OSNews

That's not an easy question to answer. However, the reality is that a truly good product is not necessarily a good selling product.

One of the reasons is that a lot of people do not wanna pay more for something if they don't see any immediate benefits. A (supposedly) higher quality is not necessarily immediately visible. In addition, some people don't care about the higher quality.

Another reason is what was mentioned in the article. People are afraid of change. They would probably worry about whether they will be able to use all their documents on the new system. They are afraid that the new system won't work very well for them. They took a long time getting used to the current system, and they finally know their way a bit in the system and they are not wanna go through the same thing again and start from scratch on a new system. This also goes for businesses for example. Running your business on another system will incur a high initial switching cost.

Another reason is applications. Think young people. Young people play games. If you're interested in games, clearly, Apple is simply not the best choice. Related are applications which have not been ported to OSX. This is also related to being used to certain Windows applications and not willing to start using another application for the same task.

Another reason is a practical reason. Most of the people someone knows are Windows users. I think that many people just think it's better and more hassle-free to use the same system as the one that the people they know, use. It's better for sharing files. First there's the issue of being able to read documents made on another computer system. I imagine some people worry about this. Second, there's the issue of sharing applications (illegally or not). It's easier to find a friend who has a certain Windows application than to find a friend who has a certain OSX application.

These are all things, which are not immediately saying anything about the quality of a product, about how good the Apple package of hardware+software is. I'm also not saying that every of those arguments is "real". For example, I think there's not really much of a problem sharing common file formats between OSX and Windows. However, I do think that many people think that this can cause problems. All these things make it much harder to gain marketshare on a giant like Microsoft. Going the Microsoft way, is following mainstream. Most people are familiar with Windows. In a way, it feels like you can't go wrong with Windows. Even if you think that Windows sucks in certain areas, the thing is you know where Windows sucks and you know how to deal with it. Going the Apple way is taking a bit of a risk. I think that switching to Apple feels to a lot of people like jumping in the unknown. If they don't have friends who introduce them to OSX, then they don't really know what to expect.

In my opinion, all these things together help clarify why Apple's market share isn't going gang-go bang-go busters.