How Apple is gaining on Microsoft
Both companies beat expectations last week, but only one of them was growing
Click to enlarge. Source: Company reports, Oct. 2009.
A year ago we ran a bar graph similar to the one at right. It showed that Apple (AAPL), despite the Mac's tiny market share compared with Microsoft (MSFT) Windows, was gaining on the software giant. The main reason: revenue pouring in from the iPhone but hidden as deferred earnings in Apple's balance sheet. (That chart is posted below the fold.)
Last week Apple and Microsoft once again reported quarterly earnings — and enjoyed nice pops on the stock market. But their growth rates turn out to be very different.
This quarter, deferred iPhone revenue isn't as big a deal for Apple as it was last year (non-GAAP earnings actually grew more slowly than GAAP; see here for why). Ironically, it was Microsoft that had to use deferred revenue from Windows 7 to show any growth at all. Otherwise, Microsoft's revenue for the third quarter was down 14% year over year and its earnings down 17%.
Apple's revenue, meanwhile, grew 25% and its income 46.6%.
85% of Mac owners have Windows too
Photo: Apple Inc.
Approximately 12% of U.S. computer households own an Apple (AAPL) computer, up from 9% in 2008, according to the results of a survey released Monday morning by the NPD group.
But here's the kicker: the vast majority — 85% — also own at least one PC running Microsoft (MSFT) Windows.
There's a simple explanation for this. Mac users tend to own a lot more computers. In fact, 66% of Mac households own three or more computers, according to NPD, compared with 29% of Windows households. This probably means that Mac users know more about Windows than Windows users know about Macs.
More than 2,300 NPD panelists completed the survey. Among its other findings:
Mac's Internet share grew 5% in Sept.
Apple's (AAPL) share of global Internet traffic is just a thin green slice in a great pie of Microsoft (MSFT) blue, but that slice grew more than 5% last month as Windows' share fell — as it has for eight of the last 12 months — according to data released overnight Thursday by Net Applications.
The Mac's share in September, as measured by the Net metrics firm, was 5.12% — up from 4.87% the month before — while Windows' was 92.77%, down from 93.06%.
Why are there no Mac viruses?
Image: Apple Inc.
There are, as far as we know, no Mac OS X viruses in the wild.
To prove that assertion wrong, you only have to name one.
Academic proofs of concept and theoretical vulnerabilities don't count. Neither do computer worms, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, spam or any of the other nasty species in the zoology of malware.
That eliminates Inqtana-A, iBotNet, MacSweeper and a handful of other examples of Mac malware usually trotted out at this point by PC apologists. Nor can you count the 10-second Zero Day Pwn2Own Safari exploit that got so much press attention last March. None of these, strictly speaking, were viruses.
The issue comes up anew because Apple's (AAPL) latest Get a Mac ads are once again hammering Microsoft (MSFT) for those "thousands of viruses" to which its operating systems and application suites are heir. And that, in turn, has led to a resurgence of comments in this space to the effect that a) Macs are just as vulnerable as Windows machines and b) the only thing that protects them is their miniscule market share.
Those ideas, while widely promulgated on the Web, are wrong. The fact that Mac OS X represents less than 4% of the worldwide installed base of computers might explain why there are fewer Mac viruses. But it wouldn't explain why there are none.
So what's the answer?
Net Applications: Apple just lost half its 'market share'
Source: Net Applications
The so-called market share reports issued every month by Net Applications have long been controversial — mostly because they didn't actually measure market share (which business people typically express as the number of widgets they sell in a given period divided by the total number of widgets sold).
What Net Applications did instead was sample data from browsers visiting their clients' websites and report what percentage came from machines running Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
But despite their flaws, we tracked the net metrics firm's reports because their sample size was relatively large — some 160 million visits per month — and because they offered regular snapshots of broad market trends. They revealed, for example, the rise of Firefox, the decline of Internet Explorer, the failure of Windows Vista to catch on. Their reports were consistent, dependable, and free.
Until now.
