Apple's PC Market Share: Are They Playing to Win?
With the release of AppleTV, Apple has again made a splash in the computing world. This splash is sure to be accompanied by the usual chorus of disbelief from commentators that despite its innovation and obvious advantages over Microsoft, Apple's share of the PC market is only at 6 or 7%. To point this out as a negative assumes that Apple's goal is gain significant market share and perhaps replace Microsoft's software on most people's computers. This assumption is false. Rather than pursue a strategy of seizing large portions of Microsoft's market share, Apple seems content to be a minority or niche player, aggressively cultivating a brand, choosing the strength of their vision of computing over the strength of numbers.
In some ways, Apple spends a lot of marketing dollars arguing exactly the opposite. From the "Switchers" campaign to the Mac and PC guy commercials, Apple certainly looks like it is going after Microsoft and its mass of users.
While these ads have generated some demand for Apple and its products, Apple's other business strategies put a corresponding damper on any sense of mass enthusiasm. Apple asserts absolute control over every aspect of its product, from hardware, to software, to where and how you can buy it.
You never really just buy OS X, you buy into the Apple "lifestyle". This lifestyle is a creative, stylish, anti-establishment, and hassle-free. This lifestyle is not free of cost however; Apple needs to control the hardware specs and design to pair well with their software. Apple could not get away with selling the Mac equivalent of a $400 Dell PC with onboard video and 512MB of RAM trying to run Vista. This raises the price of admission to the Apple lifestyle above that of the Microsoft world. The consumer level iMac starts at $1000. And never, ever goes on sale. Fire sales don't align particularly well with the image either.
So the consumer ends up having to pay more to get in, never really gets the satisfaction (albeit ephemeral) of finding a "good" deal, and can never try the operating system at home on their existing hardware first (OS X won't run on your typical non-Apple PC). If the goal is to get people to switch, Apple isn't working too hard to lower the bar.
However, I don't think that Apple would be all that upset by this analysis. The advertisements promote switching for sure, but really they are more concentrated on continually building up the image of the elite lifestyle Apple has branded so well. Until we see OS X pre-installed on a square box Dell, extremely unlikely due to the checkered history of the Mac clones, we will know that Apple is not playing the gain the most possible market share game. Instead, to their credit, it looks like they are playing the also profitable capture the luxury market share game.