Category: Prediction

Mac OS X Operating System Market Share Bumping 10 percent (9.93%)

Posted on by Sol Young

Since December I thought it was pretty clear OS X would own 10 percent of the operating system market share by the end of January. So yesterday, in Chinatown browsing my iPhone and trying jellyfish tendrils for the first time, I opened marketshare.hitslink.com and discovered OS X was within 0.07% of the mark.

marketshare.hitslink.com

Much like the tendrals, this was slightly dissappointing since I’d wanted to see double digits. The other interesting numbers…

  • Mac up 9.63% to 9.93%
  • iPhone almost half a percent, up 0.44% to 0.48%
  • Linux down 0.85% to 0.83%, probably since there wasn’t much Linux activity over the holidays.
  • Windows down 88.68% to 88.26% (though Windows 7 betas are picking up)
Posted in Apple, iPhone, Mac, Microsoft, OS X, Prediction

Apple on pace for 10% market share this month

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

December Trends - from marketshare.hitslink.com

I described in December that Market Share for Apple would hit 9.5% at the end of December and break 10% in January. So far Apple exceeded expectations and reached 9.63% in December. That’s a 0.76% gain of the operating system market in one month!

Look for January to carry another increase and for AAPL to break 10%, probably diminishing the effect of Steve’s health-related absense a little bit.

In related news the iPhone browser share also grew.  It now holds 0.44% of the market, a move from 0.37% last month and the largest single month gain for the device. Windows dropped almost a full point from 89.62% to 88.68%. Pocket IE is no longer tracked, probably now <0.01% market share. Playstation remained at 0.04%.

For more in-depth detail of market share, visit http://marketshare.hitslink.com.

Posted in Apple, iPhone, Prediction, Windows

Prediction: Apple breaks 10% marketshare in January 2009

Posted on by Sol Young with 6 Comments

Apple Metrics

Apple’s OS X operating system base grew by 0.66% between October and November to 8.87%. If they simply maintained the prior month’s pace, they will reach 9.5% in December and 10.1% in January (assuming a continued consumption of 0.6% from other operating systems per month).

Vista being a monstrous failure is only helping, and XP is nearly a decade old. It seems almost difficult for Apple’s marketshare not to jump beyond double digits.

Take a look at Piper Jaffray’s 12 unanswered questions to see how their Q3 and Q4 sales turned out. The new MacBook and MacBook Pro have been great successes. Apple also plans to open 20-30 new stores in FY09.

UPDATE: Remember too that 10% may not seem like a lot for the operating system, but 10% of the hardware sold is absolutely huge.

Check marketshare.hitslink.com after January to see if I’m right…

Posted in Apple, Prediction

“The End” by Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, a good read on the end of Wall Street

Posted on by Sol Young with 3 Comments

Michael Lewis’s article The End is covering Portfolio’s December issue. It’s a fantastic read on his forecasting the death of Wall Street back in the eighties in his book Liar’s Poker.

It highlights many of the insanities and irrational modes of operation amongst the firms of Wall Street and is an entertaining and solid I-told-you-so. I disagree that Wall Street is dead… But his insight shows us how things have to change.

The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.

It’s a must-read, here are links worth following along the way:

Posted in Economics, Prediction

Chrome after a day of use

Posted on by Sol Young with 11 Comments

Been using Google’s Chrome browser for a day, and so far it’s a great experience.

No. Sorry. That’s an understatement. It’s revolutionary. As the comic describes (yes, Google released a comic to introduce Chrome), this browser takes the web to impossible places. It makes the web more like an operating system, allowing each site (tab) an independent process and memory allocation, improving javascript speed – via a virtual machine – by orders of magnitude, and integrating more cleanly with Gears.

I’ve liked the browser enough to find Windows more useful than OS X this morning. A strange feeling indeed.

I’d mentioned in an email yesterday that the question was whether Chrome would quickly grab users away from Internet Explorer and other browsers or if it would be incremental in its chipping. My expectation is that it will still be chipping, but it’s going to be much faster than expected.

Just as the Google search tool grew wildly popular purely out of speed and relevance, the Chrome browser will gain huge momentum because of speed and relevance. Since there are still massive amounts of IE6 installations out there (proving that not everyone goes out and upgrades) a swing won’t happen over night, but it will gain ground more quickly than Firefox or Safari (Opera not mentioned since Chrome pretty much destroys the reason for Opera’s existance – speed).

A couple questions are begged… Is this where we really see web 2.0 take hold? I think so. And how does this affect Google in terms of monopolizing the web? They now own search and could quickly dominate the browser.

Posted in Architecture, Chrome, Firefox, Google, Internet Explorer, Prediction, Safari