Posted on Thursday 27 October 2005 - Popularity: unranked
This is definitely one of the best interviews with Steve Jobs this year. Some very interesting questions and answers, for example this one about Apple’s market share:
Still, Apple’s market share seems stuck at about 5% in the U.Ss and 3% worldwide.
So our market share is actually greater than BMW’s — greater than Mercedes — in the car industry. And, yet, no one thinks BMW or Mercedes are going away, and no one thinks that they’re at a tremendous disadvantage because that’s their market share. Matter of fact, they’re both highly desirable products and brands.
But is that a fair analogy? Mercedes isn’t dependent upon having a critical mass of developers writing software in order to make their product useful.
Except that we do have that critical mass now. In other words, the thing about Apple’s market share that you have to understand is, when you get under the hood, we don’t sell computers, en masse, to sit on every desk of every corporation. So when you take that out, the remaining markets — we have a much higher market share. Our consumer market share has doubled in the past few years — doubled. So our market share in the creative-professional marketplace is over 50%.
So when you look at the markets that we compete in, our market share isn’t 5% or 3% — it’s 10% to 60%. In some cases, it’s up at 90%. So that’s sort of the myth of the market share. If you throw in the boatloads of PC’s that are sold to corporations, then that waters down our market share. But that’s not a market we compete in, you know? That’s like saying: Let’s add the computers that are sold, you know, on Neptune.
