.3 BILLION share float

Its like comparing ants to elephants. It takes much more money to move Microsoft stock. Does that make it an inferior company? No. In fact, MSFT is the cheapest stock of the bunch right now.

Doc/Robert,

MS's stock has been a dog, and I'd agree with Robert that the market hasn't been entirely fair.  They're been growing pretty steadily while their stock has been in the dump.  The market is obviously not a purely rational mechanism.  Still, their growth is nothing compared to Apple and that hasn't come "easy".  Also, it should be noted that while the iPod and iPhone are major growth drivers, the Mac is actually making up MORE of Apple's growth than either product right now.  Apple is not treating the Mac as a second-class citizen in it's strategy.  It's front and center and it's growth and profit are exceeding the iPod now 4 to 1.  Excuse me if I don't interpret "Apple is focused on gadgets" as winzealot code for "the Mac is an afterthought".  Generally, I think that's the intent behind those statements.  Not saying it's yours, Robert, but in general it is.  

I think the key to Apple vs. Microsoft is simple.  Apple at it's core is a consumer company and Microsoft at it's core is a business company.  Jobs has always looked to Sony at it's best for inspiration.  Innovation is the core of any consumer products company and Apple views the Mac and its mobile devices through that prism.  Differentiation through innovation and a total solution.  

The hacks like Rob Enderle that think Apple is all about marketing have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

Apple's products are their brand.  Their marketing is a direct, simple extension of the product message.  Their engineering is driven by a consumer-focused vision and unified concept for what it means to be a Apple product.  As Jobs said, "design isn't how something looks, it's how it works".  Brand isn't how a product is marketed, it's the entire chain and how consumers view their experience.

Microsoft is built differently.  They've never been a direct consumer company and have thus never really had innovation as the core objective or need.  Their first major client was IBM, not the user.  Now, their customers are OEMs and Enterprises.  They deliver a broad, stable platform to a change-averse market and try their best to move the OEMs forward to deliver enough new value for consumers to upgrade each cycle.  

This isn't a slam against MS, and I'm not saying they never innovate (Media Center and Tablet are major innovations, if a market failures).  Microsoft appears to make great business solutions and works well with it's business partners.  What I'm saying is they're are driven by platform and strategy first and foremost and their main customers don't want the kind of radical changes and surprises that are core to Apple's target market.  

Why does this matter?  Why am I ranting here about this?  Because it cuts to the core of this marketshare discussion and what meaning we should derive from the numbers we have.

Apple is targeting the consumer and doing incredible in that space.  Microsoft, obviously, reaches the consumer, but is directly targeting business and is doing incredible in that space.  These two can co-exist.  Why do we see Apple embracing Exchange?  Because it's good and it's what business uses.  Why does Microsoft continue to develop Office for the Mac and sell it direct to consumers?  Because the market for consumer Mac software is very large and very profitable.

Apple may have 20% or more of the US consumer market and as much as 10% of the worldwide consumer.  That is a big deal as a platform.  That is more important than their 3.5% share of all computers used for every purpose imaginable.  I've said this a thousand times.  Paul harps on this 3.5% at every turn.  It's his go-to number.  That is dishonest bashing and pandering to the platform zealots.  It's code for "the mac is irrelevant".  Paul certainly devotes WAY more than 3.5% of his time to Apple and the mac.  Just because Mac zealots over blow the power of the Mac in the market doesn't mean it helps to pile on with equally dishonest rhetoric.

@RaaJ,

You don't get it.  You numbers don't scale in the market or take account for the realities of demand and what drives it in the market.  You've failed to demonstrate why a company that "sells 3 computers" can "easily" double it's sales.  I'm not sure what's so "touchy feely" about actually deeper thinking.  You're just lazy and more interested in bashing the opposition than being accurate or honest.

More ranting. Maybe a niche product, but if made correctly and less costly a Surface based structure, perhaps an attractive coffee table or something that can be shelled in such, that is a Family room media center would be a terrific toy. Powerful enough for gaming, TV control, and throw in X-10 or INSTEON to control lights [sprinklers, HVAC, security systems too] as well as all the typical software on a PC for erb browsing, photo editing, creating DVD's, music and stuff. etc... and I'll buy one. My PC does almost all of it now except for Surface. Media Center does if you just add Active home pro and buy a few X-10 light switches. OK, I don't know when to stop typing while I'm lifting weights, so I'll [try to] quit.

"And besides Apple is small in the computer side of things but they are obviously not a small unknown company that would have trouble advertising.  "

Actually, in most parts of the world, they are unknown and they obviously do have hard time advertising since, as a non-American, I've yet to see an Apple advert anywhere, on any medium.

Apple is not a global tech brand. They could be, but choose not to be. I don't know why. Maybe it has to do with that coolness factor or something -- keeping it small and privileged.

Someone above said you can always take your Mac to some genius bar or what not. That may be true for one country in the world. Elsewhere, such services along with decent warranty only exist for the PC buyers. Go figure which one people are going to choose: An expensive computer with mere one-year warranty (to be sent for a couple of weeks somewhere abroad for servicing) from a never-heard-of brand that only sells online. Or a well-known manufacturer with the familiar OS, on-site, long warranties, etc. and the products on display in a store.

This of course applies to the iPhone too, which now has some 4-5% of the smartphone market, though unlike current Mac efforts, it actually has future potential despite its ludicrous pricing, if only Apple understands to market it correctly -- i.e. as something "different", or even, heck, "cool", as it cannot compete on the traditional metrics such as features or technology or price alone.

John and Raaj. Mathematically the numbers are correct, but the premise is not, IMO. It can't be easy for any company to sustain 20 to 40% growth, just because the market is large. The human factor is that people must choose. If it was that easy, why didn't it occur in the 1990's, when Apple seemed as if it was ready to tank? The price was a big issue and looking at price/performance and value, the Apple product wasn't in the same league as it was over priced in comparison value for the average Joe, IMO. I was just a poor medical resident then, so I sure did know the feeling. I was lucky to afford a car and a place to live and eat. [I skipped lunches and ate two-for-one cheap pizza for dinner, but was seldom away from the hospital anyway]. It's been a hard road for Apple, who is lucky that Steve resurrected them, IMO.

@johnpapola

Based on " don't disagree with him that the numbers are often used to hype the impact of the mac beyond what is rational.  No question.  But his focus solely on outright worldwide share is the opposite extreme." how would you have a rational debate?

Since Apple only releases "outright worldwide" sales figures. There's really no other criteria that can be debated rationally. All the "But Apple ownz the x market" and "Europe doesn't count" and "Let's only count students in the US" are just hype.

As are, "share doesn't matter' (except when we discuss iPod) or "Hey, their stock price is up so you're wrong".

So, seriously, what do YOU consider a fair, rational debate given the limited actual data?

@Tero,

US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, many countries in Western Europe, Japan all amount to far more than one country.  Mac sales are way up in these places.

Service.  In the UK if your Mac has a problem it will be picked up in hours and then delivered back in a day or two.  No PC maker comes anywhere close.  So stop the BS now please.

@ JP:

You are the one that doesn't get it. It is generally very difficult for a small company that sells 3 computers a quarter to suddenly sell 6 in a quarter. That is unless, the said company is riding the wave of popularity rubbed off by an increasingly dominant product in another field. But we are not talking about a mom and pop shop here, but we are talking of Apple who enjoys a near monopolistic grip over the digital music player business.

These kinds of spurts happen, albeit rarely.. and the small company HAS to play up the fact that their sales have doubled, if they want to leverage the momentum to build up hype. Hype multiplies exponentially, but sales rarely does.

Let's get one thing clear. I really like Apple's products. What I don't like is their ethics and marketing practices. I don't romanticize the notion that they are flawless, and can't stand the idiots who do.

@weedmonk

"Wow...3 and half percent. Snow Leopard should be add another .025 hopefully. "

Seeing that Snow Leopard is supposed to both not add major new features and is rumored to be the first OS X to be Intel only (and thus obsolete quite a few Macs still in use), it may end up decreasing share due to the Mac users who decide to replace their obsolete Macs with new Windows Vista systems.

@Mike "it may end up decreasing share due to the Mac users who decide to replace their obsolete Macs with new Windows Vista systems."

There is nothing wrong with dreaming.

