PC Magazine
John C. Dvorak puts his foot in his mouth again. He starts with a flawed premise:

The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbersónot from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity. As of December 2004, the Mac share as measured by online activity is 2.7 percent (Linux is 3.1), with all the rest going to various flavors of Windows. I’m now convinced that this stems mostly from Apple’s inability to make the Mac a commodity computer by pricing it to compete with PCs made inexpensively in China and selling with razor-thin margins. Here are the reasons Apple can’t sustain its position.

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The Mac platform is stagnant? Could’ve fooled me. Yes the Mac platform is a niche platform. Yes it’s not as visible as Windows. No, this doesn’t mean it’s stagnant. Not when various Mac-focused expos continue to draw crowds numbering in the millions. Not when OS and application development for the platform continues at a decent (if not rapid) pace. Not while Apple’s products continue to arouse even a little curiosity and interest from those who don’t already own them.

He then tries to justify the premise. Some of his reasoning does have merit, but not nearly enough to justify his position.

The company figures it has certain market niches locked down. This includes computer users in advertising agencies, news bureaus, and various professional organizations as well as creative artists and writers. I also count an odd, die-hard faction of true believers, but these people are inconsequential except in online forums, where they make a fuss whenever anyone discusses the Mac. They probably hurt the Mac community more than anyone by creating an unfair crackpot image that gets associated with the machine.

This is very true. For a number of reasons, the hardcore Mac fanatics are a lot more visible around computing circles than their equivalents on the PC side. These are people who treat their platform of choice as if it were a religion, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t believe. And, much like Islamic Fundamentalists, they drag down the image of the very platform they believe in, making it less attractive to everyone else.

CEO Steve Jobs’ star persona makes the situation worse. His attention to the Apple flagship has been eroded by the success of Pixar, and more recently, by the iPod and iTunes initiatives. None of these has anything to do with the Macintosh. Keeping it on track is a full-time taskóJobs cannot be in the computer business, the movie business, and the music business and make them all successful. You see the results. Market share for the Mac is crap.

It’s a little hard to claim this when there are plenty of examples of the opposite. Look at Sony. It’s in the music, movie and computer businesses, as well as numerous other technology-related businesses. It still manages to be successful. Jobs, however, is not in those businesses. He is in the computer technology business. And he’s a master at it. To attempt to pigeonhole his businesses into established categories, as Dvorak attempts to do, is to ignore many of the lessons of the past decade.

Much of the problem arises from the psychology created by the overpriced iPod. And Mac users who buy the players contribute to the problem by encouraging the company to maintain its high-margin death march.

Apple, seeing it can still use strong marketing to sell highñmargin, high-status items, will continue to think it can do so with the Macintosh. What goes on at Apple planning sessions when market-share issues come up? Some executives probably proclaim that three percent of this market is “huge!!” Others nod their heads in agreement. And indeed, three percent is huge. But at some point (which may have been reached already), declining market share creates a relative lack of interest, and eventually, discontinuance. The Amiga fell prey to this.

This is perhaps the only really good point made in this article. Specifically, the last two sentences. Apple’s low marketshare means it has to be extremely careful not to misstep, lest it lose the interest of the general public. If people start ignoring the Mac, it’s doomed. Fortunately, Apple has a trojan horse in the form of the iPod, which it can use to keep the Mac in front of everyone’s faces.

But then he makes the biggest whopper:

I made this argument years ago regarding the bloating of Microsoft code. It goes like this: Say you have two identical products on the marketóword processors, for example. For the sake of argument, let’s make these two, X and Y, almost exactly the same. But product X is written in tight assembly language, fits on a floppy disk, and takes up 30K of memory. Product Y is written in some high-level language, comes on a CD-ROM, and takes up 500 megabytes on your hard drive. Which will outsell the other? I argue that the packed CD-ROM always will, because the public will perceive it as a greater value. You’re getting more for your money.

I would go so far as to argue that the CD-ROM product could even run slower (which obviously would be the case), and you’d still have more people buying it. The 30K program could compete only by being cheaper!

Now imagine the 30K product has tight, fast, bug-free code, but is more expensive. What would be the result? I’m guessing three percent market share.

This is the dilemma Apple faces, and there is no way around it. The long-term consequences are obvious. Apple is the easy-to-use, less complex platform. Thus it should be cheaper, not more expensive. It’s that simple.

At first glance, this argument looks solid. It does have a ring of truth to it. People do value complexity, because we’ve been trained from an early age to believe that more complexity equals more features, which equals a better product. The TV with more buttons on the remote always sells for more, right?

Well, not really. The iPod is the easiest, least complex HD portable music player out there, yet people have no problem paying premium prices for them. With the iPod, Apple has proved that simplicity can command a premium, something the Sonys of the world have yet to learn.