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Oh The Irony

There's no money in operating systems. Ask any Apple shareholder or Bill Gates.


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AppleInsider are reporting the total fan base of OS X now at 22 million, up 6 million since last year. According to other researchers that represents 6.38% of all PC systems on the planet. But in that same time period the total number of systems grew by many times that figure.

And Microsoft remain a distant second at 900 million with only 90%.

What's ironic is of course that almost everyone from Walt Mossberg on down admit OS X is far and away the best computer platform available today - and some security experts claim Microsoft will never catch OS X and all the other Unix variants out there - at the same time it's painfully obvious Apple will never be able to supply that need.

And although Keith Bachman of Bank of America Securities reveals Apple take home a 90% profit on sales of their operating system no one but no one really thinks there's much money in it - just ask any Apple website going.

No, to keep the company afloat one needs the hardware lock-in. And the limericks. Which admittedly can get pretty dicey at times: both VMWare and Parallels today come with special code - code inserted at the behest of Cupertino - to make sure OS X runs only on approved Apple hardware. Which means only on computers Apple manufacture themselves.

But even Michael Dell couldn't hope to supply one billion or more computers to the planet. If it weren't for the also rans such as Gateway, IBM, HP, and Acer, people simply wouldn't be able to have a computer. And Michael Dell has the infrastructure and the scaleability to handle a huge demand - something Apple with their incessant manufacturing difficulties could never handle.

Oh the irony: here's an operating system everyone wants but not everyone can have. Find the logic in that a bit remarkable? Ask any Apple website - they'll set you straight.

Postscript: Oh The Math

Yes of course the stats cited are contradictory. Seriously. It's Net Applications against Bank of America. No, they don't make sense. Of course not. But they're not provided by The Technological - they're only reported on.

So if you find the urge to comment on these inconsistencies nigh on irresistible, contact Net Applications and Bank of America and ask them to sort it out.

The math of the stats has little to do with the article anyway - unless your post address is somewhere in Guyana.

See Also
AppleInsider: Mac install base estimated at 22 million pre-Leopard

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