Re: Now
You beg quite a few questions.
That Apple would have done better by pricing to increase share. In the PC market these days it does very well in terms of profit with only 5% share.
Apple never was the leader in share. Businesses mostly bought IBM and later IBM compatible pcs. The significant reason for your next choice of computer and os is two-fold: what applications you have and, if Windows-based applications, what's Microsoft current version of Windows. Apple could not have ever had an iPod or even iPhone level win in the 80s and 90s pc market. All computers were expensive until the late 90s.
And look at the PC market, every couple of years the price of the good-enough pc drops a hundred dollars. And Windows remains the same price. What you see is a better deal for consumers and Microsoft and a worse deal for the OEMs. Take a look today, as the total volume of pcs sold declines, the quality manufacturers are posting sales growth. This contradicts the essential position that those who succeed in the quality sector of the market are doomed to erosion from below. It doesn't invalidate the position, the contradiction suggests that something more complex is at play.
Did you notice in the figures cited that Windows had better share than Apple? Yet Apple is the one run over by the Android juggernaut. Seems as though the hypothesis would suggest that Windows couldn't possibly gain.
Today file formats are fairly interchangeable and a native app frequently is a portal to networked information, the os is an implementation detail. The fundamental problem for Apple, say 1996, was that it was not in the running. Today, it's that it is easier to switch platforms. The more comparable player of the 80s to Apple today is not Apple 1984 but IBM 1987; after a 25 year run, it sold its pc business to Lenovo. Do the above models suggest that dooooom is Apple selling the iPhone business to someone else in 2032?
Here's my take. The internet/world-wide-web made the pc a consumer electronics item. It was priced too high at the outset of that era, but by the time broad-band became widespread, costs had come down. Apple was not prepared for this. Microsoft got on board with ethernet rather than its proprietary LAN solution (vines). Apple was not prepared for this. Microsoft got its act together with Windows and added value to the DOS users of the world who upgraded. Apple wasn't prepared for this. Microsoft got its act together with regards to NT. Apple was not prepared for that. Intel had fierce competition with AMD and processor speeds got a lot better real fast. Apple was on Motorola's architecture and its processor was good enough for most of Motorola's customers. MacOS required the users to have too much knowledge about memory sharing for applications. The os that was for the rest of us became the os for those who do math and have an aesthetic.* Their internal projects to bring MacOS into the 90s failed and probably over the sticky problem of making it modern and compatible with customer's applications.** Apple was beset on many sides.
Licensing the os, in retrospect, looks like a classic case of someone tragically believing their press releases.
Apple came back, but not buying share. They embraced the processor as the heart of a consumer electronics device and fully-voiced said "We're the brand for your quality time." Most of the competitors, today, even though it's absolutely clear what Apple did, still say "You need us for work."
(* That might be me, and I bailed from Mac in 1996. Started leaving Windows in 1999 and after a not unpleasant journey through Linux and FreeBSD on home-built machines came back to Mac in 2001 with OS X 10.1.)
(** The interim period of Classic and OS X was a fair compromise, but hardly pleasant for those who needed to do things wanting to use Cocoa apps side-by-side with applications that were MacOS 9.2 bound.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
