While Bill Gates looked on, Microsoft shareholders asked CEO Steve Ballmer about Apple at their annual meeting this morning. Steve's CEO-speak responses illustrate the larger problem.

Portfolio reports that one investor asked about the company's reputation with young customers:

"I'm just wondering why your marketing group can't do something to try to rein in this next generation, because you've got a real bad image out there."

He also said that Apple's ads make Microsoft look like "a buffoon." That's when the CEO-speak began.

"There's certainly always opportunities for improvement," Ballmer said. "[There is] ... a group of people with whom our market share is less."

When you hear "opportunity for improvement," you're screwed. Euphemistic language clouds meaning and hides the truth. Think "economic downturn" and "previously enjoyed" instead of "depression" and "used." Or "opportunity for improvement" instead of "problem."

Remember the Windows Mojave ads, in which producers tricked customers into thinking Vista was an unreleased version of Windows, only to then throw open the curtain and essentially say, "See? It's really Vista! You DO like it! There's nothing wrong here!"

Instead of telling people what they like, sanitizing language, insisting that the only reason the iPhone has 75,000 apps available is to make it usable on the Internet and denying your kids iPods, just say, "Our reputation with young people is poor and here's what we'll do about it." That's when you'll get something done.

[Via MacDailyNews]

Our friends at Cult of Mac commented on the possibility, floated on CNBC, that Apple will eventually overthrow Microsoft as the most valuable company in the technological world. If you think about it, Apple's stock was worth an unstable $25 dollars a share at this time 10 years ago -- today, it's worth $202 a share and shows no signs of decline. CNBC reports that Microsoft isn't really growing, but Apple continues to gain value and market share every day. From that, you could logically deduce that Apple will surpass Microsoft... but there are still a few points to make.

Apple has a long way to go before they're really ahead of Microsoft by most metrics. I suppose it's possible that the company's worth could surpass Microsoft within the 2 years that CNBC predicts, but as far as actual market share... I hope not. Here's why:

If Apple grows that quickly, we're going to see the effects of gravity bring them back down a bit. That kind of growth would be great for the brand but not necessarily the customer. We're already seeing record highs at the Genius Bars and not enough experienced staff to handle the demand. Calling AppleCare is usually a chore, not a pleasure.

Then again, any tech support call isn't fun, but long wait times make it even more frustrating. Using the example of Microsoft, getting too big too fast degrades your ability to offer quality service. It doesn't mean that their products are horrible, it means that you have to bring in more people to fill the gap -- people who aren't necessarily the most qualified to help. Will this sort of thing happen with Apple? I hope not. If their growth continues at its current rate, they better have a very good plan to avoid the Microsoft effect.

In my opinion, Apple does well as the underdog: they constantly have to adapt to the changing markets and make themselves more appealing than the competitor. If you look at Apple's top-dog aspects (iPod and iPhone), we begin to see things that aren't so awesome: the lack of a subscription service, the restrictive iPhone platform, not to mention the App Store approval process. In some ways, they get to the top of the mountain and then stop trying. Apple doesn't figure out where to go after they reach the summit, they simply find a different mountain and start climbing. They spent a couple years with the iPod, then a couple years with the iPhone... now we're gonna be seeing a couple years of the iTablet (or iSlate or iPad, you get the point).

If I'm not mistaken, it's really been a while since they've done anything innovative with the computer. Sure, the iTablet could bring innovation, but that's another mountain -- as were the iPod and iPhone. I'd love to see the company get back to the personal computer and do something that would change how we look at Apple. When I mention Apple at the moment, I hear the response, "Oh, they make the iPhone, right?" 4 years ago, that was the iPod. Soon enough, it will be a new piece of sexy hardware that Jonathan Ive designed.

Maybe two mountains will collide with the iTablet. Maybe it will really be the computer innovation that we've been missing. Maybe it will put Apple ahead of Microsoft in value, but let's hope that the Apple brand continues its reputation for great products, service and innovation.

Paul Carton, Director of Research at ChangeWave Research, reported yesterday at investorplace.com that Apple iPhone is gaining steadily on BlackBerry's market share, a great feat considering BlackBerry's entrenched position in the business sector. iPhone market share is now a heady 30%, still behind BlackBerry's 40%, but RIM products are not gaining new users at nearly the same rate. As for Palm? Well, the Pre seems to have leveled out the free fall, but there's nothing terribly encouraging about the data. My guess is they are still pining for those halcyon days of 2006 when Palm was king.



