Apple Rolls On
Scanning through the news this morning I discover, courtesy of AppleInsider, that Lehman Brothers, which has just initiated coverage of Apple by its financial analysts, is expecting Mac market share to double by 2013. This isn’t what you could call perceptive, it’s simply the inevitable outcome if Mac sales continue to grow at 30%. A little bit of mathematics tells you so. However, it is more likely that Apple’s share will be bigger than that. As I noted in Will Apple Keep On Keeping On?, Apple is growing at over 30% in the US while the PC market is hardly growing at all – and this has been going on for a few years now. The Mac has become main stream and its growth is likely to increase beyond 30% soon.
Incidentally, Apple just acquired a fabless semiconductor company, PA Semi. This is an interesting acquisition, because it’s quite unexpected. PA Semi designs energy efficient processors that are based on the IBM’s Power architecture, the very architecture that Apple abandoned when Steve Jobs declared his love for Intel’s x86 chips. What is Steve up to?
It is impossible to imagine that this heralds a wholesale move back to Power – the move away was an awkward transition and it muted Apple’s results for a few quarters. It’s more likely that Apple has some specific (probably portable) devices in mind. When it moved to Intel it released all its software in the form of “universal” binaries that would run on both Intel and IBM instruction sets. My guess is that Apple will continue with this so that it has greater flexibility in the devices it designs. OS X now runs on 3 chips, from Intel, ARM and IBM.
Microsoft Puts the Final Nail In The Coffin of “Plays For Sure”
In the heady days when Microsoft thought that it was a player, rather than a bystander, in the digital music market, it launched a DRM capability with the name “PlaysForSure”. The idea was that everyone and his dog would buy “PlaysForSure” music and it would become the standard DRM – to the greater glory of Microsoft and the music business. And maybe one day Bill Gates would share a stage with David Bowie or U2.
Unfortunately Microsoft never saw Apple coming down the superhighway with iTunes. iTunes turned “PlaysForSure” into “Doesn’tPlayWellWithOthers”. Then in a fit of gotta-take-a-bite-out-of-Apple, Microsoft introduced the Zune with completely different DRM. “Doesn’tPlayWellWithOthers” then became “Doesn’tEvenPlayOnTheZune” and was consigned to the Redmond home for dying software. Microsoft has now announced that it is about to retire the DRM approval servers that allow users of “Doesn’tEvenPlayOnTheZune” to move music from one playing device to another. “Doesn’tEvenPlayOnTheZune” has thus become “SoonWontPlayOnAnything”. A service of remembrance will be held in Seattle in June at The Church of The Sleepless Coder.
Internet Explorer in Decline
As it happens Internet Explorer (IE) has been in decline since June 2004, when it’s market share was 95.04% and FireFox was but a rumor. Since then IE has declined to 78.8% market share and the decline has been pretty much constant with a mild increase in market share when IE was given a makeover with the release of Version 7, a few years ago. IE has two significant competitors in FireFox and Safari. Firefox has 15.87% of the market and Safari 3.32%.
Safari usage has a similar market share to pattern to Mac usage. It’s use is growing because Mac market share is growing. However, some Mac users, like me, prefer FireFox. Microsoft, though doesn’t even try to provide IE7 for the Mac – which is strange, because Apple is providing Safari for Windows. And lately the iPhone has boosted Safari usage in quite a big way.
One has to wonder; does Microsoft even care about IE?
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