Economist.com | Apple Computer:
Even though the iPod now outsells Apple’s computers by volume, most of the firm’s revenues still come from the computers—the iMac desktop, the iBook laptop and the high-end Power Mac and PowerBook. So Mr Jobs still needs to fix Apple’s longstanding problem in its core business, which is that its global market share in computers seems stuck at about 3%.
Well, lookee there: Porsche, never considered a doomed company, barely uses any ink on this chart, while BMW seems right around 3-4%. Know anyone who frets about BMW going away?
The idea that Apple is a a failure unless it dethrones MSFT says more about reporters’ feelings about the companies — and their founders — than about the market in which they operate.
The article goes on to accurately assess the niche Apple’s mini was designed to fill:
Cutting the price tag of the new box by leaving out the peripherals rather than by stripping down its functionality is a shrewd way of minimising two risks. It is unlikely to cannibalise sales and profit margins of Apple’s more expensive models; and it is likely to snap many Windows users out of their inertia and into making the switch. As more of them do, Mr Jobs reckons, the converts will tell other Windows users how safe Macs are (compared to Microsoft’s buggy, virus-prone software) and how user-friendly (just try networking several Macs together, compared to several Windows machines).
So on balance, they got more right than wrong, but it would be nice to read an article that didn’t expose the reporter’s frustrations, but laid out the facts.