In the last five years, Microsoft’s share of personal computing plummeted from 90% to 32%

“Gartner reported that PC shipments totaled 80.3 million units in Q3. Subtracting an estimated 4.4 million Macs yields an estimated 75.9 million Windows PCs,” Horace Dediu reports for Asymco.

If we include all iOS and Android devices the ‘computing’ market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90% whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%,” Dediu reports.

See the usual excellent charts in the full article here.

“After failing to materially participate in the shift to tablets and smartphones, Microsoft has been left with its OS software on less than a third of the devices companies and individuals now use,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.

“Dediu’s figures come from Gartner’s PC and tablet shipment data. The firm, along with IDC, suddenly stopped counting certain tablets among PC sales after Apple released its iPad,” Dilger reports. “Both companies have since added Microsoft’s Surface and other Windows-branded tablets to their PC numbers while relegating iPads and Android tablets into a separate ‘media tablet’ category.”

MacDailyNews Take: Because they’re in the bag for Microsoft; always have been. Now, IDC and Gartner have simply become bad jokes whose specious estimates have to be taken to their logical conclusions by people like Dediu whose goal is simply to show what’s really happening in the personal computing market, not to make Microsoft look good at all costs, including what’s left, if anything, of their reputations.

Canalys: Worldwide PC market share, Q2 2013 vs. Q2 2012

Dilger reports, “In stark contrast, complete PC market data from Canalys (above) has more clearly shown how modern tablet form factors have had a tremendous impact on the PC market, without regard for how flattering the truth is to Microsoft.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Wonderful job, Ballmer T. Clown!

42 Comments

    1. Yeah, but Windows-based PCs still dominate the enterprise for what ever reason. Apple has nothing to crow about until it commands at least 20% of ALL installed user bases.

  1. Come on, MDN, you claim market share doesn’t matter and then present data that shows copycat Samsung growing 106% YOY while Apple loses 12%.

    The MS failure to see the future of computing is old news. The question is, what is Apple going to do about the Samsung/Google onslaught?

    1. Mike, Mike, Mike, it is not about marketshare. Apple has never cared about marketshare. Their objective is to build the best devices possible and price them accordingly.

      Since most people will select cheap over quality, cheap shit always has a bigger marketshare. Jobs used to say it and Cook says it now: We don’t build crap.

      So as long as Apple builds the best quality stuff, they will make lots of money selling to people like me and preserve sufficient marketshare to continue making boat loads of money selling to people like me.

      1. Let us not forget the reliablity as well. The iPhone 5 had three times the reliablity over the nearest competator- say Samsung’s best phone. So, a hundred percent rise is more on replacement than new. While the iPhones continue to chung along. Quanlity over quanity.

    2. More the same…iPad 5,6,7,8,9,10,11…iPhone 6,6s/c,7,7s/c,8,8s/c,9,9s/c… Perhaps they will get a watch out and a TV. They might even reinvent the hair dryer stick an Apple logo on it make it look pretty and charge $800 because you can takes calls on it and listen to music on it. The competition will be blown away.

        1. I suppose people were so distracted by your sarcastic take on the sameness of Apple products that they missed the REAL joke…that an Apple hair dryer will “blow away” the competition. Ha! Ha! Ha!

          I towel dry my own hair because it’s so wild, but as Apple is so ingenious in solving such mundane problems, I might be tempted to try one even if the logo is just slapped on. 🙂

    3. When it’s convenient to cite market share, Apple fanboys will cite market share, e.g. percentage of tablet market share which iPad leads for the moment. When it’s inconvenient to cite market share, e.g. Mac vs. PC, it’s more convenient from the fanboys’ perspective to cite profit share.

      That’s all nonsense of course. Market share is just as important a metric as anything else. If market share weren’t important, Cook wouldn’t be crowing about the number of iOS devices sold at every Apple event. It’s just that the fanboys have tunnel vision and selective memories.

      Anyway, the shitty iOS 7 won’t be helping much increasing market share.

    4. The important thing to consider is that, for Microsoft, marketshare mattered as they had a monopoly on the OS along with Office.

      Even while the PC assemblers fought each other for minimal margins on the hardware, MS made nearly all of the profits of the PC industry.

      MS is still very profitable, but their share of the computing industry profit is much smaller than before.

    5. You are a moron. We Apple supporters can certainly cite market share data when the data shed interesting light on an issue may prefer to keep muddled. This includes MS market share data declines over the past 5 years due to Apple iPhone and iPad — and copycat Android OS devices. But I agree it is totally unfair for Apple to include Android counts in these data — since Android users typically use their devices mostly for phone calls, and not as full-fledged “personal computing” devices, which iOS devices are, indeed, used for.

    6. If you are actually serious (and not trolling) then you need to look at two things.
      Of the “real” smartphone market apple dominates. While google/samsung have the lion-share of the “feature phone plus” market it is neither very profitable nor a desirable demographic (ad or marketing wise for goooogle).
      The second thing you need to consider is the current trend in the US showing apple (iOS) poised to overtake android.

      Apple’s iOS poised to overtake Android in the U.S. smartphone market

      Not so clear an “onslaught” when you consider all the facts.

  2. I assume we’re talking desktop installations… and for sure these numbers are indicating current trends as opposed to established installations.

    Apple needs to start thinking big on behalf of the Mac and it’s accompanying OS.

  3. “If we include all iOS and Android devices the ‘computing’ market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90% whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%,”

    That may be true, but another report this week pointed out that a large proportion of Android devices are not actually used as smart phones, so it might not be sensible to count every Android device as computing device. However it has to be pointed out that for as long as people have been counting PCs, those used as POS terminals and equipment controllers have also been counted as though they were desktop PCs, so it’s misleading to jump to conclusions from the raw data. The only reliable information that you can extract is the trend over time, which is clearly away from desktops and towards hand held devices.

  4. Not that it’s going to make the numbers look good, but lumping in all iOS/Android/etc devices will skew it to an extent, because a lot of those are not replacing Windows PC’s or even Macs, they’re just being used as phones, not even smart phones, and would need to be accounted for in some fashion. It’s still a huge drop, but I feel it’s only fair to defend Microsoft against flawed numbers as we would defend Apple. Which is not to say that Microsoft aren’t still crap.

  5. And unfortunately, most people at work who are trying to actually be productive with less staff have employers who stick them with slow, buggy, easily compromised PC’s.

  6. Apple has reach the top of the hill in personal computing. It is now time to go into the enterprise. Many will say that we are getting into the enterprise with iPads and iPhones but the majority of desktops in the enterprise are Wintel machines and this gives an opening to MS to push the Surface tablets.
    Look at what happened at Delta Airlines. Even though the pilots wanted iPads the IT department pushed and got Surface tablets. This probably happened because of price, remember MS doesn’t make money off of the hardware but by selling software so if the companies buy hardware that runs Windows they will make their profit sooner or later, and the fact that both the tablet and the desktops will run the same OS. Even if it not really good.
    MS also has hold on the servers that many companies buy they can use this to keep many companies on their side, While many companies are going Linux on the server Linus still works better with Windows rather than Macintosh OS.

    For these reasons Apple must really get into the OS server market and making sure that it does at least a job equal to MS initially upon release and outdo MS in all aspects of the server market. Whether they should make the hardware themselves of allow third parties to install the OS on their hardware is something I will leave to Cook and company. I know that this is somewhat of a contradiction on the way that Apple now makes money but different markets may make for different strategies.

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