I think both sides of this tit for tat are wrong. As I stated on a previous comment, I hypothesize that both Microsoft and Apple are getting new first time users. Since the worlds population is generally estimated at about 7 Billion, the total number of computer owners at this time is about 1 out of a 1000. With nearly 6 plus billion potential new customers including emerging markets like Cuba, China, India, etc, there is plenty of go around for Windows, OS-X, Ubuntu, and other players.

You guys are going tit for tat that existing users are switching. Perhaps in a small way, some users switch between platforms. However, with virtualization heading more mainstream, you can run both equally and careless for this debate. Also, since HDD have been very cheap over the last few years, you can find hacked versions of OS-X and run them on the Intel platform. Not legal, but it happens. Also, as Paul has made clear, he uses his Mac to run Windows Vista. Again thats one retail copy sale of Windows that goes into the coffers of Microsoft. Essentially, for every copy of Windows that runs on a Mac, it makes the whole Windows vs Mac debate a moot point. I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future, Windows will run OS-X natively with their version of bootcamp. If Jobs will not sell it retail, some genius will figure it out and probably some lawyer will make it legal. Not only would it make sense, but imagine legal versions of OS-X running on Windows. Jobs would be a very rich man at near or better than Gates level fortune, with the one billion or so versions of Windows running OS-X. Just a thought.

Peace.

There was some stat, again from Steve J, that a large number of new Mac buyers were switchers, but I can't remember what I read that he said. I think it was more than 20% of new buyers. Still that's not a lrage amount of the Windows user base and in fact is rather small.

@subzerohitman721

I actually did think of hacked systems running OS X but figured that anybody who was willing to violate the license agreement on the OS was probably also willing to use a bootleg copy. I also suspect that what we're talking about is a tiny percentage of another small percentage so I figure it gets lost in the sampling noise.

The issue of copies of Vista (or XP) running on Macs, that's probably a bigger factor especially since Steve Jobs listed 3 separate ways to run Windows on OS X as major features of Leopard at his PDC presentation. Unfortunately, I have no idea what percentage of Mac users run Windows on their Mac. I know several users who never boot into OS X but I suspect that's also statistical noise.

The hackintosh scene is at critical mass IMO. Recent scene releases(Kalyway and iATKOS) make it beyond easy for anyone to install dual boot OSX hackintosh system. EFI bypass is broken so you get to use the vanilla mach kernel that doesn't brick your installation after a software update. Besides patched updates are issued within days of official release.

Yeah. I should also have mentioned that Apple actually advertises how the Mac is a good platform for running Vista as yet another data point in how many Mac (hardware) users are actually Windows (software) users.

Of course, the last platform I remember that tried to take sales away from Windows by saying how great they were at running Windows apps was IBM who did the "Better Windows than Windows" ad campaign for OS/2 Warp. The now-obvious result was that everybody stopped developing for OS/2 since even IBM said Windows apps were fine no matter which OS you used and it's not that cost effective to develop a different version of your product for a tiny market. Without apps that took advantage of their platform's specific features, the platform died.

@jp - "Convincing a life-long Windows user to switch to the mac which is a different interface with all new software is NOT EASY, which is what these growth numbers require.  It's not like there's this massive market of first-time PC buyers in the US, Europe and Japan. "

I am not being snide...but I have to wonder if you have considered all of the kids leaving home for college or leaving college upon graduation and moving on to a career...I would put these people into the first time PC buyer group...I wonder how many come from homes that already use Macs and schools that use Macs...thus they go out and buy a Mac. I know of quite a few kids that fit into that category...my daughter just graduated high school and is getting ready for college. Her and most of her friends want Macs to take to college. Many of them come from Mac homes and I know for a fact that 80% of the computers at the high school were Macs. Where do we lump those people? Certainly, they are first time PC buyers and not life-long Windows users.

I think that what this says is that not all...in fact I would wager that not even most...Mac purchasers are switchers. Remember, Apple has an incredibly loyal customer base...many homes have multiple Macs and many send their kids into the world with a Mac under their arm.

--tayme

re: Avro:

OK, we may extend the "one" country to "few". Won't change anything -- Apple is irrelevant to the global consumer and that is due to Apple's own choosing. It's Steve's strategy, not mine, so blame your idol, not me.

@Mike,

Let's do a little thinking experiment. It's going to require honesty.  What information do you draw from Apple's worldwide market share?  What would you expect most people to derive from it?  How does that information impact a developer?  How about a consumer?  

Is this single statistic enough information for any of these groups of people to act on?

If it's not, then wouldn't that mean this number lacks enough inherent meaning to be used as the sole basis for any discussion?

Now, Gene Munster has estimated Apple's US consumer share at 21% and worldwide consumer share at 10%.  Maybe that's wrong, but it does more closely correlate to other data, such mac retail market share as well estimates of mac software's share of the overall software market.

Let's, just for the sake of argument, that he's close.  Let's say US is 15% and worldwide is 7%.  

How does this change those questions?  

Then there's the absolutist approach is 30 to 40 million users whose demographic data include being more affluent, more tech-savvy and dramatically more likely to pay for software and media makes for a pretty compelling market.

Now, let's look at some of the biggest software firms that serve consumers and small business: Adobe and Intuit.

Adobe has just ported nearly all of their windows-only applications to the Mac as part of CS3.  Not cheap undertaking and surprising considering Premiere is entering with Final Cut as an entrenched competitor made by Apple themselves.  Still, they did it.  Even Avid has ported their biggest windows-only products (symphony and express) to the mac.   Intuit supports the Mac for both Quicken and Quickbooks and has recently announced a ground-up re-write of Quicken in Cocoa.  Again, no cheap undertaking.  But they're doing it.

Clearly, neither firm looked at worldwide market share.  And if they did, it was overridden by the factors I'm talking about:  segment share, userbase size and demographics.

I'm going to assume that your "concern" over the OS/2 death scenario vis-a-vis Windows-on-Macs is a genuine warning and not a prediction in order to "prove" that the Mac has no future.  The latter is zealot hack fodder, the former is reasonable concern.

There is certainly a danger of Windows-on-Mac and virtualization leading to some developers ignoring native OSX development in favor of saving costs.  So far, though, the reality on the Mac is the opposite as demonstrated above and in the general news on the ground from WWDC.

The developer community for the Mac is healthy and growing and attracting more and more software than ever before.  Which is my core point regarding the meaninglessness of this worldwide share discussion.

So... do you want to engage in this discussion, or are you just going to dismiss this as "hype".  it's up to you, Mike (and anyone else, including paul).

And so there is radio silence on market share debate once again.  Yikes.  Nobody's up for a real discussion on this issue.

@johnpapola,

What I would answer is that with only one number to draw from (and the rest being pundit estimates) we can only discuss that number.

Anything else is just going to end up with "my expert is better than your expert"

As to the OS/2 comparison, it was precisely a concern. I actually wonder what Apple is thinking in effectively telling developers to not target their platform. With a small market share, it's a hard enough business decision to invest for a platform with a wildly different API and tools and pushing Windows compatibility is, frankly, either a bad decision or acknowledgement that they've given up on all but niche markets.

(I did a more detailed post about it on my personal blog last June after Apple's WWDC 2007 when Apple essentially told their developers to, in Scoble's words, "Go pound sand". The post is at mikegalos.spaces.live.com/.../cns!D67AAFB9181617CF!690.entry if you're interested.)

Since this comment software didn't like the permanent link URL, here's a shortened version http://is.gd/12aT

Or, you can go to mikegalos.spaces.live.com and look for the blog entry "Life i the Slow Lane" from June 2007.

First, thanks for replying and engaging in the discussion honestly.  I have to say, though, that your perspective on Apple, it's developers and community are really out of step with reality and that link is fill with bashing and snarky lines like:

"less people use Macintosh than believe the moon landing was faked on a sound stage".

That's just a lame insult and your "coverage" overall is just a classic apple-bashing "death knell".  It's also totally obsolete.  Apple has since that 2007 WWDC released the SDK for the iPhone which has blown developers away far and wide and now has the most compelling mobile development platform on earth.

"I actually wonder what Apple is thinking in effectively telling developers to not target their platform."

Where did you get that idea?  Also, did you actually go to WWDC?

"With a small market share, it's a hard enough business decision to invest for a platform with a wildly different API and tools and pushing Windows compatibility is, frankly, either a bad decision or acknowledgement that they've given up on all but niche markets."

