I think it depends a lot on how long the economy is down. Apple won't go out of business, but market share will drop if the economy stays bad long enough. Most apple fans will simply put off buying a new comp. rather than give up their OS. They mention that Apple is down 16.7%, but no mention of how much MS is down. There have been MS layoffs so things must be down considerably there also.

Hello Swarf
Hello Gary,

The strange thing is that In the same period quoted in this article PC sales actually rose - I did actually post the details in answer to another post but can't find my source at the moment. Of course PC doesn't mean Microsoft directly but in real terms good for PC is Good for MS

There we go I found the other source for recent Financial Info ...


Microsoft Watch - Marketing - 'I'm a PC' Marketing Pays Off for Microsoft, OEMs

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for reminding me. I had forgotten about that. A senior moment. The graphics there look very good for MS. I think the final release of W7 will also give PC sales a boost. Market share wise, I'm thinking PC's will gain back the losses of the recent past and then some. As the article says, no netbook for Apple will cost them in this economy. Most people don't need a powerhouse machine to surf the net and send email. If I didn't want to do video editing, I would probably still be using W2K on my old machine. It did what I wanted otherwise. Had to reboot it more than Vista or 7, but that wasn't a big enough problem to spend $1000+ to fix.

The Apple enthusiasts will buy Apple kit as long as Apple make it, and the Apple haters will never buy from them.

Where the swing to apple has occurred in the past year or so is with the people who just want a computer and Apple's marketing both, positive and by association with the iPod and iPhone, and negative anti Vista have been effective.

Now that money is tighter and the positive windows 7 buzz is starting to get into the wider world I think that Apple will fall back to their "normal" niche market share.

Apple themselves don't class themselves as a Computer company anymore but as a consumer electronics manufacturer so I suppose that indicates what apple consider their most important product iPod & iPhone

Time will tell :)

Well in Microsoft Vs Apple or i would say Windows Vs Mac we should not forget the open source.

French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu

A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization's workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.


Source : French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu - Ars Technica


Looks like the open source wonder is already saving millions in this bad economic times.

Apple makes some great products, but ruins it by charging about 500% what it is worth. If you compare a PC and a Mac with the same specs (give or take a little) and the PC is not made by Dell, then the Mac is DEFINITELY more expensive. (varies)

I didn't actually do the math (too lazy to really look), but if someone wants to check it out, please let me know (or I will let you know if I get around to doing it).

While I use an iPod Touch and its GREAT, I did jailbreak it so I can get something really good on it. The App Store kind of sucks.
Good music player too.

~Lordbob