Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th Oct 2009 21:33 UTC
On October 22, Microsoft will unleash the much-anticipated Windows 7. After the commercial disaster that is Windows Vista, it is believed the new release will turn the tide for the world's biggest software maker. A lot of people also believe it will put a halt to Mac OS X's growth, but I personally think we need to remember the timeless quote form Steve Jobs: "We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose."
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RE: I like grubers take
by google_ninja on Thu 15th Oct 2009 23:30
in reply to "I like grubers take"
Member since:2006-02-05
Member since:
2006-02-05
We’ll see about that prediction, but I think Wilcox is spot-on that Windows 7’s primary competition is XP. Microsoft really does worry first about raw market share, and XP is the market leader by a long shot. Such comparisons against the Mac are apples-vs.-oranges, though, because Apple isn’t concerned about overall market share. They’re concerned about sales only in the middle-to-high end of the market, and hardware profit share. Apple sells computers, not OS licenses, and their share of the profits in the U.S. computer market is somewhere north of 25 percent. (Maybe way north.) But so even if it’s true that Microsoft isn’t concerned with Apple’s growing market share (which indeed is just a few single percentage points), is there any doubt that PC hardware makers are very much concerned about Apple’s growing profit share?
But so here’s a thought: What if the reason why most PCs are still running XP has nothing to do with whether Vista is “good” or “bad”, but rather is the result of indifference on the part of whoever owns these untold millions of XP machines, be they at home or in a corporate IT environment. I.e., that switching to Vista, regardless of Vista’s merits, seemed like too much work and too much new stuff to learn; that the nature of the PC as a universal commodity is such that most of them belong to people who value “old and familiar” more than “new and improved but therefore different”. If that’s the case, Windows 7 may not do any better than Vista. Perhaps Windows 7’s competition isn’t so much XP as it is apathy.
http://daringfireball.net/2009/10/microsofts_competition_for_window...
Edited 2009-10-15 23:31 UTC