I brought up many more points than strictly the pundit estimates.  How do you account for Adobe's investment in porting more apps to OSX?  Or Intuit moving Quicken to Cocoa?  Or the growth of mac software and developer support?

You're painting a picture of something that isn't reality, which is a picture of developer retreat and platform stagnation akin to OS/2.  You also seem to be rooting for it to happen in that Apple-bashing "see, we told you the mac was dead" kind of way.  It's clearly not a "bad decision" to target the mac for many developers large and small and I find your analysis here to be built on ignorance and bias.  I'm being honest and direct here.  Not trying to attack you.

In 2005, the Software Publisher's Association estimated that 16 percent of computer users are on Macs and the Software and Information Industry Association estimated that 18% of ALL SOFTWARE SOLD was Macintosh software.

That is yet another indication of the meaninglessness of Worldwide share, which you are harping on with Paul.  

Truth be told, I don't think you are interested in understanding the Mac market.  I think you have an axe to grind for some reason and have some interest in seeing Apple and the mac fail.  Maybe it's just to prove that you're choice was the right one.  I don't know.  I don't get it.  But I find the glee and snark in your blog post and your posts here impossible to justify.

I'll ignore the rabid fanboism but I will answer one point. Why does Adobe bother? Because their products target the same niches that Apple did well in - graphics and video production. (Although that's nowhere near what it was)

The reality with Adobe is that they're very, very angry with Apple's lame lack of warning on API retirement. As a result, you're seeing a liklihood of the CS4 series being delayed for Macintosh.

I'd also point out that Adobe saw the writing on the way a while back and where they used to have a policy of "Write for Mac, port to Windows" it's been the reverse for several versions now.

Oh, and, for your numbers to work out, let's look at this:

Apple in 2005 was about 3% of the market but had 16% of all sofware sales?

And you believe that?

BTW: according to a poll done by the Gallup organization, 6% believe the moon landing was faked. I was being nice by not saying "almost twice as many people believe the moon landing was faked as use Macintosh".

Apple would kill for as high a percentage of the market as people who think the moon landing was faked.

But, hey, that's actual data. Can't allow that to interfere with thinking that a tiny niche product should be taken seriously.

But, let's put it graphically...

WWWWWWWWMWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWMWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

The "M"s are Mac users, the "W"s are Windows users.

RRRRRRRRRRRRFRRRRRRRRRRRRRFRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRFRRR

The "F" are people who think the moon landing was fake, the "R" are people who think it was real.

But, maybe you're right and share doesn't matter...

Okay, so again, did you attend WWDC last year or this year?  If not, how can you feel qualified to comment on what Apple is doing and telling developers?  I don't believe you are working with enough information to draw this OS/2 connection.  I think you're preaching.  Telling people and developers to ditch the mac because it's dying and join your team.

How can the 16% work out?  In part because enterprise workstations, vertical market terminals, point-of-sale desktops, a wide range of the PCs that get sold each year will not have much software purchased for them beyond Office and a vertical app or two.  In part because of the rampant piracy in the emerging markets where the mac has no footprint.  In part because Mac users have been shown to be more willing to pay for software and media (perhaps because they are more affluent as a demographic).

The Mac is a very profitable platform to develop a wide range of applications for the broad consumer and for various niches.  It's not comparable to OS/2 and Apple is certainly not encouraging developers to write for Windows and run in virtualization.  What they are doing to welcoming former Windows-only devs to come onto the Mac and use virtualization to continue their Windows work on the same box that they develop on the mac.

Oh, and Apple's entire developer toolset is 100% free Vs.  Microsoft's costly solutions.

You are coming to conclusions with almost no information accept the one marketshare stat that no serious developer looks at.  Devs look at the size of the market for their application.  That's why Adobe has INCREASED their Mac support since it's decline.  That's why many other apps are written for the mac.

Please don't wish away choice just to cheerlead for your team.

Your moon landing jab may being technically true.  There are many statistics that you could have used to demonstrate the relative scale of the Mac userbase.  

But the connotation is not something you can deny and was absolutely intentional insult. You're saying "look, there are more crazy idiots that believe the moon landing was faked than there are crazy idiots that use macs".

You're a smart guy.  You clearly don't like the mac or it's users and are unwilling to acknowledge any data that goes against you core believe that the  mac is so tiny that it's doomed.

Yet you are willing to trot out insulting gallup polls (which are likely no more reliable than anything I'm bringing to the table here).  You've given me not a single reason to believe you're interested in real discussion.  The entirety of your answer thus far can be summarized like this:

"There is only worldwide marketshare.  Any information of any kind that contradicts that number will be ignored"

And yet, worldwide share is based on estimates by two organizations averaged together that are anything but "fact".  You choose to believe IDC and Gartner on worldwide, yet not believe them on US or believe other organizations like the SPA and SIIA.  You only seem interested in the facts that back up your thesis.

@jp and Mike - Who really cares? It seems as if the 2 of you have commandeered Paul's blog to host your debate. You should use a differnt forum to continue, allowing only the 2 of you to post. Maybe even pick up a phone and discuss it. You may as well be arguing Coke vs Pepsi, Chevy vs Ford, or beer vs wine. The arguments in all of those are basically the same as the two of you present.

John, you should admit that you prefer OS X and honestly do not care for MS or Windows.

Mike, you should admit that you prefer Windows and honestly do not care for Apple or OS X.

You both have your reasons for those preferences, and they are both the same...each of you make your living using the tools of your choice...and from what I can tell, you both make a good living using those tools.

Most of the rest of us will continue to be geeks and look at, touch, play with, test, and use a variety of the gadgets and systems that are available.

--tayme

@tayme

Actually, I have a lot of respect for the Macintosh. I wish Apple had actually succeeded in one of their attempts to write a modern OS rather than bolting their UI onto Unix because it would have moved the industry forward, but that's my biggest objection.

What I do object to is the insanely disporportionate amount of attention that a 3.5% share niche product gets and the pass they get every time they screw over their customer base or lie about their competitors.

What I also object to is the provincial echo chamber of The Valley. For example, if you go the the computer museum in Mountain View you'd think that the history of computers was: First there were mainframes, then minis (but they were really just small mainframes so let's skip that), then the SUN Workstation appeared (well, OK, and Apollo workstations) and computing was freed and brought to the world - well, and there was the whole PC thing single handedly invented by Apple, too, but really it was Unix workstations.

@tayme

Just to put a little more perspective on it, here's what I would consider the ideal world...

-------------------------

Apple announces at WWDC 09 that the reason their OS work has been frozen into tweaks and tuning for the last decade is because they've been very quietly working on a modern OS and announce OS 11. It is a modern microkernal OS with personality modules that allow it to run apps from all previous Mac OS versions.

It is no longer tied to the 1960s teletype paradigms of Unix (like assuming native data is a stream of chars). It is cross platform and portable and will be available immediately on multiple 64-bit chipset based systems including Macintosh and Windows and any remaining RISC and VLIW architectures.

A full SDK is immediately available including a rich, managed interface and toolset that allows development in multiple languages.

Apple's system software market share, for the first time in decades, increases to over 10% of new OS sales. Bill Gates returns to full-time at Microsoft now that there is actually something interesting to do. Computer journalists start writing about features and potential rather than competing for who can write the latest "style" column. ValleyWag stops being the most important magazine in the industry.

------------------

It's not that I dislike Apple. It's that I dislike stagnation and lack of innovation being treated as "revolutionary" when all they are is new chrome and different tailfins pasted on top of the same old rusting hulk.

Let's add a little history here to reflect stagnation (and, yes, I know the names were sometimes System x or Mac OS x or Macintosh system software version x but let's skip the totally pedantic):

Mac OS 1 - 1984

Mac OS 2 - 1985 - 1 year later

Mac OS 3 - 1986 - 1 year later

Mac OS 4 - 1987 - 1 year later

Mac OS 5 - 1988 - 1 year later (really v4 with Multifinder)

Mac OS 6 - 1988 - a few months later

Mac OS 7 - 1991 - 3 years later

Mac OS 8 - 1997 - 6 years later (really just a name change for 7.7 to break clone contracts)

Mac OS 9 - 1999 - 2 years later (final version of System 7 in reality)

Mac OS X - 1999 - Same year

Mac OX 11 - ? - 9 years later and still no new OS

In reality, the big versions were 1, 6, 7 and 10 so those gaps are 4 years, 3 years and 8 years. We've now had v10 for 9 years and with the announcement that 10.6 will be a major feature free tuning release, we're looking at a minimum of 2010 for an actual new OS at the earliest. That's an 11 year lifespan for an OS. That's worse than System 7.

