{"id":211,"date":"2006-01-09T22:55:23","date_gmt":"2006-01-10T05:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=211"},"modified":"2006-01-09T22:55:23","modified_gmt":"2006-01-10T05:55:23","slug":"apple_is_toast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"Predicting Apple’s fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

The iPod is toast. So says the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen in a Business Week interview<\/a> posted today, the eve of Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote. Christensen, like many before him, believes that Apple’s desire to keep the iPod a closed system, rather than allowing other manufacturers to use iTunes software in their devices, amounts to a replay of Apple’s fateful decision not to license the Mac OS, which (the story goes) opened the way for Microsoft’s dominance in PCs.<\/p>\n

“I’d be very surprised,” Christensen says, “if three years from now, the proprietary architecture [in music players] is as dominant as it is now. Think about the PC. Apple dominated the market in 1983, but by 1987, the industry-standard companies, such as IBM and Compaq, had begun to take over.”<\/p>\n

Hold on a second. Apple dominated the PC market in 1983? That was a year before the Macintosh was introduced, and at the time PC market shares<\/a> looked like this:<\/p>\n

Commodore: 41%<\/p>\n

IBM PC\/clones: 26%<\/p>\n

Atari: 10%<\/p>\n

Apple II: 9%<\/p>\n

Other: 14%<\/p>\n

Apple was hardly dominating the market in 1983. In fact, Apple never had a particularly big share of the PC market; it’s basically been a niche player all along. The Macintosh’s share peaked at 12% in 1992 – when IBM PCs and clones held the other 88% of the market.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the iPod’s current share of the market for portable digital music players is estimated at upwards of 70% (and its share of music downloads is probably even bigger). Controlling 70% of a market is a heck of a lot different than controlling 12%. In fact, it’s completely different.<\/p>\n

Apple today is in the driver’s seat in the digital music business in a way that it never was in the PC business, and it will likely announce products and partnerships tomorrow that will extend its lead in video as well. If Apple’s rivals are going to overtake it, they’re going to have to come up with a better strategy than waiting for history to repeat itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The iPod is toast. So says the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen in a Business Week interview posted today, the eve of Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote. Christensen, like many before him, believes that Apple’s desire to keep the iPod a closed system, rather than allowing other manufacturers to use iTunes software in their devices, amounts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}