Did Jobs blow Mac's big chance?

If you're the owner of a Windows PC who is looking for a replacement computer, the choices are grim. You can step into the world of hurt that is Vista, the latest version of Microsoft Windows that was released in January. Or you can seek out a new machine that still comes loaded with the comparatively ancient Windows XP.

Maybe, you might say, the moment has arrived to take a look at the Mac. You can easily order one online, of course. But if you would like to take a test drive before you commit, odds are that you will have to look far and wide for a store that sells it. The Mac's presence in the retail world remains limited, a shame given the rare opportunity for Apple to gain market share that opened up when Vista arrived.

The Mac's worldwide market share was 3 percent as of June, according to Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm in Wayland, Massachusetts. That forlorn number looks even worse compared with Apple's peak worldwide share of 14 percent in 1984, the year the Macintosh was introduced and sales of Apple II computers were the company's mainstay.

Kay noted that Apple's share was as low as 2 percent as recently as early 2004. He said the increase to 3 percent might be a result of the "halo effect" produced by the success of the iPod. It could also just as easily be attributed to Apple's simply offering better products at more competitive prices, he added.

For Jobs, Apple's CEO, better known on these pages as The Jerkoff (and we use the term affectionately), a 3 percent share seems unlikely to be a satisfying attainment after more than 20 years of selling the Mac. Consider whether Jobs would be able to deem the iPod a success if it had gained only 3 percent of the market for portable players. After all, he gave Microsoft's poor Zune exactly one month to succeed before he mocked the device's 2 percent market share at the Macworld conference in January.

The best time for gaining market share is when your main competitor stumbles while introducing an entirely new version of its core product. Thanks to Microsoft's lumbering pace, The Jerkoff had six long years to look forward to the moment when XP would be replaced by Vista.

When the long-awaited moment arrived, Vista turned out to be in just as sorry a state of semi-completion as Jobs could have hoped for. Many pieces of hardware that customers already owned, like printers, turned out to be incompatible with the new Vista models. The spectacle of Microsoft's customers scrambling to avoid buying machines with Vista was a sight to be savored for those watching from Apple's offices in Cupertino, California. Dell had to retract its initial all-Vista policy and reintroduce an XP option to appease distraught customers.

The Mac was seemingly well positioned for the moment in many ways. The transition to Intel microprocessors was complete. The OS X Tiger was a sleek, feature-rich, polished operating system. Leopard, the next iteration, is scheduled to be released in October.

The I'm-a-Mac/I'm-a-PC commercials that began in 2006 found endless ways to draw entertaining comparisons between the joys of owning a Mac and the hassles of owning a PC. The evolution of the software industry also worked in the Mac's favor: Users spent far more time within a browser, insulated from operating system-specific software, and the Mac's new Intel foundation made it easy to run Windows applications speedily on a Mac.

The official line from Apple is that all has gone swimmingly. The company said it shipped 1.52 million Macs in the first quarter of this year, up 35 percent from a year ago. In the second quarter, through June 30, it shipped 1.76 million Macs, up 32 percent from a year ago, a quarterly record.

Funny thing, though: Based on the ratio of Windows and Macs actually in use, no gains can be seen for Apple. The Mac's share of personal computers has actually edged a bit lower since Vista's release in January, and the various flavors of Windows, a bit higher, according to Net Applications, a firm in Aliso Viejo, California, that monitors the operating systems among visitors to 40,000 customer Web sites.

To try to win over customers when Vista appeared, The Jerkoff and his managers did not enlist retailers for the Mac with the same enthusiasm they showed in building the network of retail stores for the Apple. In the war for operating system share, there is no substitute for boots on the ground to retake territory, shelf by shelf.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/16/news/digi17.php