Mac sales: Response to Asymco

In Response to Asymco’s excellent post:

When will tablets outsell traditional PCs?

One quantitative  assumption that  you make is the growth rate for Macs to continue at 25%. I believe this is a big sleeper and the rate will increase significantly.

While some of that will come from China, that growth will be partially balanced by lowering growth in the more mature USA and Western Europe consumer markets. However, what is not being factored in here is the growth in the enterprise which was recently reported at 40%. Now, since enterprise was such a small percentage of overall Mac shipments, this growth did little to effect the overall growth. But, if it continues at 40% or higher while the consumer market is leveling, then it will eventually become a significant driver of the Mac growth rate. (Note I am talking here not of sales but of the growth rate of sales.)

I think that this year will be the year in which the Mac really turns the corner in the enterprise. I can see it eventually moving to 40% market share of desktop/laptop computers sold. That would be enormous. Recent Forrester research reports had some extremely telling points. (See below)

The 40% enterprise market share  (i.e. of new sales) I see coming in about 6 years in the US in 8-10 years world wide. The ramp up will be an S curve – gradual for the next two years then much more noticeable (maybe 7%, 12%, 18%, 26%, 34%, 40% share). There really is a sea change happening.

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Links:

Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac – Apple 2.0 …

Apple Infiltrates The Enterprise: 1/5 Of Global Info Workers Use Apple Products For Work!

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New York Times on Apple Job Growth

The New York Times has published a rather silly article in which they claim that Apple has never contributed any jobs to the economy.

Well – they do not put it exactly that way – but their article practically says it outright.

I will agree with the quote:

… said Gary P. Pisano, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “It’s hard to say the exact size.”

I agree as well that the methods used by the company they hired could be the subject of legitimate debate (as long as that statement is NOT interpreted as an innuendo that someone was dishonest.)

However, the following quote is a bit odd:

David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said via e-mail that the “entire business of claiming ‘direct and indirect’ job creation is disreputable” because most of the workers Apple is taking credit for would have been employed elsewhere in the company’s absence.

They go on to note:

Mr. Cappelli said. “If you say, ‘If there had been no Apple, those people would not have jobs,’ that’s not true.”

Of course it is not true that every single one of those individuals would be jobless, but if there were no Apple and engineer X took a job at HP then there would be some other engineer who would not have a job.

According to the logic provided, then no business anywhere creates any jobs at all. Everybody else would have been working somewhere else. This is – of course – utter foolishness.

I will admit that they do conclude with the statement:

Apple is, however, an innovative company that created a market for tablets and radically increased demand for smartphones.

In reality – the smartphones existing before the iPhone are not today considered smartphone. Additionally, the app business was relatively nonexistent prior to the iPhone, so perhaps they should be credited with ALL the apps developers (snicker).

As for people buying alternative products if Apple did not exist… sure they would be buying Asus and Lenovo computer that are totally designed, engineered, and built in China in factories with absolutely NO oversight at all. And…

They would be running DOS 12.1. (What a pleasant thought.)

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