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Comment by batoure | Hacker News Reader

it speaks to the amazing power of marketing. People are always blown away when they find out that apple has less than a 10% market share and that their market share has actually gone down over the last 10 years.

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Your post speaks to the amazing power of something, not sure what. Apple's market share of what? Is below what? Where? Among whom? Has dropped since when?

It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher. And that is not even considering the effect of smart phones and tables on peoples usage patterns. My in-laws who are small town folk from the midwest, as far as you can possibly imagine from an urban hipster, had been using Dells for years and switched to an iPad last year and are getting much more out of it than they ever did their last aircraft carrier of a Win 7 Dell that was ostensibly much more powerful.

There isn't really any useful information in your reply here. Apples "Consumer only" market share is still less than 20% and if you include Ipads..... as a PC replacement their market share is still only around 15% (though that data is a year old apple only had about 25% growth last year which makes it a wash in the over all market so those numbers are still pretty truthy-ish)

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-compute...

Part of the point of my post was to show how people assume statistics in their head without doing something as simple as a Google search. Saying that market share isn't a significant measure is silly because, well its a measure of how much of the market actually uses apple.

Which leads us back to the original point, the fact that you feel that the numbers must be significantly higher is only a representation of how apple has captured the minds and hearts of people around the world... Marketing

I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.

My 80 year old grandmother actively uses VMware on her windows 8 machine, for real not making this up.

And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.

What does she use VMware for?

she has been an avid user of

PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39)

since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

For the sake of everyone in your family, please back up everything in multiple places. That's awesome to have a snapshot of the culinary history of your family in digital format. When the time is right, share all the recipes!

Sorry for the multiple posts on this. You sent me on a bit of an adventure:

* Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried)

* Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows

* installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM

* shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows

* ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes

* printed from DOSBox and got [2]

1: http://www.cups-pdf.de/ (or apt-get install cups-pdf)

2: https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6...

I will have to try this out.... the problem with extracting all the recipes... of which there are a ton. is that you are still in a go in print them one by one then parse the pdf. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to read the data files then pull everything into a db or something where I could do more with it.

The file format looks whacky but not impossible to parse.

Get in contact with me if you're interested in pursuing this further.

Is there any way you can get a copy of the disk to me? I'm interested in old file formats.

Connections like these are why HN is amazeballs. You can make a simple comment and someone here will have a technical interest in helping you out.

Runs pretty well on DOSBox - found Big Blue Disk 93 on cd.textfiles.com.

I could get it to run in DOSBox but couldn't get things to print right the way she wanted it to.

edit: i now see that you found a version of DOSBox that I didn't find that has good printer support.

That's mostly all good and fair. I don't have any data to contribute. But the I think my fundamental point is good:

PC market share as defined by analysts is reflective of the market that Microsoft is pursuing, but it is a large superset of the market Apple is pursuing.

You say this is silly to point out, but you're leaning on circular logic. You take "the market" as a given a priori, but the truth is that the market is defined a certain way, and that way is very unfavorable to Apple (and that's without even getting into the whole profit share vs market share question).

I'm not sure it's marketing but being in the bubble like was previously mentioned.

Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work.

Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)

Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners.

So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.

Would developers write better software if they had to write on slower, older machines with less memory and storage?

I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for.

When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective.

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...

No. They would write the kind of software we used to write back in the days when all computers are like that and we traded away everything else for machine efficiency because we had no choice: clumsy, feature impoverished, riddled with arbitrary limits that trip you up at the worst possible moment, fundamentally insecure, hard to use and generally crap.

Their marketing is funded by their dominant profit margin; before, people think market share equates to higher earnings, but apple shows that even with a small market share you can have a dominant profit margin and earnings, which is what really matter.

A most truthful argument. However I think that in relation to the OP its important to ask Cui Bono. This is most definitely to the benefit of apple and its shareholder, and so reflects less value to the overall population of technology users.

Assuming you don't want to get into the hocus pocus circular math of trying to figure out the value of how Apples profitability is driving competitive innovations in the greater share of the market(i.e. there would be no Microsoft surface tablet today without the ipad)

That's because market share is a meaningless measure.

Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market

market -> all the people

encompasses your share

share -> using your stuff

Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.

Market share != Usage share

If more people are buying product A, but product B has a longer useful life, then it conceivable for product B to have a higher usage share.

The problem is that usage share is a lot harder to measure than market share. But ultimately it's the more important number when it comes to things like network effect and developer and consumer mindshare.

This is definitely conceivably true but definitely not true in the current context.

80 million OSX (any version) users world wide in 2012 http://www.cultofmac.com/172693/mac-os-x-by-the-numbers-60-m...

110 million windows 8(just windows 8 not windows in general) users in 2013 http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/there-are-now-over-110-mil...

believe it or not their are 500 million windows xp users still http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-to-cut-windows-xp-2...

Market share actually does in some respect account for a sum of existing products in use, how that is calculated will depend on the reporting entity.

Usage share turns out to be super easy to capture these days, we do it by looking at the browser string of a request to a web server. Most big sites are putting out this type of data so a relatively clear picture emerges.

For a company like microsoft or apple market share is a more useful measure because it helps them plan/predict their supply chain so that they have the right amount of inventory in the right place at the right time.

But from a developer perspective usage share is more interesting for obvious reasons.

In this case the numbers are still basically the same.

Except that it doesn't measure the actual using at all; I seem to recall there being rather more interesting stats than just vanilla "market share" in the iOS vs Android comparison that show that while more people have Android devices, more people with iOS are spending more on, and using more Apps.

So again we see that apple has been good at getting the platform profitable here is a great article that breaks this down. It ends up being less about the fact that iphone apps are better per say (which I think they often are) but more about the fact that significantly more apps for android start out free.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-number...

but your statement about usage is wrong see the following article on app use:

http://www.cnet.com/news/most-iphone-applications-gathering-...

That cnet piece doesn't in any way contradict the parent's comment.

It's meaningless because the 'market' of which share is measured is an arbitrary classification.

How so ? What market do you propose to measure then ?

How so? Because these so called 'markets' of which share is measured are not markets at all. They are simply groups of products that analysts have decided to add together.

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