

Mac OS X market share cracks 8% - alexk
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9115988&source=rss_news

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biohacker42
Does anyone care to guess what the _critical_ level is?

Presumably at some point OS X stops being a niche market, and producing cross
platform software becomes almost mandatory.

I'd guess 30%.

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LogicHoleFlaw
It's exactly the point at which the loss of revenue due to incompatibility is
greater than the cost of developing cross-platform.

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akd
Thanks for exactly restating his question. I needed that.

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bdr
Hey, it made things clearer. For example, when you break it down like that,
you might realize that the cost vs. benefit analysis is different for
different kinds of software -- there is no "critical level" in general. This
is good news for Apple. As their market share grows, software crosses that
threshold continuously (as opposed to all at once). That makes their platform
become continuously more appealing to users too, creating a positive feedback
loop.

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eelco
Uh. In other news, no wait, in the same news (the site the article is based
on, link at the bottom), Linux' market share almost _doubled_ in 9 months.
How's that for growth ;)

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Prrometheus
I was intrigued by that, too.

However, iPhone share is growing quicker and it's going to be slightly
embarrassing when the iPhone passes Linux in market share.

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siculars
well with the five or so apple laptops and desktops i have in my house alone i
wonder what took them so long. but really, i would like to thank microsoft for
vista ;)

disclaimer, not including two iphones and various generations of ipods :)

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omouse
Are they counting the iPhone, iPod touch or iPod etc operating systems as part
of OS X?

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unalone
No. This includes desktop OS only.

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tlrobinson
I'd like to see market share stats broken down by segments of the market, i.e.
business, servers, consumers, etc.

I suspect OS X's consumer market share is much higher.

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opal
Too bad it's a fake *nix. Not compatible out of the box with 95% of linux
applications.

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lallysingh
darwinports does a pretty good job. And for many things, the mac has better
software available.

Besides "fake *nix" could apply as well to linux as to darwin. Remember that
OS X actually licensed the Unix name...

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opal
No. You can compile the vast majority of unix projects on linux and run them
with no modifications. Darwinports is ok if you want only the top 1% of
popular projects, often several versions behind.

