A survey by a company called InsightExpress has an interesting conclusion. After surveying 500 pc seeking americans they find that 14% consider Apple computers their favorite. Since Apple currently has ~3% of the market share that means that various barriers are turning away a large amount of Apple fans to second and third brand choices. If Apple could capture the full 14%, they would remake the entire personal computing landscape, not only for Apple shareholders but for fans of any and all other alternative operating systems out there. Right now the economics of PC marketshare makes it cost effective for an awful lot of software developers to go mono-platform and the mono-platform of choice is Windows with a huge majority of the market. With a 14% share, a great deal more applications would have a strong economic case for going multi-platform. The nature of going multi-platform is that adding that second platform is a great deal harder than adding a third platform.
So what's keeping the missing 11% away from Apple? The survey's public release doesn't seem to say. For Apple fans the answers are critical. For those who simply like innovation, variety, and strong competitive markets, there's a great deal of interest too.
Posted by TMLutas at December 8, 2003 05:36 PM