The smartphone market itself is rising; according to Mr. Carton's research, a full 39% of consumers now own some kind of smartphone. Compare that with last summer, when the smartphone market was just cracking 25%.



The good news for Apple is that RIM's stranglehold on the smartphone market appears to be loosening, and with so many consumers still to reach, Apple has the momentum. CNNMoney.com characterized Apple's market gains as putting Apple within "striking distance" of BlackBerry. What's driving the momentum? Customer satisfaction. Among those who plan to buy a smartphone within the next 90 days, 36% plan to buy an iPhone. And among current users, fully 73% of them are satisfied with the device, compared with only 43% of BlackBerry users.



Mr. Carton notes that BlackBerry is planning product launches this year, and Apple has already released the 3GS. If Apple holds true to its history, we won't see a significant upgrade to the phone until next June. Either way, Apple has carved itself out quite a niche and the iPhone can no longer be dismissed as a toy to BlackBerry's business device.

Amidst the ongoing macroeconomic malaise (is it over yet? Can we come out from under the covers?), the PC industry's sales have been suffering as big corporations and cash-strapped consumers postpone those discretionary purchases of shiny new gear. The expectation, based on 2008's results, was that this quarter would be tough sledding.

Results from analysts Gartner and IDC, however, both show an uptick in unit sales across the PC market year-over-year (2.3% higher globally per IDC, 0.5% higher per Gartner). Any pickup in sales comes as a surprise to Gartner, which had predicted a 5.6% decline in unit shipments.

For Apple specifically, the news is also good: both firms predict a boost in unit sales and share percentage for Apple's CPU shipments, with US numbers up from 8.6% to 8.8% share (Gartner) or a blazing 9.4% share (IDC). For the unvarnished results, you can tune in this coming Monday, 10/19 at 2pm PT to hear Apple's quarterly earnings call.

[via BrainstormTech]

Apple's quarterly earnings aren't the only bits of good news going around: according to Betanews, the market research firm NPD has found that Apple's revenue market share in the premium price segment (computers costing $1000 or more) is 91 percent, up from 88 percent in May.

Not only is this good news for Apple, it is a continuation of a positive trend: their premium revenue share is way up from the first quarter of 2008, when their cut was about 66 percent. However, most original equipment manufacturers and Microsoft prefer to measure success by unit market share, or how many individual computers were moved regardless of price. Gartner and IDC place the unit market share of PCs running some version of Microsoft Windows at 90 percent, while Macs have 8.7 percent.

Breaking down the numbers, this news isn't too surprising. According to NPD, the average selling price of a computer sold at retail in June was $701. Splitting this figure into Macs and PCs gives an ASP of $515 for any Windows PC sold. A Mac, on the other hand, has an ASP of a whopping $1400.

Considering that Apple chooses not to wage the netbook price war and that the bulk of PCs purchased cost less than $1000, it makes sense that Apple would control the premium segment. They were also able to boost their sales figures in this bracket by lowering the high-end prices $100 or more on each model while keeping all but one computer in the $1000+ segment. But hey, we'll take good news however we have to slice it, right?

[via The Loop]

If you're looking for a bright spot in the Mac market share numbers after the recent dips, Net Applications has your back. The May survey indicates an uptick in Safari's share of browser usage -- up to 8.43% from 8.21% in April, and 2% higher than a year earlier. Firefox continues to be the big 2nd banana to leading browser choice IE, with a 22.5% share. It's not yet clear how the IE8 release will drive browser adoption.

Operating system numbers (which aren't definitive, but provide a reasonable indicator of usage) also show a slight rise for Mac OS X (9.81% from 9.73%), also more than 2% over the year-ago allocation.

On the mobile side, the survey company notes that Android browsing usage started out with the same adoption curve as the iPhone/iPod touch, but has since fallen off that pace. Coverage of the Palm Pre starts soon.

[via Ars Technica]

Although overall shipments for Macs are at an 18-month low , worldwide numbers continue to climb. Macworld UK pointed to a Gartner study evaluating UK PC shipments for the first quarter of 2009. Apple has moved up, joining the top five PC manufacturers in terms of units shipped for the first time.

