[symphonix]

I think the state of Apple's current market share can be traced to poor decisions and poor marketing in the late eighties and early nineties. When the Mac was introduced in 1984, Apple were a powerful force in the computer industry.

During the "bad years" of 1990-96, Apple's market share was eroded by poor leadership, poor marketing choices, and bland and rather uninspired products.

They were also seeing heavy competition from Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Dell, Compaq and a thousand tiny computer companies who had worked out that they could sell PC hardware under their own badges with zero product development or testing costs. It was hard for Apple to compete with hundreds of ads in every computer magazine, all pushing no-name PC hardware. These small companies also made sure that these magazines also ran very pro-Windows stories. When your computer magazine has 150 advertisers, one of them is Apple and the other 149 are selling no-name PCs, you're going to want to run plenty of PC and Windows stuff.

I'll be honest, Apple really didn't come back to life until Steve Jobs returned and put a bomb under all of their backsides. With Jobs' charismatic leadership, the migration to an open-source unix based OS, the technology brought over from Next, and a cultural revival on the Apple campus that once again encouraged innovation, Apple were quick to recover. They've doubled their market share from the "bad days" and are one of the only major IT corporations to remain profitable in the wake of the dot-com crash. They've gone from the dull products of the early nineties, which were little more than "lets try and beat the PCs at their own game" to a culture of "Lets innovate, and try things that have never been done before".

I'm a great admirer of the way Apple are doing things now, and I expect that in the next ten years they will double their market share again. That still leaves them short of their glory days of the mid-eighties, but would make them a very big player. Here's hoping.