MacOSX will take 15 years to surpass Windows at current growth rates | Hacker News Reader

MacOSX will take 15 years to surpass Windows at current growth rates

successfulsoftware.net

2 pointshermitcrab12 comments

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Assuming current growth rates will not change over 15 years for any technology makes you into an ass.

From the article: "Of course, it is highly questionable to project 15 years from a single year of data"

Good point, but the headline is linkbait.

You were expecting something else on a social news site? ;0)

So? Does Mac OS X need to surpass Windows to be successful?

Seeing as Apple has more cash on hand than Google or Microsoft, (or both, combined) I'm guessing no.

(Just another question: How many years will it take the Zune to the surpass the iPod at current growth rates?)

>Seeing as Apple has more cash on hand than Google or Microsoft

Really? Got a source to back that up?

Try yahoo finance. Cash on hand as of end of fiscal year:

* AAPL 24.49B (on 27-Sep)

* GOOG 14.41B (on 31-Dec)

* MSFT 19.71B (on 30-Sep)

It isn't as much as both combined. But that is an impressive mountain of cash. Does Steve Jobs give anything to charity, or does he just spend all sledging down his pile of money?

It actually IS more than both Google and Microsoft combined. They're required to break up the revenue from the iPhone over 8 quarters -- its supposed to be spread out over the life of the iPhone's subscription. But its all paid to Apple upfront.

While that listing didn't show you exactly how much earnings was reported that quarter from Apple, but its fast becoming their bread and butter. And yes, if you end up multiplying that value by 8, Apple's cash on hand last quarter was something like $40 billion.

(Still looking for a URL to back up my sources. DaringFireball.net did an analysis where he was quick to point this out. I think the closest I can find to the number crunching was this: http://daringfireball.net/2008/10/the_phone_company )

I remember the post addressing re: iPod Touches and charging for updates -- because they're not part of a subscription, but yeah, either way, there's a lot of evidence that the "cash on hand" is significantly larger than what's being reported, due to accounting reasons.

I'm not a statistician, but assuming growth continues, once it hits a certain threshold (a tipping point) the rate of growth will accelerate substantially.

This means that if OS X is ever to surpass Windows, it will probably happen in a lot fewer than 15 years.

So I guess in 2007 he could have claimed that Apple would take, uh, \lim_{x -> pi/2^(-)} \tan(x) years to surpass Palm's market share? (please excuse the bastardized TeX, but \frac is too verbose for ASCII)

The Mac's market share is growing simply because market share doesn't matter anymore. Thanks to the Internet, people are buying the computers they want, not the one they feel constrained to buy.

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