Why

[Akkarin]

Why when Macs can do everything that windows can do, do they have such a low market share?

Do you think this will change in the future?

Akkarin

[mindbend]

I could throw out a very long-winded answer, and there are a lot of reasons, but some primary ones are:

Twenty years ago Apple made a decision (actually, Jean-Louis Gasse) to appease its shareholders and go for "profit margin" over "market share". Big mistake. They made a lot of money and the shareholders were happy, but they were losing ground to the cheaper machines. They never made it up.

The public at large has a proven track record of accepting cheaper alternatives as long as they're "good enough". The VHS/Betamax is the classic example of this.

Had Apple chosen to get Macs in as many hands as possible, almost as loss leaders, it would have been interesting.

For a wonderful, rich history of Apple's early years, directly from the developers who gave us the Mac, visit:

www.folklore.org

Note that it's mostly about how the Mac was developed, not so much about their market share and business model.

[eric2006]

In my oppinion..
1. Everyone has windows
2. Windows works
3. Windows is cheap (machine-wise)
4. Lots of free programs for windows (picasa, openoffice..)
5. More software for windows (sure, you can do everything with mac, but there's more ways to do it with windows)
6. EVERYTHING for a large amount of computer consumers is made for windows. Because a lot of people have windows. It's true.

There's more stuff, but it's late..

[fryke]

Let's go back in time. Apple actually had much more market share initially. When Windows came to version 3 in 1992, it certainly wasn't better than the then current Macintosh OS, then simply called "System". But the PC world had two definite advantages: PCs were cheaper and available from several (many, actually) vendors in various configurations, whereas you could only get so many different Mac models, all from one vendor at higher prices. If Apple had taken the opportunity and licensed the OS to other manufacturers then, history would've looked different.

_Today_, eric's points are the important ones. But it's important to see that if the market would start today instead of 30 years ago, things would probably look different. I guess in such a case, we'd see 80% linux, 19% Mac and maybe 1% freaks who'd pay for an inferior XP-rience, because they like the gummi look.

This thread certainly is more fitting in the opinions forum, so I'm moving it there.

[powermac]

I believe the future is changing, and Apple is surely on the rise. As mentioned exposure is one way to advertise, something Apple did not have much of in the early years. I remember purchasing (parents) my first Apple's at Montgomery Wards, or Sears. Shortly after the cheap PCs came in, and the Apple display of products got moved to the back, and further back in the store. The nearest Apple retail store for me growing up was in Syracuse. Even at that, the store sold both PC & Macs. The Apple section, had one salesman, and only a small portion of the display floor was provided.

When major stores like Sears, stop carrying Apple, there was little exposure left. Only repeat customers like myself would purchase a product they could not actually see.

In my opinion, the Apple stores have given Apple some great exposure. People can actually walk in and play-around with the products. That is important when trying to sell.

I am not sure how I feel about market-share percentage. Personally, as long as they continue to make quality products, I will continue to purchase. As we have seen lately, Apple's pricing is certainly competitive.

I feel that Apple needs to start targeting the young professional consumer. Many people get the image from Apple of a youth culture icon, and don't take there products seriously. As a professional in the education field, I can share that during meetings, people bring there ThinkPads, or Dells. I sit, at the other end of the table, with my PB flashing its Apple logo on the back of the display. Occasionally, I get a curious colleague looking over my shoulder to see exactly what it is I have. In the end, most don't take it that serious, and consider me the rebel on the team. Just a few years back, Apple was a leader in educational computing.
The future looks bright for Apple.

[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.

[Akkarin]

Thank you for your answers they are helping me to understand the Apple/Mac brand more.

[Thank The Cheese]

I think it is changing too, but it's going to be a long, slow process. Windows users are very stubburn. They're not necessarily anti-mac, just afraid of change and of the unfamiliar.

I teach a class of first-year students at a local uni - most of them are just out of high school and have never used a mac before. I can tell you that 1 session with the Macs and they are ready to throw them through the wall. They hate them. I don't mean dislike, I mean they H*A*T*E THEM. If you could only see the way they carry on about the Macs. It's like trying to get a 10-year-old to do algebra, you have to drag them kicking and screaming through every control-click.

And it's frustrating for me, because I know that if they knew how to use Macs as much as they knew how to use Windows, they would love them, but if it doesn't do the same thing XP does and in the same way, they give up and don't want to know about it.

So my point is, that if the tables do turn, it's going to be very very slow. Most people are not going to buy a mac until they are already familiar with it. Once I started working and had my own money to spend, I started buying Macs again (my family was all PC through the 90s). So because I carried my iBook everywhere, whenever my sister or mum wanetd t use the internet, I'd give them my iBook and they would slowly learn the basics over the course of a couple of years. 5 years later and most of my family have switched to Macs, but only after they were no longer unfamiliar and scary.