Monday, April 18, 2005

Apple and the 5% marketshare glass ceiling

Paul Thurrott has posted on www.Internet-Nexus.com a short breakdown of Apple's marketshare for Q105, putting it between 2.1 and 2.3 of all PCs sold depending on if you believe Gartner or IDC. I still read Paul's various properties, but even if he is a life long Mac fan as he says in his "review" or Tiger, the best I can say about his recent work is that he doesn't try very hard to think positive about Apple, but he easily does so with Microsoft. It seems that this trend has become worse as Apple has increased their success in 2004 and into 2005. I think it's incredibly lazy to just divide Apple's PC sales by total PC sales and say Apple's marketshare sucks. What matters much more is the trend in the markets Apple actively competes in, like the Consumer, Education, and Creative markets. What's Apple's share there? Is it going up or down? I don't think it matters how many laptops and desktops get sold into medium to large business IF Apple can convince people that they a) the Mac is compatibile with everything on the Internet and b) is compatible with enough of their work stuff they could use it in a pinch. It's still the age old compatbility issue. Unless Apple aggresively targets this, and not passively through iTunes and iPod on Windows, I think it will be hard to completely crack the 5% glass ceiling again.