No Magic Bullet for the Mac

To some Mac lovers, the rational among us, market share just doesn’t matter. For members of that camp as long as Apple makes OS X and equipment to run said marvel of OSes, they are fully sated. The more zealous Mac fans out there don’t just love the Mac, they also despise Windows and the success of Microsoft in general. To fully satisfy the members of this camp nothing less than a major Mac market move is required. The exact percentage varies from individual to individual but, for the most zealous, the taget is OS X 100%, Windows 0%.

It’s human nature to find reasons why your desires will come to pass, even if requires leaps of logic that would make a politician blush. Which explains why every change associated with Macs is always a reason Macs will rule the world in nanoseconds and Microsoft will be reduced to producing Donkey II: The Swervering.

USB replacing legacy ports on the original iMac, of course, meant Macs would have access to all the peripherals out there. Surely, it was thought, Mac share would surge. Providing a new shiny OS instead of the Classic OS, some opined, would reinvigorate market share. The list continues: the G5, the switch to Intel, most recently Boot Camp and in the future, virtualization. So far, no massive spike in the market share of Macs.

Perhaps examining one case of an expected upturn is in order. It turns out that high hopes for a sudden increase in Mac market is not the sole purview of pundits and zealots. Some big wigs occasionally buy into the “magic bullet theory.” In this case, the resolute believer was Steve Jobs and the bullet would be launched by iMovie. iMovie was written by Glen Reid after Adobe rebuffed Apple’s request to produce a consumer orientated digital video editing solution. The result was a fantastic program, Glen’s team got all the little things right; from the consistent cut and paste metaphor (hard core videographers hated the idea) to the simplicity of the first release (anything you thought iMovie needed was likely left out to keep the learning curve as flat as Nebraska).

Steve Jobs saw the result and he was pleased. He felt certain that iMovie was the kind of thing that would propel sales of Mac hardware. His logic is particularly transparent when he compared the then nascent home video editing market to the established desktop publishing arena, to wit:

“Without going into much detail here, because we don’t want to—the one thing I would point you to is iMovie. iMovie is huge. We believe that desktop movies are bigger than desktop publishing. We know a lot more people who want to make a movie of their family than want to put out a newsletter from home. Apple knows a lot about creating new markets, it helped created desktop publishing, and we are really far ahead of everyone. iMovie has been a huge hit …There are more of those. We are working on them.”

So Steve sounded pretty pumped about iMovie and the eventual impact it would have on Mac sales. It didn’t quite work out. While iMovie is the greatest example of getting technology (then) costing thousands of dollars into a (then) free package accessible by neophytes and useable by pros, it just didn’t sell the number of Macs Steve had hoped (though it did sell a G4 tower to me).

In the next few months, you’re likely going to be hearing more and more about virtualization. This will be hailed as the next bit of computer magic that will really spike sales of the Mac. The concept is simple, users will be able to run multiple OSes on a single chip at native speeds, or speeds close enough to native that the performance hit won’t be noticeable. Some envision virtualization akin to fast user switching, others see it as using the OSes side by side and one Intel exec imagines users using Microsoft all day at work and OS X exclusively once they get home.

The allure of such technology is easy to see, one machine yields all the benefits the software world has to offer without multiple computers or even so much as a reboot. Since Apple EULA restricts OS X to only Macs (for now, things change) the only computer legally capable of running Windows, OS X, and some flavors of Linux simultaneously will be a Mac, a pretty big win for Apple one would think.

The problem with that reasoning is that it assumes that there is a huge untapped market of people who want to run multiple OSes. This market does not exist. Surely, there are a great number of Mac users who need access to that one Windows program or Windows users who would really to like to run iMovie (and if you’ve played with Windows Movie Maker you know why) but, by and large, most people just don’t care. They get everything they want out of Windows (and with malware, a lot more). A computer that does more surf the ‘net and check mail is seen as having unnecessary functionality and, by extension, must also be unnecessarily complicated.

It isn’t the case that Boot Camp, the mini and OS X are the purest wastes of time. All these things helped the Mac market share, they just were not the instant cure the faithful had hoped for. The reality is that an instant fix simply doesn’t exist. Any software advance Apple comes up with can be quickly copied, any hardware coolness will have to be peddled to users who are happy with the “good enough” state of the Windows machine. Apple’s key to success will be taking the long-term view and keeping a steady supply of slick programs and interesting hardware rolling out of Cupertino. Market share will never change overnight (only Microsoft can pull off that trick and it would likely involve Vista actually killing millions of users) but every little success of Apple’s adds up.

It’s a lot like snow in Nebraska, the first snowfall may only be an inch deep but by the time spring rolls around (Nebraskans are grateful for spring) there’s a twelve foot pile of snow lining the streets. Just like it doesn’t require a blizzard to dump five feet of snow overnight for Grand Island to be a winter wonderland waist deep in snow by mid January, Apple doesn’t have to grab a huge chunk of the market all at once. Looking at Mac market share of late we see some flurries, the patient expect accumulation.