Not that I am saying I think it has had no impact at all, I am sure examples exist of ABI breakage or distro fragmentation having caused 3rd party software developers to shy away, but I don’t really believe Linux would have had for instance a 10% marketshare today if only our ABI stability had been better over the last 10 years. But my general point is that I when I ask myself if I think our market share would be significantly higher if our ABI stability had been even better, the answer is no. So I could go intro great detail for each of my bullet points, but I think they are quite self explanatory.
While for Linux it has often been a proposition of trying to build a market when considering porting to Linux. So for instance porting games has provided enough income to support companies in keep doing so. Of course I think only supporting your own hardware also does sometimes makes things harder for Apple, because if a company was considering switching to MacOS X they would have to throw away all their existing hardware, which I am sure makes a lot of companies think twice if contemplating switching.Īpple were also able to build on their old market share when launching MacOS X, which means they have had a profitable ecosystem all the way.
We on the other hand have been struggling with trying to support basically any random configuration out there, which means ensuring a problem free experience for everyone is next to impossible. In the advantage collumn that means that their developers had a very limited set of hardware configurations to support and they could ensure MacOS X ran well on that configuration.
Another thing that is both an advantage for Apple and a disadvantage at the same time is that they got their own hardware. I think that speaks volumes about the challenges posted by the first two items in my list above.
So in other words on the back of being the media darling and record breaking products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, they have managed to increase their market share with 2.5% in the PC market. According to Wikipedia (not the best proof of anything, but lets assume they are in the ballpark) their marketshare is now about 7.5%. So how did Apple succeed? Well first of all the question needs to be asked if they have succeeded? When Steve Jobs came back to Apple I think their global market share for personal computers was down to just below 5% if my memory serves me correct.
Personally I think this argument doesn’t hold water at all and the comparison with MacOS X a bit random. The core of his argument seems to be that the lack of ABI stability was the main reason we didn’t get a significant market share in the desktop market. So Miguael de Icaza posted a blog with his opinion about why Desktop Linux has not become a huge success.