Apple kept on trucking with Mac shipments growing 51%, they now garner a 6.6% of the PC business. Fears that iPod sales are being cannibalized by the iPhone were unfounded with 10.6 million units sold. iPhones sales came in at 1.7 millions. All in all another good quarter for Apple and puts the fear mongers back in their place.
On the Microsoft side, it was a lackluster quarter for the Client division (Windows and Office) which was down 24% (mainly due to the Vista coupons given out in late 2006), but still managed to bring in $3 billion in operating revenue. On the bright side, the Server division revenue was up 16% and the Entertainment and Devices (Xbox, Windows Mobile) was up 68%, but the Online Services revenue continued its loses with an operating loss of $228 million.
The bottom line; Apple is a very successful niche player which is gaining traction in the PC market. They have demonstrated that they can adapt to the real world. The management (Steve Jobs) has become less dogmatic and is willing to embrace some aspects of the Microsoft world. The Windows development team at Apple is growing. They are now releasing Safari as part of their Windows update process. My last iTunes updates installed it on my XPS 720, I did not notice the additional entry which was checked for Safari and clicked through. They are using a Microsoft tactic which all major vendors seem to have latched onto, I do find it annoying, but it is getting me to at least try Safari. On my first attempt at bringing up my blog, I was not very impressed, it does not render correctly. I am not sure what is going on, typepad is a major blog publisher so I would have expected Safari to render it as well as Explorer or Firefox. I may play around with it, but it does not bring me confidence in Apple's out the box experience. That being said, if they keep the growth up, provide additional compatibility with Microsoft Servers, over time they could become a threat to Windows. IBM research seems to think so; they are embarking on a project to see if the Mac can easily coexist in an enterprise environment. In a related note, with Linux support for desktops waining, it does give the Mac another boost as the only real competitor to Windows.
On the other side Microsoft is still a very profitable company, one quarter does not tell you anything, they still have a lot of work to do with Vista's perception but after June Vista will ship with every new machine. By next year the majority of folks will learn that Vista SP1 works well, is as stable as XP and provides some great features. I still don't believe the Yahoo deal would be a good thing for Microsoft. They will spin their wheels trying to integrate while Google keeps on gaining market share. Microsoft will have squandered $48 billion if the purchase goes through. The management in Redmond is finally realizing that there may be too much resentment by Microsoft staffers to make the integration work, but with Mr Ballmer you never know, he is a gamer of the first order.
In what way does your blog not render correctly in Safari? It's always looked "wrong" in Firefox for me, with the article appearing way below the Google ads sidebar. I just assumed it was IE only.
Posted by: Chris Carlin | April 26, 2008 at 09:50 AM
Hmm, I will have to try it again on Vista, the last time I really used Firefox was on XP, over a year ago...
Posted by: Stephen Skarlatos | April 28, 2008 at 08:31 AM