From: ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) Subject: Market fragmentation (Was Re: Great marketing (Was Re: BYTE asks, ) Date: 30 Sep 1992 14:50:29 -0700
jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz) writes:
>of grand. I dunno, Microsoft is sure to sell a lot of copies of NT,
>but their shooting for being the operating system standard of the future,
>and I think they missed that mark long before they started to fire. Maybe
I agree. The market is way too fragmented today to support
anything like the market domination which Microsoft had ~ 1987
when they accounted for 80% of all operating systems sold.
Microsoft will never own that market share again. Thank god.
Earlier the high volume platforms were
1. PCs, running MS-DOS (were Xenix and desqview around?)
2. Macs
Today we have
1. Intel boxes running
MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OS/2, PC-Geos, desqview,
BSD386, Coherent, Destiny, Minix, Nextstep 486, SCO Unix,
Solaris 2.0, a few dozen other SVR4s, a few Mach-BSD,
Desqview/X, X display servers,
386-BSD, Hurd, Linux, Mach-BSD
2. Macs running Garbage, or AP/UX, or Mach-BSD
3. Suns running 4.1.1 or Solaris 2.0 or (soon) BSD
4. Other RISC workstations, all running some sort of Unix
Some of these may seem really niche, but they all diminish Microsoft's
market share as compared with the dark ages.
Even under the perfect (probability 0) scenario, (where WNT ships on
time with all the promised features with lots of device drivers
without serious bugs), it's simply too late for Microsoft to recover
it's 1987 market share, or prevent it's market share from dropping
further. I love it.
-ans.
-- Ajay Shah, (213)749-8133, ajayshah@usc.edu