Microsoft Windows dominance fades as Apple beats HP, Canalys claims.
It’s been a long time coming but it was inevitable.
It certainly makes sense to include tablets (iPads) in the totals for personal computers since that is exactly the role people are using them in. What makes less sense is not including those other devices running the same operating systems (iOS and Android) with smaller screens – smartphones and iPod touches.
Nice catch from MacDailyNews: as of the close of market today, Apple is worth more than Microsoft and Intel combined. And some tasty claim chowder on this Bill Gates quote from June 1998, regarding Steve Jobs’s return to Apple as CEO:
“What I can’t figure out is why he [Steve Jobs] is even trying? He knows he can’t win.”
According to Wolfram Alpha, using their mean market caps for the entire month of June 1998 (it was a volatile month amidst the boom), the Wintel combination was worth $339 billion, vs. $3.5 billion for Apple. Put another way, Microsoft and Intel combined were worth 96 times more than Apple then. Since then, you get this.
[From Apple vs. Wintel] via daringfireball
Microsoft’s once dominant Internet Explorer now accounts for less than half the web browser market, according to recent figures from StatCounter. [From Internet Explorer market share dips below 50 per cent]
Good news for standards-based browsing.
So good that in 2006, they predicted that Windows Mobile was poised to take over the industry and attract the most developers.
★
[From How Good Is Gartner at Predicting Smartphone Market Share?]
That’s a hoot 🙂
Bad, getting worse – for Windows At least one seasoned analyst agrees with Steve Ballmer’s admission Microsoft has “lost a generation” of users — but from this number-cruncher’s point of view, the situation is worse than Microsoft’s CEO concedes.… [From Ballmer’s ‘lost generation’ note finds resonance]
I have doubts about some of the numbers in this story but I did predict a couple of decades ago that UNIX would eventually win the platform wars and Mac OS X and Linux are both *NIX OSs. And modern Windows is a sort-of descendant of VMS 🙂
Apple surpassed Microsoft two months ago as the world’s most highly valued tech company, and is now challenging the Redmond giant on another key metric: In a blowout third quarter, AAPL posted record revenue of $15.7 billion, which should be close to or exceed what Microsoft reports Thursday. [From Apple Is the New Microsoft, Part 2]
That would be two out of three. How long until Apple overtakes Microsoft on profit too?
Later
Next quarter then 🙂
There is no joy in Redmond Microsoft got some more bad news today: Intel is porting Android 2.2, née Froyo, to the x86 architecture.… [From Intel preps x86 Android for summer release]
I’ve never understood why anyone would pay for Windows when Linux is free and OS X is better.
By Joe Wilcox, Betanews For weeks, pundits predicted what happened today: Apple’s value exceeded Microsoft’s. While writing post “The Windows era is over” early this afternoon, Apple’s market capitalization was $227.95 billion and Microsoft’s $228.47 billion, or just $520 million separating them. By the time I posted, at 2:56 pm, Apple’s market cap was $225.98 billion and Microsoft’s was $225.32 billion.In the 20 minutes after, the two companies went on a roller coaster ride of sorts, with Microsoft failing to near $221 billion and Apple rising above $228 billion.For Apple, there has been dramatic change since stock markets collapsed in autumn 2008. Apple’s market cap was $88.68 billion on Oct. 2, 2008 and Microsoft’s was $228.35 billion on Sept. 29, 2008. Mmmm, do you see a difference? Microsoft hasn’t much changed, while Apple, boasted by surging share price, has rapidly gone up. About six weeks before the crash, on Aug. 13, 2008, Apple’s market cap was $158.84 billion compared to $254.83 billion for Microsoft.From one perspective, market valuation doesn’t mean much. It’s mitigated by several factors, including the number of shares publicly traded. But its symbolic significance cannot be understated, particularly considering the long rivalry between Apple and Microsoft and Apple’s near-death experience during the mid 1990s.Something else: Apple and Microsoft were founded about the same time and both companies played important roles launching the mainstream PC industry in the 1980s. But since 2000, Microsoft’s stock has been moribund. Apple shares started a slow surge around 2003, which the September 2008 financial collapse reversed. But throughout 2009, Apple shares rose and rose and rose. Apple shares closed at $100.10 on Oct. 28, 2008. As I write, Apple is trading at $248.15.A more meaningful comparison of the companies — at least as rivals — is revenue and profit. During first calendar quarter, [From Apple market capitalization tops Microsoft]
That’s symbolic. Remember when Apple first passed Dell? Now it could buy Dell with spare change 🙂
Get ready to rumble, the latest Gartner and IDC smartphone numbers are out to give us a pretty good idea of how things shape up globally. Remember, IDC measures vendor shipments while Gartner measures actual handset sales to end users. So what does the data tell us? Well, to start with, in terms of smartphone devices, Gartner claims a 48.7% increase in smartphone sales of 54.3 million units in Q1 2010 compared to Q1 2009 — IDC pegs growth at 56.7% on 54.7 million units for the same period. Both estimates easily outpace the 17% or 21.7% growth in worldwide units of mobile phones moved according to Gartner and IDC, respectively.
IDC’s list of top 5 smartphone device makers (pictured above) has Nokia at the number one spot repeating its 39.3% share as it did in Q1 of 2009 while RIM is down slightly from 20.9% in 2009 to a 19.4% market share in 2010. Apple (up from 10.9% to 16.1%) more than doubled its device shipments in the last year as HTC (up from 4.3% to 4.8%) and Motorola (up from 3.4% to 4.2%) all managed to increase their shares on higher volumes.
Regarding smartphone OS market share, Android’s global numbers echo its success in the US jumping from a 1.6% market share to 9.6% in just one year. Gartner claims that sales of Android-based phones increased 707% year-on-year to displace Windows Mobile in the top 5 for the first time. Apple’s iPhone OS also saw growth from 10.5% in 1Q09 to 15.4% in 1Q10 as both RIM (down from 20.1% to 19.4%) and Symbian (down from 48.8% to 44.3%) dropped. See the OS numbers broken down into a no-nonsense table after the break.Continue reading IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and GoogleIDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 04:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | | Email this | Comments [From IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google]
It’s pretty clear who’s not doing well anyway. Faster growth is always possible from a small base so let’s see how Android grows now that it is in the same market share range as the other main contenders. Nokia has the most to lose.
There has been some … interesting news from the tech sector this week.
Firstly, the Apple vs. Adobe vendetta gets even nastier, with a public letter from Steve Jobs explaining why Adobe’s Flash multimedia format will not ever be allowed into the garden of pure ideology that is the iPhone/iPad fork of OSX.
Secondly, Hewlett-Packard are buying Palm, apparently for Palm’s WebOS — with rumours of plans to deploy a range of WebOS tablets to rival the iPad — at the same time, they’re killing their forthcoming Windows 7 slate, just as Microsoft are killing the Courier tablet project.
Finally, gizmodo (not, perhaps, an unbiased source in this regard given current events) have a fun essay discussing Apple’s Worldwide Loyalty Team, the internal unit tasked with hunting down and stopping leaks.
It’s probably no exaggeration to say that Apple’s draconian security policies are among the tightest of any company operating purely in the private sector, with a focus on secrecy that rivals that of military contractors. But even so, the control freak obsessiveness which Steve Jobs is bringing to bear on the iPad — and the desperate flailing around evident among Apple’s competitors — bears some examination. What’s going on?
I’ve got a theory, and it’s this: Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why …
Interesting analysis from SF and former tech writer Charles Stross. He may be onto something.
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