I think they are referring to shipment share so this will be reflected in a few years in usage share. The world will be a better place if M$ does not get a bye in the market and has to compete on price and performance.
“Windows has 75% PC market share and the business productivity market where Office has 95% share by our estimates”
see Forbes
Forbes bases its stock-price estimates on a steady rise in notebook production. I expect notebooks will take a hit with the rise of smart-thingies which have huge growth. They do see a potential 10% drop in share price if M$ fails to capture significant share of mobile devices. That capture is not going to happen this year, so I see M$ falling in share of OS rapidly. According to the graphical calculator, if M$ slides to 50% share this year and 30% in the next few years, share price could drop 20%. Too bad, eh? Forbes calls it a “danger”.
17495
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It is good to see choice coming for the consumer and to see MS and Apple to get a significant drubbing down to size. That being said, I don’t want to see them totally get decimated by FOSS OS’es (GNU/Linux, BSD’s, etc) either; healthy competition is good and spurs innovation and the more players the merrier. The early to mid 90′s had a lot of real OS innovation going on OS2/Warp, Linux, 386BSD, Freedows, Win9X, MacOS7, VMS, BeOS, and many more, some public and open others closed and proprietary, most syngersticaly competing on positive merit, not using lawyers, bundling, dumping, patent trolling, strong-arming, locking and other dirty tactics. This was occurring in apps-space too. It was exciting times with great leaps forward. Hopefully we’ll be seeing this again.
M$ biggest problem long term is price point. MS had to fight tooth and nail to stay relevant in the netbook space though they finally conquered it. But they took a huge hit in the profit angle on the whole deal. Android driven tablets will have the same effect this go round. When its $99 for a basic 7″ Chinese knock off by Christmas I don’t see how they will be loaded with Win7Bastard edition. Or if MS tries they will take it in the profit margin again.
Check out my two Tablet Wars posts. And I wouldn’t expect any $99.00 Chinese knock offs this Christmas. Apple priced the IPad very aggressively, their competitors are having problems meeting Apple’s pricing. The only saving grace for their competitors is that Foxcon has limited capacity, and limited money to expand, since Apple pays them as little as possible.
It’s not a problem meeting the price. These products are so attractive they will sell for such high prices. The margins on these things are huge compared to ATX PCs. Think $hundreds rather than $tens. The margins are large because the ARMed chips cost half what Atom costs and GNU/Linux or Android cost almost nothing.
Lower number of windows licenses may also come from lower desktop/laptop sales in general.
Having said that, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing because smartphone/tablet market is growing at a much faster rate and M$ is getting literary murdered in mobile. By the end of this year Android Linux will capture 50% of the mobile market (last year Android grew by approximately 880%).
Sorry, but I don’t see where Forbes clearly documents that 75%. Yes, I followed their cite, which goes to MS’s 10K form … it is not clearly cited there.
Based on Forbe’s second footnote, it may be that this 75% value is based on the inclusion of Tablets as PCs. What this means is that this is the influence of the iPad.
iPad is down to 60% share of tablets from 80% a year ago. Android/Linux tablets will take half the market for tablets within a year.