Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

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re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008 - Ms Windows On Macbook ♦ Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro News

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[...] johnpapola made an excellent post today on their site [...]...

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:02:53 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

johnpapola — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:12:36 GMT

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).

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:01:33 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

Dude1313 — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:45:39 GMT

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>

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

johnpapola — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:10:10 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:03:41 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

johnpapola — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:31:50 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:45:07 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:29:32 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:25:59 GMT

John,

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

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

johnpapola — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:57:43 GMT

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.

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:51:15 GMT

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"

re: Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

mikegalos@msn.com — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:45:45 GMT

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.