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By Applelinks Senior Editor John H. Farr
We're not sure what Steve Jobs would think of colleague John Martellaro's latest Warp Core column, but we think it's food for thought. He calls it "Why Apple's Market Share Hasn't Budged," and it all makes sense to us. In a nutshell, the boundaries of Apple's market share are fixed by what amounts to static "religious" preferences. Some of us believe in Macs but many others don't, and never the twain shall meet, you might say. Oh, there's some overlap, and here and there you get some switchers, but none of that amounts to anything like a movement or a mass migration. That's why John says that whenever Apple opens up a retail store, the Mac guy on the other end of town has fewer customers. There's just a certain number of us to go around. We realize that this is apostasy, but how else do you explain the relatively static numbers in the face of such obviously more attractive technology? We know a lady who used to use a PC, then got herself an iMac a couple of years ago, and now has sworn off ever using Macs again. She's had a lot of problems, apparently, and something happened to her modem. She checked around and says "you can't buy replacement modems for the iMac" any more, so ... We hope you're shaking your heads now like we did when she told us that. If that attitude isn't something akin to religious conviction, we don't know what is. "THOSE computers won't take me to heaven!" and so forth. But our man John does believe it's possible to gain tremendous leaps in market share. How does this work? -- through the development of "disruptive technology." Apple has to come up with something, a product, an app, a gadget of some kind, that will put a crippling hurt on another established technology or company. There isn't any other way. More retail stores won't do it, cute commercials haven't got a chance, and arguing with zealots from the other side will only cost you friends. Warp Core's theme is really that it takes a bomb. A disrupting explosion. A whopping big and nasty thing. Layoffs and stock plunges, you get the picture. Liquidation sales. Junior college instead of Ivy League. Assuming that beneath the sermons served up to the faithful, Apple recognizes this, what will they come up with?
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