(sigh)

@Mike,

I like your response.  I think you have a lot right about the group think regarding Apple.  I simply invite you to avoid going to the other extreme and trumpeting anti-mac group think as a response.  Painting the Mac platform as circling the toilet bowl because of it's worldwide share is an example of the latter.

Or, to simplify...

It took Apple 8 interminable years to replace System 7 and that included the fiascos of Gershwin, Copland, Taligent and Rhapsody.

In the even longer 9 years of OS X so far we're reduced to people acting as though making the tray 3-d, the menu bar translucent and adding a back-up utility with a space themed background screen are earth-shattering breakthroughs.

That's what's pathetic.

@john,

I don't say they're circling the bowl. I say they're stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry. Perhaps that's saying that they should be circling the bowl but it isn't saying that they are.

@john

Or, to put it another way, the BIG DOMINENT MAINSTREAM product (Windows, in this case) is inherently not the place for innovation. Backward compatibility and stability of the industry are the keys that role requires.

Innovation should be coming from the smaller players and their innovation should drive the industry forward including pushing the dominent player.

There are two niche players in the OS market, Apple and Linux.

Apple doesn't innovate and won't because nobody complains about their lack of innovation. Their fans are too tied to Apple as a fashion brand and a source of their identity.

Linux doesn't innovate. Period. Their model doesn't allow for it.

That leave Microsoft to be the innovator and the fact that they've stepped up at all in that role is amazing. They could have stopped OS development at XP and Server 2003 and still kept their market share and increased profits by not having the hundreds of millions of dollars of expenses.

They didn't and the industry is better for it.

@mike - "That leave Microsoft to be the innovator and the fact that they've stepped up at all in that role is amazing."

But, they haven't really had any great innovations in the OS scene since Windows 95, in my opinion. That is not to say that they haven't modernized and polished the Windows OS...but what is truly an innovative anymore in Windows or any other OS for that matter? Could it be that, as many have said on this site and others, that the OS paradigm has reached its potential? Yes, there will always be the need for the OS...but what you described in your post that began "Apple announces at WWDC 09" was not so much an Operating System in today's sense of the word as it is an operating environment that would run on many Operating Systems, similar to what MS did with Windows on top of DOS and Apple did when they built OS X on top of Mach/BSD. Commodore did the same type of thing when they released GEOS to run on top of their BASIC.  See toastytech.com/.../index.html for several examples of this.

What will the truly next innovative system look like...I have no idea, but I hope that it appears in my lifetime.

--tayme

@tayme

First off, Windows XP (and Vista) are based on a totally different OS than Windows 95 so they're innovative in literally hundreds of ways that have never been present in a consumer OS.

As for the 'well, the OS has reached stability", I'd say that's just an excuse given by people who have gotten used to the stagnation and don't know enough of the technology to know that there is much, much more that could be done.

The multi-personality OS is decidedly not running a shell on top of an OS like Windows 3.0 did. It's what Windows NT did when it came out. Windows NT's actual underlying OS doesn't use Win32 or Win64 or any variant. The actual API exposed to developers is done with a personality module that rides above the base OS. Windows NT 3.1, for example, could run Windows, OS/2 or POSIX applications natively with each getting the OS that they wanted, not in emulation or as a guest OS but running together in same session. It's hardly new but it would be a big step forward to, at least, 1990s state of the art.

@mike - By "Windows XP (and Vista) are based on a totally different OS than Windows 95 " I assume that you mean that they are based on a new kernel, and I know that...but OS X's use of the MACH kernel is not in its original form either...so you have to say that it innovative...to not do so would be blatantly lying.

I am also aware that NT could run OS/2(text mode only)and POSIX applications, along with Win16 and DOS applications in a protected and limited virtual machine.

That was innovative...in its time. What you described is no more than an update to that. Is that innovation? I may be innovative for part of the OS, but my opinion is that the next generation of Operating Systems needs to be redesigned from the ground up. To hell with backwards compatilibity...new apps, new methods of input, new storage subsystems, new memory management, new shell design. If we are to truly move to the next level, we have to let go of today first.

Like I have said previously...you say potayto, and jp says potahto, and I say french fry...none of which are wrong.

:-)

--tayme

Yikes...my typing was horrible in that last post. Hopefully it is not totally unreadable.

--tayme

@tayme

It's not just a new kernel between the Windows 9x and Windows NT families.

The Windows NT family brought basically everything in the OS world labs at the time to the production OS world and Windows XP brought all those innovations to the consumer level OS (Things like a journaling file system, native Unicode, B level object security enforced in the microkernel, multipersonalities, DFS, EFS, etc)

While these had existed in the lab before (microkernels were, after all, invented at CMU by Rick Rashid who went on to head Microsoft Research) they were totally new to the OS world with Windows NT and totally new to the mainstream consumer space with XP.

Since the modularity of the modified microkernel design allows for pretty much any parts to be replaced or duplicated as needed, one thing to realize is that giving up backward compatibility isn't really needed even for radical changes.

@Mike,

"It took Apple 8 interminable years to replace System 7 and that included the fiascos of Gershwin, Copland, Taligent and Rhapsody."

That was essentially a different company that was making those mistakes.  The apple today is the NeXT of yesterday.  Jobs had left and formed NeXT which succeeded in shipping a modern, object-oriented OS.  Meanwhile, I can make the same statement about Microsoft and their Cairo initiative as well as WinFS and the other promised features of Vista that were dropped.  Big software projects are hard. Jobs appears to have a great track record with them, though.

"In the even longer 9 years of OS X so far we're reduced to people acting as though making the tray 3-d, the menu bar translucent and adding a back-up utility with a space themed background screen are earth-shattering breakthroughs."

That is a dishonest statement.   It's frankly an outrageous slam and a lie that makes it very hard to take you seriously, Mike.  I invite anyone that REALLY cares about the truth to go to arstechnica.com and read all of John Siracusa's OSX reviews.  Every release has massive work in it on all fronts from UI to APIs to core OS services.

"I say they're stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry."

I'm really trying to be reasonable here, but statements like these are so below honest debate.  NOTHING?  SERIOUSLY?  Apple revolutionized music distribution.  They've delivered mountains of real innovation in OSX.  They've developed the best mobile development platform with the most elegant and easy-to-use distribution system for software ever.  There is a massive list of things they've offered "the industry".  I guess the fact that every celphone maker is now trying to create "iPhone Killers" as music player makers have been trying to create "iPod Killers" is because Apple is stagnant and offers "nothing" to the industry.  What a load of $hit.  Honesty.

"Apple doesn't innovate and won't because nobody complains about their lack of innovation. Their fans are too tied to Apple as a fashion brand and a source of their identity."

Jesus. You know what, on second thought, you're really not worth an honest discussion.  You are a blind apple-bashing zealot that is completely out of touch with reality.  You're intellectual dishonesty is frankly disgusting.  Your amazing hyperbole is beyond all reason and accountability.  You are a partisan hack of the worst kind and I have no reason to waste any more of my time trying to have a discussion with you.  You are Waethorn.  Enjoy your delusions, pal.  I hope the energy you put into keeping your blinders on brings you some kind of peace.

@john,

And there you go citing marketing programs as technical innovations. (And citing other products when we were talking about consumer operating systems)

The point of mentioning Copland, etc was not to say "bad Apple blew it" but to say that even with all those false starts the gap between 7 and X was less than the time that X has been on the market. Perhaps you should reread it.

Lastly, to all the partisan zealots and Apple-bashers let me just go on the record as saying that I believe Microsoft has, in fact, earned their success.  Gates saw the opportunity for a unified software platform and made it happen.    That is historic vision worthy of epic praise.

I happen to share this opinion with one mr. Steven P. Jobs who said the same thing in the early 90's documentary "triumph of the nerds" in which he laid the blame for the Mac's mainstream failure squarely on Apple and their decision to go for high margins instead of market share.

You see, that's how honesty works.  You acknowledge the facts, give credit where credit is due and avoid insane hyperbole and black-and-white proclamations.

