Apple’s Key Strategy: Vista

“The Mac is clearly gaining market share, with sales growing 36 percent—more than three times the industry growth rate,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

Apple shipped 1,517,000 Macintosh ® computers … representing 36 percent growth in Macs … over the year-ago quarter.”

“More than 50 percent of people who bought a Mac in Apple’s retail stores were new Mac buyers”

Source: zdnet.com

“What it really says is Apple continues to garner much greater attention in the personal computer market,’ said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies. ‘They’re attracting customers who used to be PC customers.”

According to my inside mole at Apple (MacDeepThroat), Apple’s strong second quarter results were the direct results of “Operation Vista”, a super-secret project which involved planting a number of high-powered techies into Microsoft’s OS Development Center. The mission of these double agents was to infiltrate Microsoft’s Vista team to propose and implement OS features which require more computing, RAM and video resources than currently available on almost all current PCs.

This diabolical yet brilliant strategy played into the design team’s quest for “bigger and better than XP” approach. It also fits with “Gates Law”, which dictates that each new OS will double the complexity of the previous OS.

Apple’s double agents exceeded expectations; Vista’s less than stellar response by PC buyers has opened PC buyers’ eyes to the Apple brand. “Operation Vista”, coupled with Apple’s recent embrace of Intel CPUs, had a direct impact on Apple’s accelerating PC sales.

Although my mole would neither confirm or deny this, it is strongly suspected that a similar operation is in place at Dell, resulting in Dell now re-offering PC products with XP as an optional OS. The Dell strategy is to keep XP as a viable option for as long as possible while Apple’s OS versions pull ahead in features and user friendliness.

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