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Comment by sureshn | Hacker News Reader

With 88.67% of desktop OS being different flavors of microsoft OS, it seems a bit overwhelming that its still that high , especially after a massive acceptance of ubuntu. Its shocking that Apple has failed to make inroads in any other country outside the USA. One wonders why it never crossed their minds. This gives Microsoft a great opportunity to win back this big iPhone using crowd by making their Apps platform independent which they are doing already. I see Microsoft coming back big time like the windows 98 , 2000 and VB 6.0 kind of good times awaits them now :)

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In the european market most people simply dont see the value in a mac. Even in switzerland where a $3000 laptop is not such a big of a deal you see this money invested in alienware or high quality business machines over macbook a lot.

I think they simply failed to keep up with the quality they once had.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1) If Microsoft is already/still at ~90%, is there really room for a big time come back? Getting the rest of the market is small potatoes compared to what they already have.

2) How much of the market does desktop represent, anyway? Most people I know do not own a desktop. They may have a laptop, but they may also only have a tablet and/or phone.

Now, I believe you are actually suggesting that Microsoft can leverage their desktop market to get back into tablets and phones, but I don't know . . . so far, their efforts have been disappointing, and frankly, people are used to their Android devices, so Microsoft will actually be the weird phone even if it is the normal desktop.

Desktop is synonymous with laptop/desktop machine in fact it is actually difficult to separate the two.

I think this is the case here.

Here in Germany most consumer store chains have replaced hybrid Android tablets and netbooks with Windows 10 versions.

Many of those devices do allow for a SIM card as well.

Eh? Are you saying they don't sell Android tablets anymore, but only Windows tablets?

Not sure what he said. But this is definitly not true. It is still a small minority of the devices that runs Windows

Then check online at Conrad, Saturn or Media Market, in Germany, what type of netbooks or hybrid tablets are being sold.

Not sure what you mean. The topsellers here for example, the top-5 are all Android, and the rest mostly Android:

http://www.saturn.de/de/category/_tablets-252064.html?search...

Well, this is the 2nd most sold device right after Apple's iPad.

    TREKSTOR SurfTab duo W1 Volks-Tablet WiFi, Convertible mit 10.1 Zoll, 32 GB Speicher, 2 GB RAM, Windows 10, Schwarz

Not sure what's going on, but when I opened the page, and set to topseller ranking, the first items were all android.

Check Media Market, Saturn, Conrad online stores for netbooks and hybrid tablets and see which ones are being sold.

> I see Microsoft coming back big time

Coming back from what?

They've been steady at 90+% market share for a couple decades now. The modest increase in MacOS market share this past decade has never been more than a couple of percents worldwide. A drop in the bucket, really.

A lot of that is due to the fact that most businesses use Windows almost exclusively.

Even in the tech world, outside of startups and hipster tech companies, there are a lot of developers using Windows (i.e. the vast majority of .NET developers).

I'm not sure what you mean by Apple failing to make inroads outside of the USA as well. They've made inroads all over the western world.

Also according to the Android team on the Android Developers Backstage podcast, the majority of Android Studio installations are on Windows.

Makes sense. People on OSX are probably investing in Xcode, which leaves the majority user share on Windows and in second place, Linux.

Have you actually seen the numbers in the article?

MacOS has about 1% market share worldwide.

1% market share worldwide. I was just recently in Vietnam, unsurprisingly I didn't see a single Apple computer, and most of the computers were running Windows XP.

Apple has around 10% [0] of the market for laptop sales (most consumer computers are now laptops, I don't know any non-enthusiasts who have bought a PC in the last 5 years).

Now, factor in that those sales figures include less developed countries as well as developed countries, and you're probably look at at a decent margin about 10% of personal computer sales for home use as Apple products.

[0]: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-2015-notebook-m...

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