John,

Tell you what. Let's reset and you can tell me some of the "mountains of innovation" that OS X has introduced to desktop operating systems. Perhaps I missed them.

Remember that these should be things that are innovative (Not seen in commercial desktop OS prior to OS X introducing them), part of the desktop OS (not other products or hardware) and not marketing programs, distribution deals or other such things.

I'd really like to see some. Apple's role as the small share vendor should provide a lot of them. If I'm wrong, I'd love to see where.

@Mike.

I welcome the challenge and hope I can represent it well.  Later tonight I will post some stuff for you to consider.  I'm a TV guy first and foremost, so my technical knowledge has it's limited despite a few semesters of A-grades in CSE at penn state.  It ultimately is my hope to just defend my platform to intelligent people like yourself who I think have written off Apple unjustly (hey, we all have only so much time to learn about stuff).  Let's both give up broad proclamations and dismissals and we can really get somewhere.  I'll post more later.

One big starting point, though, is the Quartz graphics subsystem in OSX.  Another is QuickTime.  I'll expand on those later.

John,

Can you try to be specific. Saying "Quartz" without saying what the innovation is that your talking about is too vague to really help discussion. (The same for QuickTime which includes hundreds of technologies)

This should be interesting. Remember, mike...play by your own rules...you saying "Things like a journaling file system, native Unicode, B level object security enforced in the microkernel, multipersonalities, DFS, EFS, etc" will be considered too vague as well.

--tayme

I believe that the Quartz compositing engine when it debuted in 2000 with OSX 10.0 was very ahead of it's time and a dramatic advance in desktop image processing.  Then with 10.2 in 2002, Quartz Extreme moved the compositor to the GPU.  Core Image and Core Video came along in Tiger and power system-wide broadcast-quality realtime image processing on the GPU.  This is the engine that enables the really amazing realtime HD motion graphics in the Final Cut suite, as well as all the GUI image effects in the operating system.  I've seen nothing like Core Video within Windows (though maybe I'm missing something).  I know XP's graphics subsystem is nothing like any of this tech. All of this came about long before Avalon/WPF shipped in Vista let alone talked about at PDC.

I don't have the technical acumen to dig any deeper with this and must again defer to John Siracusa at ars and others.

Leopard added Core Animation that dramatically simplified the way devs can build animated GUIs.   All of these Core frameworks in OSX are apparently pretty awesome.

As for QuickTime, I believe the media playback architecture was amazing and revolutionary at the time of it's debut in 1991 and had no parallel on Windows.  Microsoft's rushed answer to QuickTime was "Video for Windows" which managed to get a few thousand lines of Apple's code into it which became the subject of the lawsuit resolved in 1997 with Microsoft's 150 million settlement.

I believe that Open CL, Apple's new standard they're proposing for GPU-based processing, has the potential to be another significant contribution to the industry.  I know there's been many others, but since I deal with graphics and video/film production, Core Image and Quicktime are things that have direct positive impact on me, the performance of the applications I use, and the reason the Mac serves me better than Windows.

I welcome any reasonable corrections to my history here.  What I don't welcome is some kind of "that idea wasn't invented by Apple" nonsense.  If Apple got GPU-composited GUI out to customers first and well, that's a major contribution, whether they thought of the broad concept of it or not.  I'm not interested in the silly "who invented what" game.  That's for suckers.

OK. Let's take them in order so I don't miss any...

Quartz 2D - I honestly don't know what this offered in 2000 that wasn't already present in DirectX. I know the subpixel aliasing was already present with ClearType (and still isn't anywhere near it for font rendering - partly due to some bad typography choices)

Quartz Compositing - I don't know of any technology in the compositor that's not already present in every GUI. Seriously. If you know of one, I'd like to know. I've never worked on the compositor guts and the base compositor is nothing new.

Quartz Extreme (and Quartz 2D Extreme) - The offloading of tasks for the GUI to the GPU is definately an innovation and I happily give Apple credit for getting it out the door while Microsoft did the Vista Reset (Microsoft had shown but not shipped GPU compositing of the desktop but hadn't shipped it and by our discussion rules, shipping is what counts) but from what I understand, Apple still has it turned off by default because they've never gotten it working reliably. Not being snarky, that is what I understand at least as of 10.4.x and I think it's still true in 10.5.x.

Core Animation framework - There are certainly some APIs here that are neat however since they didn't appear until 10.5 and equivalent APIs already existed in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), it's pretty hard to call in an OS X innovation. That they used it in the iPhone was indeed innovative but not what we're discussing (staying to the desktop OS world)

QuickTime Video - Definately an innovative product in back in 1991. (A little iffy as for it being an OS innovation since it shipped as a separate application but innovative either way)

OpenCL - Really hard to say since it hasn't shipped. All we really know is it's an implementation of GPU/CPU cross processor multiprogramming based on C99. We'll have to see what actually gets done. (On the parallel programming front, note that Microsoft has Task Parallel Library (TPL), Parallel Language Integrated Query(PLINQ), Robot Developer Studio and MS MPI (on HPC and CCS supercomputers). This is really language stuff and not OS stuff (on both MS and Apple's sides) so probably not relevant but interesting in either case since it's a critical next set of technologies as we move to the era of 32-core and more processors.

@tayme

"Remember, mike...play by your own rules...you saying "Things like a journaling file system, native Unicode, B level object security enforced in the microkernel, multipersonalities, DFS, EFS, etc" will be considered too vague as well."

But I'd say that

First journaling file system on a desktop platform

First commercial OS that used Unicode for all text storage

First commercial OS that used a microkernal

Introduction of OS personalities on top of a microkernel

would qualify. (DFS is probably too vague although "key-based data encryption built into the file system" would qualify for EFS as would "encryption key management through integrated network directory services")

Do you agree?

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@mike,

Thanks for the reply.  I have to disagree with the narrowing of the debate to "desktop OS" given your initial claim was that "they're stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry".  I'm principally responding to that overstatement.  But, I like this approach to discussion.  I think we can both agree that your "little to nothing" was a bit hyperbolic to say the least.  No hard feelings ;)

Like I said, I can't really speak to the technical implementations of any of this stuff.  All I can say is that everything I've read by people that seem to be pretty credible say that the implementation of Quartz was very ahead of it's time especially compared to GDI+ (is that right?).

"Apple still has it turned off by default because they've never gotten it working reliably."

What you're talking about it Quartz 2D extreme, not the GPU-acceleration of the compositor, which has worked beautifully since 2002 in Jaguar.  Quartz 2D Extreme is an effort to have the GPU take over the rest of the graphics pipeline. Not only composite the drawn windows, but actually draw the interior and changes like resizing.  I believe it's actually active in Leopard.  Tiger and then leopard very heavily optimized the performance of Quartz.

My end user experience of Vista vs OSX (pick any version since 10.2) is that OSX's engine generates a much more polished experience.  Why is it that brand-new, top of the line PCs running vista demonstrate horrible tearing, artifacts and dog-slow performance with application window resizing?  Even simple windows like IE resize horribly.  It makes the otherwise nice looking UI feel cheap.  You generally don't see any tearing in the OSX UI even on old hardware that can't support Quartz Extreme. That's been true since OS 10.0.   It's also impressive that Apple is able to deliver the UI with or without the hardware, switching software-rending that's still got the solid, tear-free composting alpha-effects and all.  Clearly there's some superior code under the hood with Quartz.

Another contribution to the industry is WebKit.  When Apple chose to build on KHTML, everyone laughed.  "Why aren't they using Gecko?  IDIOTS!".  Now, it's becoming a widely-used engine (Android, Adobe AIR, Nokia and others).  Is it the greatest thing ever?  I don't know about that.  But it is a contribution that's underpinning a ton of interesting work.

The other thing that needs to be said is that there are a great many industries where Apple's impact is very very powerful.  Media creation and distribution is the most obvious and continues to be an area of intense innovation.  Hardware design is another obvious one, and since they are a computer maker, it's not fair to ignore or dismiss that.  Now mobile phones/mobile internet... where according to Google the iPhone is already the number one mobile platform in terms of actual use of the browser.

Apple is not the end all be all or the sole innovator... but they're a great innovator on many fronts including the OS.  I take back my jabs at you and appreciate your honest debate here.   Don't let the mac zealots get to you.

