Stan Beer
Wednesday, 02 April 2008 17:37
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Macs are not iPods. While they certainly provide value
for money, Macs are at the premium end of the personal computing market
and they come in a limited number of models and configurations. As
most Mac users will tell you, Apple makes beautiful hardware. However,
it's hardware that doesn't provide the flexibility, choice and price
points required by more than 90% of personal computing users that
continue to choose Windows only PCs.
Yet many PC users would love to have the option
of running Mac OS X in a dual boot configuration with Windows. Imagine
that you're in the market for say a Dell or HP notebook and you had the
choice of paying a couple of hundred dollars or so extra to get a
pre-installed dual boot Vista and Leopard model. Would you pay it? My
bet is that many would.
Most will argue that Apple, being a hardware company, would never allow
such a thing because selling Leopard to the PC market would cannibalise
Apple's Mac sales. I would argue the opposite. The vast majority of Mac
users would stay with the products they know and trust. Most of them
don't care or want to know about Windows PCs and those that do have a
need for Windows would rather install it on their beloved Macs than buy
PCs. There would be very little leakage of the single mouse button
brigade because they love the design, the elegance, the coolness and
the whole Apple Mac experience.
On the other hand, there's an untapped market of 1 billion PC users,
many of whom are highly dissatisfied with Vista and Windows in general,
that literally could be ripe for the picking for Apple. Offering a
version of Leopard to large sections of that market initially through
selected major OEM vendors would without a doubt produce significant
software sales and additional revenues for Apple.
Perhaps even more importantly for Apple, however, is that a far wider
audience than just Mac users would be exposed to Leopard, probably the
most advanced personal computing operating system available today. Some
of those users may decide to buy Macs the next time round and some may
not but Apple will still be selling more software - and as we all know
the margins on software are phenomenal.
On that point, those who argue that Apple is first and foremost a
hardware company may not be correct. Many market analysts believe that
the major reason behind Apple's marginalisation as a computer company
in 1980s and 1990s was that the company thought it was in the business
of making computers when in fact it was really in the business of
making superior operating systems.
