OSNews

Apple's marketshare is small because they want to. There's nothing wrong with that; they choose to sell less computers but be more profitable than say, Dell.

Unless they expected Microsoft to rule the other 95% of the market forever (and I'm starting to think that's exactly what they want) they had to know this was coming.

Don't know why this is marked down to -2. If you read Michael Porter, you see that profitability as a function of market share is U shaped. You have high profitability at very low share, and high profitability at very high share. It happens for different reasons. In the low share segment, you have high pricing power and a niche customer base. At the high end, you are down the experience curve and have economies of scale. It is when you are in the middle that you suffer. As he says, not differentiated but different.

So as a matter of business strategy, it is perfectly rational to choose a niche and stay with it, and it may well be that this gives a better risk adjusted return on shareholder funds than trying to go up the market share curve.

Because the risk is, you won't get all the way there.

The difficulty in the present context is that the Apple people applaud the results of the strategy - niche volumes, high profits, while not being willing to admit explicitly what it actually is. So they get into all kinds of intellectual contortions about what is a threat to what, Apple on the corporate desktop and so on.

Lets be clear: this strategy means that OSX cannot be a threat to Windows, and probably cannot have much or any effect on Linux takeup.