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@John

We're not narrowing the discussion by staying with desktop OS. The whole point of the discussion was that Apple, as the smaller competitor, is the one who should be innovating.

On the GPU enablement of the window manager in Quartz Extreme, I'll grant that, then, as an innovation but don't see the big benefit if it's just handling the window and not content. I suspect it was done as the test to see if things could be handed off the the GPU and when they couldn't get content enabled, they kept it in even though it really doesn't offer much end user benefit. Still, it is an innovation.

On the issue of you having tearing showing up, I've never seen that in any of my Vista boxes. There were some absolutely horrible drivers for some video cards in the early days of Vista and I suspect you're seeing a driver bug. You should check for an update. It's certainly not something that is a problem with the OS.

OK, on to the new item you list. Apple choosing to use KHTML rather than Gecko. I'm going to totally disagree on this one. Not because it might not have been a surprising choice but because neither KHTML nor Gecko is an Apple innovation. They didn't write either one. To really be innovative, they should have created a new engine that actually did things that didn't exist in other desktop platforms. Effectively, neither of these engines are innovations, they're both clones of existing HTML renderers. I'd argue that neither of them were innovations even by the teams that developed them and certainly not by a company that chose to use them rather than write their own.

We really have wandered off with ActiveCL and QuickTime video since neither was an OS X innovation. (ActiveCL since it's not out yet and QT Video since it was an innovation as an add-on to System 6, 16 years ago)

Here's the original part of a message that kicked this off...

---------------------------

Let's reset and you can tell me some of the "mountains of innovation" that OS X has introduced to desktop operating systems. Perhaps I missed them.

Remember that these should be things that are innovative (Not seen in commercial desktop OS prior to OS X introducing them), part of the desktop OS (not other products or hardware) and not marketing programs, distribution deals or other such things.

I'd really like to see some. Apple's role as the small share vendor should provide a lot of them. If I'm wrong, I'd love to see where.

---------------------------

On the debate narrowing, I'm just saying that Apple as a hardware vendor has been a major influencer of the industry.  The iMac was a significant factor in migrating the other vendors to USB (who were resistant to [any] change).   They lead the way to widescreen laptop displays with the original Titanium G4 Powerbook.  The backlit keyboard was, I believe, the first of it's kind, and the magsafe connector continues to stand alone.  Among the most important may be that Apple was  a leader in introducing WiFi to the market with the iBook in 1999 (the first computer maker to do so). Lucent developed the tech and worked with Apple to make it cheap for a consumer laptop.  Apple also lobbied the FCC in the early ninties to open spectrum to wireless data, foreseeing the future potential of wireless networking.

Apple's innovation and leadership in PC hardware is indisputable.  It's core to their company DNA starting with the Apple II, then the Mac and continuing from there.  They don't stagnate like the PC makers have, typically ceding all innovation to Microsoft and Intel for reference designs and new ideas.  Apple tries new things without anyone's prodding and takes risks on new standards.  That has had a tremendous impact on the industry.  We can see their impact playing out in realtime right now with the iPhone and it's ever-expanding list of clones from every phone maker.

So leaving their hardware leadership off the table isn't fair to what their core business really is. Hardware+Software has always been the key.  Apple's launches Wifi... they build in the OS support.  Their intergrated business model allows this fast innovation. Look how easily they moved their Multi-touch work into the trackpads of the macbook pros.  And since this thread is all about marketshare of COMPUTERS, it's worth nothing these things.

Now...

"I suspect it was done as the test to see if things could be handed off the the GPU and when they couldn't get content enabled, they kept it in even though it really doesn't offer much end user benefit. Still, it is an innovation."

Glad you agree it's an innovation.  It does, however, offer a real benefit though.  First, it relieves the CPU of a ton of processing and decouples some of the GUI responsiveness from the CPU utilitization.  Hence, the OSX GUI remains solid and snappy even what all cores are tapped at 100%.  Also, the awful GUI drawing engine in XP that sends windows repeating in a smear across the screen when the CPU is pegged, or leaves artifacts all over the screen goes away.

There is a reason the Aero / WPF engine was considered one the biggest "pillars" in Vista and it's basically a Microsoft implementation of what Quartz has been doing for years.

It also enables new GUI approaches with useful animation and no CPU impact like Expose and spaces.  The animations aren't "eye candy" but very informative guides to keep the user oriented as the windows ***.  GPU accelerated compositing and rendering is the pre-requisite to advanced next generation interfaces.

Flip 3d is powered by GPU compositing, though it is a classic example of copying a feature while missing it's key benefit.  Flip doesn't show all the onscreen windows at once, leading to a tedious rollodex scrolling.  It also stacks them in a cascade that obscures the contents.  Dumb.  Even so, WPF had to come first before new UI opportunities could be part of the Windows platform.  This is big BIG stuff for application development and user experiences and Apple got there first.

So I think this one innovation is more than enough to demonstrate that Apple isn't "stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry".  Bonjour zero-config networking is another great innovation (as was appletalk before it).  I believe Macs easily networked long before it was reasonably doable on the PC (without major tech chops).

You haven't addressed core image and it's broadcast-quality GPU-accelerated rendering which is on display in an app like Motion and used by many third parties.  OpenCL is vaporware until it ships... but it's building on this base of expertise and there's little reason to assume it won't work.

I'd also like to point out that NeXT, the precursor to OSX, was probably one of the most innovative OSes ever given what it could do at the time of it's release compared to everything else.  To me, Apple now = NeXT

Here is the Apple model:

#1.  Concept emerges in computer science. (GUI, object-oriented programming, networking, wifi, etc)

#2.  A company or group of companies experiment with the tech.  Sometimes Apple is in at the beginning, sometimes not.  Nobody appears ready to take the risk or able to ship a productized version that can have an impact.

#3.  Apple identifies the potential of the tech and leverages their agility and integrated business to deliver a functioning solution to market before anyone else.

Computer Science is just that... science.  Each "invention" stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.  Those that discount all innovation that isn't original invention simply have concept of the nature of computer science.  As such, many of the discoveries aren't as interesting in themselves unless they are implemented.  WiFi is just a lab project until someone has the guts to invest in shipping and promoting it.  It only matters when it ships. Sometimes Apple is a basic research innovator.  More often they are an innovator in the execution. They're doing tons of real software engineering on all levels, though.  That's clear.

Harnessing the GPU for the OS graphics isn't a hard concept.  But Apple got there first with a great execution that is now underpinning all of their devices.  Quartz is the heart of the iPhone's fluid UI as well as the UI power of OSX.

As for KHTML.. at this point, I think they've probably contributed more code than initially was present in the engine.  It's not a macro innovation for them to take someone's engine and improve it.  But they are improving it tremendously and it's having an impact on the industry.  Without Apple, KHTML would not be what it is.  I believe, actually that, WebKit is now the only name for it.  This is a symbol of Apple's contribution to the engine.  

Microsoft didn't "invent" the engine in IE either.  They bought mosaic and built on that codebase.

So, at the end of this massive diatribe, I hope I've made my simple point.  Apple is an innovator that continues to contribute to the industry.  They aren't the ONLY one, obviously.  But their contribution is very significant in the areas of OS software, Application software, hardware, distribution and business models.

p.s:  I'm going to go to a Best Buy with my camera and snap some shots and video of the awful window resizing in Vista and post them at some point for other to comment on.

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The point wasn't about Apple as a hardware vendor. It was that Apple wasn't filling the role as innovative competitor to a dominent competitor in the desktop OS market. I can see why you'd want to change the subject but that was the subject

As I said, I agree that moving things over to the GPU is innovative and important. What I said was that just handling the window manager rather than the rendering engine was only a minor improvement.

As for IE using Spyglass (not Mosaic), they did license the code (not buy it) and then used it as a base for their own code. Perhaps a very similar thing to Apple starting with KHTML. The difference is that I'm not saying "using Spyglass code was an innovation".

What we've really come down to is really a trivial level of innovation. A couple of minor items in 8 years? You've had to include an item where Apple System 6 had a feature that wasn't in Windows 3.0 and include a company that was a competitor to Apple (NeXT) at the time of the innovations to build a list.

Really. I keep hoping I've missed some OS innovations in OS X. I'm really serious about this and think of it as a learning experience. So far, though, the premise of a stagnant product still holds. There's really nothing there that would push Microsoft to play catch-up. Microsoft innovates even when not driven by competition.

