Microsoft Agonistes
Microsoft has very little territory on which to fight. In fact it almost feels as though the game is already over. It has no direct retail footprint and it doesn’t do hardware. It even suffers from the indignity that while you can run Windows under OS X, you cannot run OS X under Windows. Because of virtualization, Windows has become a Mac app for running legacy PC applications in the Mac world – and the Mac world is currently expanding at 3 times the rate of the Windows world.
It’s possible that the recession will make a difference to this, that the consumer will sicken of Apple and perceive the PC as being the vehicle of value in the computer market. Apple’s diminished stock price indicates that some investors certainly take this view, but to be honest, I don’t see that happening.
Apple’s computers aren’t actually much more expensive if you compare like-with-like. At the top end (the Mac Pro) they are cheaper than competitive PCs and even the laptops are only 10-15% more expensive. Apple chooses its price points for quality and always has done. However, it could choose to sell at lower price points if there was a business necessity.
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At Serena, what was the total number of computers they have? If they had 60 Mac’s out of thousands of computers, that not so much. If the employees chose Macs 60% of the time that’s huge. The sentence you used could be read either way.
Louyis
My apologies, that 60 was a typo, it should have read 60%. I’ve corrected it. Yes 60% is huge but do remember this is a technology company where appreciation of what Apple delivers is likely to be higher.
What does Toyota, Sony and Apple Inc. have in common?
Their prices are slightly higher than their competitors and so is the quality and the innovativeness of their products. For decades now everyone wants Apple to bring out a product at a lower price to compete with the low balling Dells of the world.
LOWER PRICE? They don’t play that game! Thought everyone would have gotten that by now.
What is driving this is the user satisfaction rates. Apples are extraordinarily high. (I am sure you have the latest numbers.)
I would also argue that the rates are a little deceptive. If you follow the blogs you so often run into people who say “After many years in MS world I switched to Macs, and now I will never look back.” My point is this: many people who give high rankings to Windows laptop X do so in comparison only to other Widows machines. If they ever had a Mac, I believe many would rate their current machines much lower. (Just a hypothesis)
Again – what is driving the conversion is the User Experience. The goal of Total Quality Management (TQM) is to “exceed customers expectations.” This is Apple’s modus operandi.