Mac share of surfers doubles in 8 months
Apple is eroding Microsoft's online market share, says analyst — The portion of people surfing the Web using a Mac has doubled in the past eight months, an Internet metrics analyst said today, and represents an audience that can't be ignored by Web application developers.
Context & Ripple Effects
The timing turns this into an opening round of a web-platform contest. One day earlier, Microsoft relaunched MSN Hotmail as Windows Live Hotmail worldwide in 36 languages and showed off its new Silverlight rich-internet plug-in at MIX, drawing positive blog reviews though most poll respondents stopped short of calling it a Flash killer.
Against that backdrop, the analyst's argument lands directly on Microsoft's strategy: the audience those web services are being rebuilt to capture is, by his reading, increasingly browsing on a Mac — a share that has doubled in eight months and, per the analyst, can no longer be ignored by web application developers.
First-order effects
- Web application developers face a measurably larger Mac audience, making Safari and OS X compatibility harder to treat as an edge case — the analyst explicitly frames it as an audience that cannot be ignored.
- Apple gets an independent, metrics-based data point showing it eroding Microsoft's online presence, separate from any shift in retail PC unit sales.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's freshly launched web properties — Windows Live Hotmail and Silverlight — now have to perform well in OS X browsers, or they cede part of the exact audience their May 7 rollout was designed to win; Silverlight's cross-platform Flash challenge gets tested first on its rival's platform.
- Internet metrics firms gain outsized leverage: whichever analyst numbers get cited will steer where developers and advertisers direct testing and porting budgets across platforms.
Third-order effects
- If browser-based measurement keeps serving as the yardstick for platform health, competition shifts from desktop installed base toward who controls the web runtime — favoring whoever makes cross-browser delivery cheapest.
- With an iPhone launch still unconfirmed but widely expected next month, Apple's browsing footprint has a plausible path to compound beyond the Mac line, further decoupling 'share of surfers' from traditional PC market-share math.
The trend: Web-analytics measurements are becoming the scoreboard for the operating-system wars, shifting the Apple–Microsoft contest from boxed software installs to shares of the browsing audience.