Rather than go to Best Buy to shoot video, why not just say what hardware you're running and what driver version you have and maybe we can diagnose your driver problem. (You said you were having the problem)

@john

Or, once again, the point of this discussion is to back up your statement:

They've delivered mountains of real innovation in OSX.

That's why discussing innovations in NeXTStep or System 6 or power cord design really aren't relevant.

I'd say that there were interesting innovations in NeXTStep. They were trying to be the "innovative small competitor" to unseat Apple. They failed, but they tried.

I'd say there were interesting innovations in System 6. Apple was still trying to compete back then.

And I do think the magnetic power cord is innovative. (although I wish they'd have insisted that their designers stick to one rather than letting the Mac Book Air team do their own) and I applaud Apple's successful push for USB and even their unsuccessful push for IEEE1394.

But, again, those do not have anything to do with:

They've delivered mountains of real innovation in OSX.

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As for networking, you made a couple of points so let's look at them separately...

Bonjour is not "simplified networking", it's a minimal resource identifier that offers a tiny subset of what Active Directory does and plays catchup with Microsoft's WINS that's been around for decades now. While the simple subset of AD might be considered an innovation, it's not an Apple innovation. The Apple item was naming their version "Bonjour" rather than calling it zeroconf. It's actually a public spec extension of DNS. (It's also a source of annoyance to Windows users since Apple installs it as malware on Windows systems when you install iTunes whether you want it or not.)

AppleTalk - No question that Apple innovated with Lisa in 1983. No question. No debate. Not in the least related to OS X. BTW: AppleTalk is a local non-routable protocol that's equivalent to the IBM/Microsoft NetBEUI protocol introduced in MS-DOS 3 and extended to be compatible with TCP/IP with NBT in the late '80s. It also (back in the 80s and early 90s) required no configuration - just plug in the wire and go and was the Microsoft LAN default until TCP/IP became dominent in the mid 1990s.

My knowledge of OS underpinnings is thin as I'm a director not a coder.  I think that you're trivializing Quartz and it's contribution to OS progress, and that's unfair since it was one of the single most important changes Microsoft made in Vista.  

If you judge the GUI subsystem's importance by how Microsoft treats it, then Quartz and Avalon/Aero/WPF are very big deals and one could argue that OSX played a major roll in orienting Microsoft around this priority.

So yeah, on the graphics front, OSX has mountains of innovation.  You still haven't commented on Core Image accelerated rendering.  Maybe it's because you don't really know what it does.  But it's amazing and is in use in the real world from Apple and third parties.. unlike WPF which still seems to have pretty limited developer support (though I hope/assume that will improve with time).

I'm sorry if this doesn't satisfy you.  I believe that it more than qualifies as a rebuttal to your initial statement.

"I don't say they're circling the bowl. I say they're stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry. Perhaps that's saying that they should be circling the bowl but it isn't saying that they are."

I think we can agree that Apple/NeXT have a pretty long history of industry-influencing innovation on all fronts.  If they aren't delivering the kinds of innovations you care about, that's fine.

I also think it's not reasonable to say that Microsoft can be fine without competition.  IE stagnation prior to the emergence of Firefox is proof to the contrary.  

This has been a great discussion so far.  Thanks Mike.  I think we'd enjoy a geek-out over coffee to really dig deeper.  Have a great rest of the weekend.

I'll add one last thing.   In an era of explosive growth in user generated content, Apple's massive contributions to media production at the application and OS level are very powerful tools that have broader implications than the not-so-narrow niche of pro and semi-pro content creation.

John,

Actually, if I understand it correctly, Core Image is a response to technologies already in Windows with the various DirectX systems including the Emmy winning Direct3D and later Media Foundation.

I think we can agree that NeXT did some innovation. However, that was many years ago. The point is that Apple has not innovated much with OS X and has been stagnant in OS development. That they bought a company that did innovative ideas when their attempts to create a modern OS failed is commendable. That they did so little since is sad.

On the "one last thing" (taking after Steve?)

I find it very hard to accept that the growth of user generated content is dependent on OS X. That some is due to consumer applications may be true.

But, again, we're talking about lack of OS innovation and not "is iMovie a better end user tool than Windows Movie Maker"

I'm unaware of any facilities in DirectX that compare to Core Image.  We're not talking about gaming here.  We're talking about very high-precision 32bit float image processing in real time being provided for free to devs.  This stuff is sick.  Apple's Motion delivers realtime motion graphics capabilties that are unlike anything I've seen on any other system.  (All that said, I still think After Effects is a better, richer tool)

This is what powers Final Cut Studio to deliver extremely impressive realtiem performance on standard hardware without custom ASIC accelerators.

That's niche, but it's result is a system that can power great content creation with dramatically lower rendering times even in apps like iLife's suite.

I'm unaware of any Windows applications like Motion and not sure that Windows (even Vista) has anything that can compete with Core Image.  I believe developers on Windows are rolling their own solutions.

Again, this is the underpinnings of the minority report UI future.  To me, that's more important that the execution at some lower level.  How people interact with the device can provide bigger gains in productivity than low-level optimization of kernel performance, etc.

The iPhone is the perfect example of this.  The fluid UI is a direct result of Quartz.  If you want to say "well, that's not a desktop"  I have to say that your being very antiquated.  Computing is computing and the range of devices on which you do the work has implications across the board.

John,

DirectX is not just for gaming. I'd suggest you look into it. They didn't win a technical Emmy for gaming.

As for iPhone, that's again a different discussion we can have by stealing another of Paul's comment boards...

But this discussion was about your statement that they've delivered "mountains of real innovation" in OSX when I said that Apple wasn't being an innovative competitor to Windows as would be expected of the small competitor.

So far, that mountain has been a few rendering APIs.

As for Final Cut Studio (Motion isn't a stand alone product aymore), again, we're talking about OS innovations in OS X and not just any Apple products that you happen to like.

The fact that Avid Media Composer runs fine on Windows (even on XP SP2) certainly shows that high end video work can be done on either platform.

I'm talking about Motion because it uses Core Image and other developers have built their applications on the same OS-level APIs.  DV Garage makes a shake-like compositor called Conduit that works in realtime in HD resolution based on Core Image.  Magic Bullet plugins are Core Image accelerated for speeds many times faster than CPU rendering.

This isn't about comparing apps.  Avid and Adobe have rolled their own proprietary solutions, and they can afford to since they're big.  But Core Image in OSX is powering even tiny projects like the raft of image and video indie software from Pixelmator to live VideoDH apps like VIDVOX.  iChat uses core image to generate its realtime effects and multi-chat 3D environment.  So this is a very scalable OS tech.

There is a tremendous amount of innovative third party software that is building directly on top of Core Image/Video and QuickTime in OSX to do realtime processing in ways that simply wouldn't be possible in Windows to my knowledge (unless you are Avid or Adobe and can design your own GPU-based engine from scratch).

So, the mountain of innovation is the GUI and the technologies that power it.  Since the GUI is the most important part of the system for end users, I don't think you can dismiss it as you are.

Remember, Microsoft has been talking about this kind of tech since "chromeFX" in the never-shipped and later abandoned "Cairo" project.  Apple/NeXT got there first and better and is still further ahead.  I don't believe there's anything like Core Image in Windows right now. Maybe I'm wrong... but I can't find any applications that claim to use it for what I'm talking about.

So I was in staples getting some stuff printed. I played with every Vista machine in the store.  Every one of them exhibited horribly slow application resizing performance and tearing.  Even the admittedly slick HP touchsmart.  There is clearly some serious problems in WPF compared to Quartz on the performance and quality front.

Again, you're talking apps and not the OS.

(Oh, and Chrome wasn't part of Cairo)

I still have not seen tearing or resizing problems. Maybe we mean different things since you see it everywhere and I never run across it.

The OS is a platform for apps.  My references to apps are all in the context of how they are using OS technology to innovate, and without which they could not do the things they do.  Remember "Developers, Developers, Developers"?  That's what the OS is there to do.  Abstract the hardware, provide a unified experience to the user and provide a unified platform for developers to expand the capability of the computer with new software.

If Vista lacks APIs that can do what Core Image can do, than the Vista platform will lack the kinds of Apps being made of OSX.  Saying, "well, they have Avid and Adobe" doesn't cut it.  The Mac has those too.  But the real innovation is coming from the new entrants and they're leveraging Apple's APIs and free dev tools.

