Apple market share and the open source solution

Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997. That was the last time I bought an Apple computer. My first Apple was an Apple II+ circa 1980. Anyway, Jobs has done some amazing things since he came back to the helm at Apple. The candy-colored iMacs were a big hit. And the new, fast G5 towers are impressive. But Jobs hasn’t been able to turn his design successes into sales. Apple’s market share continues to tank. What can they do to correct this? Today’s Wall Street Journal has some figures. In the first quarter of 2001, Apple’s market share of the home market was 2.9%. In first quarter 2004 that figure has fallen to 2.1%. Their share of the government market and the business market have also fallen. Things have improved apparently in the education market in that time from 6.3% share to 7.9%, but that’s a far cry from when Apple dominated the education market.

I grew up with Apple’s in my home so I look fondly on the company despite its foibles. The most compelling Apple products these days though are music players and software. People love Final Cut Pro. People love the iPod. This is good, but where is the Mac headed as a platform?

The PowerMacs are too high in price. The iMacs for that matter at too high in price—who wants to pay $1,700 for an entry-level computer? Not many people apparently. There was a time when the Apple brand meant something to people. It was the idea of thinking different, right? There was still that sheen. But perhaps it was Mac OS X that sullied that notion. It’s not really the Mac OS anymore, someone might say, it’s just Unix under the hood. I know a few people who still swear by Macs, but there are so fewer of these people. There is less of a distinct ideology to that preference anymore—it is more of a preference for something other than the Microsoft monopoly than adhering to a philosophy of the Mac.

Expressions of brand preferences are influenced by marketing and created by real-world experiences. People have moved away from Apple—is it because of the marketing muscle of Wintel? Yes. Is it because people had real-world problems with Macs? Yes.

The strongest indicator to me that the Mac platform is in trouble is the degree to which developers have stopped making Macintosh software. Apple reports that Bill Gates used to brag that Microsoft made more money from the sale of each Mac than Apple did. There’s still good software on the platform—but it mostly comes from Apple now. Apple adherents used to argue that the Wintel monopoly was a monoculture—no diversity of thought or expression. But that’s the way the Mac platform has become. The hardware is Apple. The software is Apple—from the software that organizes your photos to the software that surfs the web. It’s all Apple produced now. Strange. The Mac platform to me used to be about being quirky or different. But now it has a sameness—all the Mac users are using all the same applications.

To me, the interesting developments in operating systems are over in the open source world. I have a box at home running Red Hat Linux, and I’m making a plan to switch over to Mandrake. The one area where Linux falls far, far short of Apple and Microsoft is in applications. Open source apps are nowhere near as full featured in general as their commercial counterparts.

Here’s what I’d like to see: an Apple supported version of Linux. Ditch Mac OS X and build the Apple GUI on top of Linux. And then by extension, release the great Apple software in Linux compilable versions. Okay, the other part of this then is to allow the Apple/Linux platform to be installed on Intel boxes. I’d love to see Final Cut Pro running native on an Intel box running Linux. That’s how Apple could change the world, and at the same time get some tremendous market share.