Matt Warman wrote for the Telegraph an article entitled Apple’s iOS will equal Windows ‘within a year' in which he described how within a year that the marketshare of iOS + OS X might equal that of Windows. The basis of this assertion was another article by Horace Dediu in which there were graphs (which of course means it was really well researched and argued).
As the comments at foot of the article rightly argue there were many things missing: where this would happen (globally? US? US + UK?), whether it was including all OS versions or just the latest/imminent ones, whether it was looking at the consumer and/or business market, and in general all of the facts the argument was based on.
I would be one of the first to celebrate a more balanced and heterogeneous tech world, where market shares were more balanced, and I even argued recently that within a few years we might see the OS world split roughly into thirds between Apple, Microsoft and Google.
What this article has done, though, under the hood is to take a lot of data, the origins of which are largely invisible to the reader and make an argument from them, and done it at one step removed in a second-hand, hand me down way.
Yes, if you look at the growth from 1% to 5% marketshare of a new OS, you can state that it has enjoyed a 500% growth, while an OS going from 88% to 90% marketshare has only witnessed little over 1% growth, but then any more than 10% and it would be reaching the limits of possibility. And it is these types of statistics that I think are the fuel to articles such as these (along with wishful, and accelerated, thinking).
As the comments at foot of the article rightly argue there were many things missing: where this would happen (globally? US? US + UK?), whether it was including all OS versions or just the latest/imminent ones, whether it was looking at the consumer and/or business market, and in general all of the facts the argument was based on.
I would be one of the first to celebrate a more balanced and heterogeneous tech world, where market shares were more balanced, and I even argued recently that within a few years we might see the OS world split roughly into thirds between Apple, Microsoft and Google.
What this article has done, though, under the hood is to take a lot of data, the origins of which are largely invisible to the reader and make an argument from them, and done it at one step removed in a second-hand, hand me down way.
Yes, if you look at the growth from 1% to 5% marketshare of a new OS, you can state that it has enjoyed a 500% growth, while an OS going from 88% to 90% marketshare has only witnessed little over 1% growth, but then any more than 10% and it would be reaching the limits of possibility. And it is these types of statistics that I think are the fuel to articles such as these (along with wishful, and accelerated, thinking).
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