>Apple's market share in publishing is 80%, desktop video is probably close
>to that, graphics is probably 70%, film industry is close to that also. I
>once was asked to leave (jokingly) by the asst dir of a movie for
>mentioning Win'95.
>Overall maybe it is 3.5% But as we all know, when did the 97? (+ or - .5)
>ever matter?
It matters because of the tipping factor. Once you fall below 20%, the only way to get people to develop first-rate software for you is sell your soul.
The MSFT deal didn't originally make sense to me, although I don't expect most acquisitions to make sense. But I come down to three main reasons for MSFT doing the deal:
1) The deal kills Rhapsody. MSFT knows no one from the Windows world will switch to MacOS 8 at this point, and that NT will eventually kill Apple entirely. MS Office and IE 4.0 (and other company's apps that follow along) will be optimized for MacOS 8, but won't be available for Rhapsody (and they're betting that blue-box performance will suck, or maybe they'll make their applications purposely blue-box-incompatible). Thus, MS can try to ensure that Rhapsody is still-born.
2) MSFT gets to keep Apple limping along as a pathetic competitor. The only thing better than having no competition at the desktop is having an embarrassingly feeble competitor. It keeps the Feds away.
3) MSFT makes a strike at it's real competitors: Sun and Netscape. Sun doesn't get Apple to make NCs, and Netscape loses it's cross-platform advantage over MSFT (since Unix isn't a factor at the desktop). If MSFT now controls all the desktops, who will bother to install Netscape. Most important, I think you'll see a secret deal revealed over the next year or so that Apple has signed up to (or will at least be neutral towards) MSFT's Java-killing J/Direct strategy.
- dan