According to Gartner, Apple shipped 143 thousand units in the UK the first quarter of 2009, accounting for 4.8% marketshare. That represents a 6.6% growth year over year, which is in sharp contrast to the 5.1 percent decrease in the overall UK PC market.

At 4.8 percent, Apple is still a relatively small player -- the number four manufacturer, Toshiba, shipped nearly twice as many units -- but these numbers prove that Apple adoption is remaining strong, regardless of the economy.

The figures that will probably get the most play in the non-Mac press are those from Acer, the number three manufacturer in the UK. Acer's year-over-year growth in terms of units shipped was up a whopping 40.6%, due in large part to its price-conscious netbook offerings.

Apple and Acer approach the PC market from opposite ends of the spectrum; Acer goes for high-volume, low-margin sales, Apple does high-margin, lower-volume, yet both companies are succeeding in an industry that is declining worldwide.

What does this mean? Well, to me, it means that despite Microsoft's quips, price doesn't necessarily dictate market share.

Microsoft's share of the operating system market is dropping, while Apple computers and handhelds have topped 10 percent for the first time, according to a new report on Internet-connected computers.

NetApplications, the company that tracks browser and operating system market share for a variety of sites across the Internet, released its data for December 2008. According to a Computerworld analysis, the number of Windows users decreased in December by 0.94 percent to 88.7 percent.

The fall was the steepest in four years since Net Applications began collecting data, and was also more than twice that of any similar period in the previous three years. The Computerworld article does note that December statistics do slant slightly towards the Mac due to the reduced number of in-office days for corporate users, but the overall shift is decidedly Mac-ward even once that's accounted for.

Apple's share is just over 10 percent, if one combines the market share for both Macs and iPhones. Macs account for 9.63 percent of computers online. (Windows Mobile devices are included in the 88.7 percent figure.)

Also of note, almost three quarters of Macs online have an Intel processor. This time last year, less than half had one. Overall, Mac OS X's share grew by 31.7 percent compared to a year ago.

Windows XP remains the operating system with the largest installed base, with over 65 percent of the market.

Apple 2.0's Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes some new Net Applications statistics that suggest 8.87 percent of all Internet users use a Mac: a new record.

Add to that the iPhone platform's 0.37 percent, and over one in eleven use an Apple product to browse the web. The iPhone gained 12 percent more users compared to the month before.

Also notable is that Windows users accounted for less than 90 percent of Internet users for the first time in recent memory. Also, market share for Internet Explorer dropped below 70 percent for the first time since its popularity surged in the late 90s.

Linux also gained ground, increasing almost 17 percent to 0.83 percent of all Internet users.

Net Applications tracks statistics from over 160 million visits to websites it monitors. The full report is here.

There's word this morning that the NPD Group's latest research shows a surprising finish for the iPhone in the 3rd-quarter sales competition among US cellphones bought by consumers; for the first time in three years, there's a new top model. The Motorola RAZR, long the most popular handset for adult consumers, has fallen before the touchable juggernaut from Cupertino, CA.

Yes, even while the overall consumer unit sales for cellphones declined 15% from the year-ago quarter (ouch!), the iPhone 3G kicked the RAZR out and took over as the #1 most popular handset sold in the US. LG also bypassed Motorola as the #1 overall vendor in consumer phone sales. Even though the RAZR is now offered as a free phone on new contracts with many carriers, those phones still count as sales for the purposes of the NPD analysis -- making the iPhone's ascendancy even more stunning.

"The displacement of the RAZR by the iPhone 3G represents a watershed shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for NPD (and recent TUAW talkcast guest). Four of the five best-selling handsets in the third quarter were optimized for messaging and other advanced Internet features.

The top three phones (the iPhone, the RAZR, and the Blackberry Curve) address some different markets and diverse user needs -- but to have the iPhone on top, even counting in the pent-up demand for a 3G version, is pretty astonishing. Considering that Apple has ramped up from a v1 iPhone which gave up some key functionality in the interest of getting to market in a hurry, and even the 3G model lacks some popular items (copy/paste, tethering), getting to the top of the heap is an achievement worth celebrating.

