Mac OS X market share cracks 8% | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS X market share cracks 8%

computerworld.com

20 pointsalexk18 comments

Does anyone care to guess what the critical level is?

Presumably at some point OS X stops being a niche market, and producing cross platform software becomes almost mandatory.

I'd guess 30%.

'In the last two years, Mac OS X's share has increased by 3 percentage points, a gain of 58%.'

That's about 25 percent CAGR, so there are still a few years to go before we hit that point, assuming of course that the growth rate is sustainable.

It's exactly the point at which the loss of revenue due to incompatibility is greater than the cost of developing cross-platform.

Thanks for exactly restating his question. I needed that.

Hey, it made things clearer. For example, when you break it down like that, you might realize that the cost vs. benefit analysis is different for different kinds of software -- there is no "critical level" in general. This is good news for Apple. As their market share grows, software crosses that threshold continuously (as opposed to all at once). That makes their platform become continuously more appealing to users too, creating a positive feedback loop.

producing cross platform software becomes almost mandatory

How does this explain all the Mac-only software?

Producing cross platform software becomes mandatory for companies that make Windows software currently (unless they don't mind their market shrinking). For Mac only software the market is growing so if they're happy enough at the moment there be even less incentive for them to develop cross platform.

Uh. In other news, no wait, in the same news (the site the article is based on, link at the bottom), Linux' market share almost _doubled_ in 9 months. How's that for growth ;)

I was intrigued by that, too.

However, iPhone share is growing quicker and it's going to be slightly embarrassing when the iPhone passes Linux in market share.

well with the five or so apple laptops and desktops i have in my house alone i wonder what took them so long. but really, i would like to thank microsoft for vista ;)

disclaimer, not including two iphones and various generations of ipods :)

Are they counting the iPhone, iPod touch or iPod etc operating systems as part of OS X?

No. This includes desktop OS only.

Yeah, the iPhone/ipod touch stats are at the bottom of the article.

I'd like to see market share stats broken down by segments of the market, i.e. business, servers, consumers, etc.

I suspect OS X's consumer market share is much higher.

Too bad it's a fake *nix. Not compatible out of the box with 95% of linux applications.

darwinports does a pretty good job. And for many things, the mac has better software available.

Besides "fake *nix" could apply as well to linux as to darwin. Remember that OS X actually licensed the Unix name...

No. You can compile the vast majority of unix projects on linux and run them with no modifications. Darwinports is ok if you want only the top 1% of popular projects, often several versions behind.

Too bad

Why? OS X doesn't stop anyone from running Linux.

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