Is the whole world having a "c-change" and going Mac?

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 27 November 2007 11:36

Opinion and Analysis

In case you might feel that those figures could be skewed because we're a technology site, research firm Net Applications tracks Mac OS market share each month by monitoring tens of thousands of websites and releases a very tight set of figures.

According to Net Applications, in September 2007, Mac OS had 6.6% market share compared to 4.7% in September 2006. In October, Mac OS stayed stagnant and even slipped back slightly to 6.55%, possibly due to the impending release of Leopard on October 26 which may have held new buyers back for most of the month.

However, the overall market share growth trend of Mac OS has been up for the past year and it will be interesting to see November's post Leopard figures from Net Applications. My prediction is that there will be a sharp increase in Mac OS market share.

Incidentally, Net Applications' figures indicate that the 1.9% year-on-year growth of Mac OS in September was at the expense of Windows which slipped 3% from 94% to 91% for the same month.

OK then what happens next? Well, I don't know how many people I've spoken to or blogs I've read recently with posts from people who have been Windows users for 20 years or more who say they've moved to Macs. So it's not inconceivable that Mac OS marketshare is going to hit double digits sometime in the not too distant future.

So after Mac share hits 10% or more, what then? Will Macs go on to rule in the place of a declining Windows? It's not likely that a company that makes both the hardware and operating system would ever again be able to gain a market monopoly - the last such company was IBM and those were different times. And it's hard to imagine Macs breaking into the business space.

While the Mac would not be able to attack Windows in businesses, however, it could kick the Windows only PC out of many homes. And all of the "c-change" folks I've spoken to are buying Macs for their homes not their office. Want to take work home? Want to play PC games? "I can just boot up Windows on my Mac," is the answer I'm getting. That’s not such a bad thing for Microsoft but it won’t make hardware vendors and PC system builders happy.

The next year should prove to be quite interesting in the desktop and notebook space. Not least because there is another player contributing to the decline of Windows market share.
Remember, Mac OS only took 1.9% out of the 3% year-on-year decline in Windows share in September. Presumably, the other 1.1% of desktop operating system share was gained by Linux. Anyone who thinks that Linux is not going to be a serious player had better look at the reception that the Asus eeePC sub-notebook has been getting recently!

Microsoft, meanwhile, is beginning to look like an ocean liner that has sprung a small but steadily growing leak that it is desperately trying to plug before it gets too big. Time will tell whether all of these "c-changes" contribute to opening the floodgates of an exodus from Windows in the consumer space.