“While Microsoft abused its monopoly power to beat the pants off Netscape, IE became a superior product by its third iteration. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t done much since to improve its bloated and buggy browser. Without competition, as critics feared, it has had little incentive to better the breed. Features added to recent IE updates are aimed more at promoting other Microsoft products, such as Windows Media Player and MSN Search, than enhancing browsing.”
“Apple’s new Safari (test version available for download from [url=http://www.apple.com/safari]http://www.apple.com/safari)[/url] returns the focus of the browser to displaying Web pages. While I can pick nits with Safari, the worst thing I can say about it is that it’s only available to those who use Mac OS X–which happens to be less than 5% of computer users.”
“The two most striking things about Safari are its clean design and its speed. Apple based the browser on software developed by the KDE project, a cooperative closely aligned with the Linux open-source effort. It displays Web pages faster than any browser I have seen on any type of computer, a difference most noticeable on a swift Internet connection,” reports Stephen H. Wildstrom for BusinessWeek. Full article here.
“Apple, which has recently begun charging for some software that used to be free, such as iMovie, has not yet decided whether to charge for the finished version of Safari”
Ohh-kay…?
he probably means iLife and doesn’t realize that three of the four are still free downloads from apple. good to see safari getting some nice attention from the nonmac crowd.
emailed the guy about 2 points…
1. “Microsoft Explorer.” There are two pieces of software from MS with a name like this- Windows Explorer and IE. We know what he means, but at least he should discern between the two.
2. Following the trend of countless other reporters, stating that apple is charging for iMovie/iPhoto/iTunes (iMovie in this case) is REALLY misleading to the common reader. As you all know, these 3 apps are still on new machines and on apple’s website.
The article was in error. iMovie still is free and downloadable. They now charge for iDVD ($49) and is bundled with the free iAps (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes).
The article seemed to start off as an assesment of browsers, but ends up being a reason to praise Safari; fast and innovative…. which I agree.
Apple has recently dropped IE from the docks of their store’s demo computers (it can still be found in the Applications folder), and has been replaced with Safari.
I think this is a stong hint of things to come. But, this is logical. Jobs and company never produce a product that they don’t think is a significant improvement of what’s already out there. Safari is designed to not only replace IE, but to make IE a much more inferior (if not totally useless) product on the Mac. Once Safari polished up and out of beta status, I don’t see a reason to have IE preinstalled at all.
Safari does not handle MS-specific coding very well. It follows the W3C standards (http://www.w3.org) much more closely. I will not hessitate to let a webmaster know that his webdesign is Mac-hostile. I switched banks for just that reason. My bank redesigned their online banking pages, and I was unable to view it with Safari (and marginally successful with IE on my Mac). I told them. They didn’t care (implying I should buy a Wintel beige box). I found a bank that KNEW they were Mac friendly (waaay cool!). I cancelled ALL of my accounts at my old bank of 10 years, and promptly sent a letter to their president as to why and where my money was moved. Perhaps they will care now. I’d give $50 to hear their IT’s dept head talking to the bank president, and trying to explain why they chose to ignore Macs.
The mac platform only has 1.9% marketshare; osx has a small subset of that. Business week needs to check their facts before posting another article.
“The mac platform only has 1.9% marketshare; osx has a small subset of that. Business week needs to check their facts before posting another article.”
That’d be good advice for you to follow too my friend. You’re both wrong. The most recent count is UP very slightly to 3%.
re:Percent debates
Quote: :::which happens to be less than 5% of computer users:::
…therefore ANY NUMBER less than 5% is correct.
Language is a beautiful thing isn’t it? I mean….ummm…when YOU actually understand it, I guess.
“That’d be good advice for you to follow too my friend. You’re both wrong. The most recent count is UP very slightly to 3%.”
actually if you measure market share by the installed base, (or the people actually using a computer), rather than sells…
Apple’s market share then ballons to 8.2% for people surfing the internet from home, and 4% including people at work….
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-943519.html
the 4% figure comes from Google, where of everyone in the world on the internet surfing and using Google…. 4% are doing it from a mac…. including work computers…
so, Apple who has only really been marketing to the home user has a great deal of the market they targeted….
market share of sales are a function of what market you are talking about, where Apple has 25% of education sales, but considerably less to Business sales…..
so a market share figure showing sales for any given month do not really reflect what is going on….
what is important (for someone investing) is how many sales they have period, is it going up, or down….. right now it is stagnating because of the economy….. which actually is pretty good for an economy like this….
and Apple is the only one making money of all the box makers on an operational bases…. not even Dell is making a profit when you take into account how much money Dell has to spend buying back it’s dilution debt, last year,(Nov, to Nov.) Dell’s shareholder equity actually went down because of this debt, where Apple’s went up…
so Dell is selling a whole bunch of computers at a loss, just to show these sales market share gains….
i don’t know about you, but i’d rather be like BMW, and have low Market share, and actually make money, rather than the Yugo of the computer world…..
course then you actually get to use the equipment of BMW, and Apple….. an added bonus…..
but i’m sure glad a lot more people buy Dells, it keeps the economy from imploding, so thank you dell for the price war that you’ve gotten yourself into……
have fun trying to actually make money from what you’ve wrought……
jon.
Re:Market Share
According to what I have heard Steve J say, there are about 25 Million Macs out there worldwide. 25 Million of anything is a lot. Now I do realize that not all of these computers are capable of running system 10 and Safari, but I am sooooooooo tired of all this sh*t about market share. I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again:
Hyundai sells more cars than BMW, but which car would you rather drive.
Kodak sells more cameras than Leica, but which would you rather have.
Timex sells more watches than Rolex, but which would you rather wear.
Folgers sell more coffee than Starbucks, but which would you rather drink…
The Mac is a PREMIUM product and is not about being all things to all people, If you want to join the masses go on ahead.
Sorry guys. Worldwide marketshare is at 1.9%. You can pick and choose markets until you find numbers you like, but in the end, worldwide is the bottom line.
For those of you that are really interested, I suggest you find the latest industry numbers from IDC or gartner and those from apple and compute apple’s marketshare yourselves.
1.9% worldwide, true, but keep in mind that there are many parts of the world where it is illegal to sell Apple because they’re too powerful
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And just one more thing: the largest installed base of software on the world’s computers is based on DOS. That’s why there are so many Wintel machines; so businesses can run the proprietary DOS software written 15 – 20 years ago that they depend on for so much of their work. It has nada to do with the capabilities of OSs or hardware and everything to do with the costs of starting over.
Nike.com opened just fine for me. Maybe he’s not using the latest version?
The percentage of marketshare and installed base Are not the same thing. I use OS X, have not bought a mac in several years. Of course I wouldn’t show in marketshare, which is based in current sales. Macs don’t go obsolete as fast as Windows PCs do, which further widens the gab between figures.