Why Apple isn't selling more Macs

There is an interesting article in the New York Times today (September 16th) that anyone involved with personal computers should read. It's called "A Window of Opportunity for Macs, Soon to Close" and it was written by Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University.

The main point of the article is that Apple should be selling many more Macintosh computers than it is. I agree completely.

The author points out that the release of an obviously half-baked version of Vista provided Apple with a golden opportunity to sell computers to people who don't want Vista. In my opinion, no one should buy a new computer with Vista until 2.5 years after its release. For more, see my September 2nd posting "I pity the fool (Windows XP good, Vista bad)."

Leading up to the release of Vista, which anyone in the field knew would suffer bumps in the road, Apple's marketing team blew a golden opportunity. The article describes a whole host of mistakes that Apple has made to get this point. Huge mistakes and many of them.

Macs account for only 3 percent of personal computers. My Mac experience is very limited, but I'm sure that judged on merits, it deserves a much larger market share. If nothing else, just being (mostly) immune to viruses, spyware and other forms of malicious software should get it 10 percent market share without a single employee at Apple working on marketing.

The fallout from miserable Mac sales is not limited to Apple. Windows users suffer too, because without increasingly popular Macs, Microsoft can continue doing things the way it always has. Thus Windows users suffer from poor quality work done by an organization that doesn't have it's feet to the fire.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has benefited from the brutal marketing mistakes of competitors. Anyone remember OS/2?