If you've been paying attention to the news lately, then you know that the U.S. economy is in a bit of a slump. Even so, Apple's market share continues to prosper, according to Register Hardware. Their site is reporting that Apple's market share is now 35% if you look at revenue garnered -- largely due to notebook sales. In addition, Windows-based notebook sales are down 1.5% and at the same time, Mac notebook sales are up 35% (by units).

In other news, ComputerWorld is reporting that Mac OS X's market share is currently at 8.2%. This means that 8.2% of all the computers accessing over 40,000 websites that are monitored by Net Applications. This is a huge milestone for Apple as this is the first time their market share has gone above 8%. Microsoft still leads the monopoly on the operating system front -- Windows garnered 90.3% of computers accessing websites using Net Applications site monitoring. Windows Vista currently holds 18.3% of the market share.

On the iPhone front, Net Applications reported that 0.3% of the Internet market share was owned by the iPhone -- quite a feat for such a small device. However, it does have the hype machine working for it!


[via ComputerWorld and Register Hardware]

Although there's a powerful malaise in the financial markets right now, analysts who follow Apple are reporting stellar figures for the second quarter of 2008 in both overall computer sales and notebook computer sales in particular.

To begin with, research firm DisplaySearch reports that Apple is now the fourth largest seller of notebooks in North America with a 10.6 percent market share. This was the largest jump among top computer makers, rocketing from a 6.6 percent share in the same period of 2007. Dell still leads the notebook computer market with a solid 21.9 percent of all North American notebook sales, and introduction of their new Inspiron Mini 9 subnotebook is likely to help keep them in the lead for the foreseeable future.

Apple's sales of all Mac models in the U.S. jumped a whopping 38 percent during the second quarter compared to the same period in 2007. Gartner reported that the company shipped almost 1.4 million Macs in the U.S. during the April - June timeframe in 2008, up from about 1 million in the second quarter of 2007.

Let's hope that Apple's halo effect can rub off on the rest of the world markets soon!

[via Cult of Mac]

Ben Gray, analyst at Forrester Research, says that Mac OS X accounts for 4.5 percent of the business operating system market, 3¾ times their share in January 2007.

Computerworld notes that all this has happened with one thing notably absent: an enterprise strategy. "I haven't seen anything from Apple that seems to show it's attack[ing] the enterprise market," Gray said.

He says the gains in market share are due to two trends: client virtualization (using software like Parallels or VMWare) and the idea that corporate IT departments are more willing to support a broader range of hardware and software.

"In the end, [IT departments] want their employees to be as productive as humanly possible, so they'll approve tools that people are more comfortable with," said Gray.

In related news, Windows' overall share of the corporate market dipped slightly from 95.6 to 94.9 percent for the same time period.

[Via Macworld.]

According to HitsLink, the people who track web usage statistics, iPhone users account for about a third of one percent of web browsers on the Internet, the largest of any mobile platform.

iPhone ranks fourth overall in terms of operating system market share, behind Windows, Mac, and Linux. On August 16, the stats peaked at 0.45 percent. That's a two-fold increase since the iPhone 3G was released July 11.

Jim Goldman, of business television network CNBC, says that "it's a key metric that shows market penetration and customer use." He cited a report by analyst Andy Hargreaves that suggests the increase in browser market share highlights the iPhone's key, long-term advantages. Well, duh.

"Consumers seem to know what some investors are having trouble grasping -- or believing: that Apple might be positioned better in so many key markets than any of its competitors," Captain Obvious Goldman said.

[Via MacDailyNews.]

According to a survey from the Gartner group, Apple is again the third largest PC vendor in the United States. The company nosed out Acer for the second-quarter bronze. (Dell is number one, followed by HP in second place.)

Apple shipped 1.4 million units last quarter, 38 percent more than the prior quarter. In the United States, PC shipments overall grew by just 4.2 percent.

IDC research manager David Daoud credited Apple's competitors with the company's success, citing consumers' disappointment with the "lack of innovation" among other PC manufacturers. Also: Windows Vista. 'Nuff said.

But that's just the U.S. Apple still lags worldwide, selling only 3.2 percent more units abroad than last quarter. Compare that to other manufacturers, who sold an average of 16 percent more units.

Macs account for nearly 8 percent of internet-connected computers worldwide.

[Via Infoworld.]