Dept of Redundancy Dept

[libertango]

John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes:

"(T)his “how many apps are in the respective app stores” metric is being given too much weight — not just by Mossberg, either. I’ve said this before, but by this metric, we’d all be using Windows, not the Mac."

It's almost like 90+% of the market does use Windows, or something. That's not "all," no, but it ain't beanbag, either.

EDITED TO ADD: He's basically saying, If the world worked the way the world works, the world would work that way. Sure enough, if you look at the empirical data, it's not a hypothetical that the world works that way, but the world actually does work that way.

He's also saying that because the world doesn't match his expectations, it's the world's fault, and his expectations are just fine. Ummmmmm... No.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It is certainly true that 90% of new PCs are Windows. Ish. But once you remove the corporate sales, and consider the extra life of Macs, and look at how many people are actually using each platform...

well, I don't know the answer. But presumably people out there do know what proportion of personal use computers are Mac?

By comparison, for phones, iPhones get handed down to such an extent that my 2 year old phone has a trade in value of over £100; its eBay value is nearer £200. I have never kept a phone as long as I've kept this one, and none of my previous phones have ever had a second-hand value of more than £40.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Here's an article that tries to split out the home vs business distinction you're making here. His answers: 5% of the global PC market, 6.3% of the global home PC market, 9.3% of the US home PC market (by units).

But the argument being made (diversity of the ecosystem of programs leading to higher sales) is one that's long been applied to both the home and business markets, so I'm not sure the distinction is useful. I can remember the number of applications argument being used vis-à-vis Atari, Amiga, Be, NeXT, etc. as well as Apple for about 25 years. That's part of my point: This path has been trod many times before.

Re phones, it still remains the iPhone has a 3% global market share by units, which I've obviously written about before. So even if iPhones are getting handed down an extraordinary amount, that's still a subset of that 3%. I'm doubtful that makes any difference at all to the 97% who compose the Rest of Us.