If OS-level APIs that enable great applications doesn't constitute a mountain of innovation, I don't know what else does.

I'll throw another OS tech your way: Sync Services.  Given, they only work over the network with .Mac/MobileMe, but Sync Services has been providing much of the end user functionality being promised in Live Mesh for years starting with OS 10.2 and iSync.

Mac OSX also has a services feature which exposes functionality to any application in a plug-in like way which I don't think exists in Windows.  Than there's Applescript, Automator and the amazing level of scriptability in the OS, which I've read isn't remotely close to matched by Windows.

How about Leopard's Helps search system which literally points you to the menu item you search for.  That may be one of the biggest innovations in app feature discoverability in years, and it first appeared as the System Preferences search in Tiger.

Microsoft may have demo'd instant search first at PDC in 2003.. but Apple shipped it in the OS first with Tiger.  How about system-wide, in-line spelling and grammar checking?  That's a damn handy feature to have across every place you can type.

Core Audio I know less about but I believe is a more powerful, low-latency engine for audio processing, and Apple's plugin architecture for it has meant devs can target one audio plugin that spans all Core Audio applications.

How about built-in screen reading voice-over accessibility features. I know this used to be a very expensive add-on for windows from third parties.  Built-in to OSX.

Anything OSX can do that Windows can't is motivation for Microsoft to add the feature.  by all means correct me if my increasingly obsolete windows expertise is missing areas where Windows has built-in solutions to what I've described.

Like I said, I'll install Vista on my Macbook Pro, and shoot some video, then post it.  It really uglies up the interaction experience.

mikegalos@msn.com  said:

"Seeing that Snow Leopard is supposed to both not add major new features and is rumored to be the first OS X to be Intel only (and thus obsolete quite a few Macs still in use), it may end up decreasing share due to the Mac users who decide to replace their obsolete Macs with new Windows Vista system.

Wow, what color is the sky of your world? Mac users are going to dump their systems for Vista.... sure they are.

So you have seen what Snow Leopard will be? Please enlighten us, oh wait you don't know what Snow Leopard will be? Thanks for playing.

"That leave Microsoft to be the innovator and the fact that they've stepped up at all in that role is amazing. They could have stopped OS development at XP and Server 2003 and still kept their market share and increased profits by not having the hundreds of millions of dollars of expenses.

They didn't and the industry is better for it".

So Microsoft's quest for strangling the computer industry has been good for the industry?  Predatory Monopoly anyone?  Excuse me while I step back and wonder what brand of kool-aid you have been drinking.  <sits back and waits for the inevitable well Apple has a MP3 player monopoly drivel>

John,

Cool. Let's look at these.

Sync Services - Microsoft put IntelliMirror in the OS with Windows 2000. This allows for syncing of folders between multiple machines automatically whenever they're on the network. For example, when I dock my laptop at work, my Documents folder is automatically synced with a copy stored on the network so it matches with my desktop and both are synced with a copy stored on a network share. If I make changes to a document on any machine it's changed on all. If my laptop drive crashes and I replace it, a new copy of all my documents is replicated over to the new drive. I will give Apple credit for making this a commercial service over the Internet. That's a valuable innovation. (btw: Mesh does a LOT more as a platform but since it hasn't shipped yet, that's a topic for another time)

Exposing services - Can you give more detail (or a feature name) I'm not sure what you're referring to. Sounds cool, though.

AppleScript - All of Microsoft's object frameworks (COM, COM+, .NET, etc) which are the basis for both the OS and the apps are scriptable and Microsoft has provided automation and scripting systems for all of these for many, many years from the ActiveScripting initiative back in the1990s to the latest PowerShell scripts. I believe Apple provides easier UI scripting but I'm not sure.

Apple's new help system definitely has some innovations.

I don't know much about CoreAudio either but I do know that the Audio subsystem was totally rewritten in Vista. This may well be a case where Apple innovation triggered Microsoft to improve a feature based on competitor's innovation but I don't know enough to do the comparison.

On the system wide search, sorry, but Microsoft wins this one. While it became a part of the OS later than in OS X, Microsoft shipped it as a free download add-on earlier than Apple did. (The team had it ready and didn't want to wait for the OS release)

You're out of date on screen reading. Microsoft put it in the OS a long, long time ago and, in fact, won awards for innovation in accessability technology. Apple does have nicer voices, though.

I think that DirectX actually did win the Emmy for gaming.  John Carmack was even the presenter of the award.  It was specifically given "for pioneering work in near and real-time fully programmable shading via modern graphics processors".  that's pretty specific.

I would agree that DirectX has been some great innovation on the gaming front and that Microsoft really "gets" gaming.  They don't have the pro content chops like Apple does.  That's fine, but Apple's expertise has enabled them to build an OS that is very tuned for media creation and it makes sense given their strength in that market.  Any attendant of NAB the past few years would look pretty foolish to call Apple anything less than a major and even dominant player.

If you can find an app that is leveraging DirectX to do rendering on the level that OSX apps can do via Core Image, I'll consider it comparable.  But I'm pretty sure it's not.

Sync Services:

Sync Services has done a ton more than just file syncing.  It's done Addressbook and Calendar syncing.  Third party applications can use it to keep their settings synced (for example, the ftp Client "Transmit" will sync its list of favorite servers between all your macs, and the Yojimbo notes application uses it to keep the contents of your database sync across them as well).  Sync Services is, in effect, and rich-client + cloud service that's completely extensible and that many Mac apps leverage.  It's awesome and has been the primary cause for my ongoing .mac subscription.

Spotlight:

Regarding system-wide search...  I don't believe that the bolt-on search Microsoft shipped ahead of Vista was as powerful as Spotlight.  Spotlight actually involves a low-level notification system built into the file system that is realtime and only needs to index once (the first time you start using the system).  Spotlight also debuted smart folders before they were in Windows... which have been part of iTunes long before that in the form of smart playlists.

This stuff was being done in the BeOS, whose engineers came to apple and worked on spotlight, so their work and team clearly predate PDC2003 or the MSN search.  Copland builds even had this feature (though that never shipped). Even so, I will grant that Microsoft has been working on this too.  This is one of those well known computer science features.  Tiger just got it out the door in a mainstream OS first and in a way that maintained the index in realtime.

Services:

Get on an OSX machine, click on the Application menu (the name of the app in the menu bar) and go to services.  You'll see a list of cross-app system-wide functionality that can perform tasks against your data in your app.  For example, if I select this text and go to the menu, I can "Search with Google" or "Speak the Text" or "make a new applescript" from the text or "make a sticky note".  This functionality is pervasive and extensible by applications.  It's discoverability kinda sucks, but it's awesome if you know it's there and use it.  I'd call it a great innovation.

Screen Reading:

Glad they have it.  Very good.

Scorecard:

So, OSX has a pretty solid list of innovation that we can both agree on, even considering our mutual gaps in knowledge.  Microsoft has innovation too, so this isn't a zero sum game.  Would you agree that your "offer little to nothing to the industry" was hyperbolic?  Hey, I come to this site looking for Microsoft innovations I hope Apple will respond to.  I want Windows Mobile to be great so that my iPhone improves.  I would like nothing more than for Windows to be so awesome that I switch to it (and hence the whole world enjoys a better system).  

John,

DirectX Emmy - actually, this is for exactly the type of technology that you're refering to for Apple. It's used in gaming but is also used in video.

Sync Services - again, the IntelliSync APIs allow for more than just folder sync. That's just the feature that's bundled. Other apps use the sync APIs for other sync items.

The "bolt-on" sync that shipped was essentially the same "feature wise" as what's out now. The current version, in fact, is another add-on that updates the one shipped with the OS. It was fully featured.

Services: That sounds exactly like the extensible context menu handler that's been in Windows for about a decade. If I right-click on this text, I've got links to built in function and to external programs and to external sites. Old news unless there's something that I'm missing about the feature you're discussing.

Scorecard: OS X has few innovations in the OS arena. What little they have offered has been a few low-level features that are specific to niche industries. The only items that could be said to have driven innovation are improvements to audio driver architecture and improvements in display of help text. Hardly the stuff of the "innovative small competitor" that drives the "stodgy big company" to innovate.

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