Get 'em while they are hot! 1119
Only because most computer users in general are PC users. If most computer users were Macs users, then...
MuahMan
Which part are you disputing? That its not more important for a business to have "profit growth" than "market share"?
They most certainly will, if that 2% brings in a disproportionate percentage of the market's profit share.
IIRC, Microsoft has historically revealed that their Mac business unit is one of their most profitable divisions. In industry, such business areas are called "Cash Cows".
Because they now have the production capacity to make millions of them. But if you recall the iPod's earlier days, there were product shortages. Apple's business strategy was to not risk overexpansion of production capacity - they were willing to lose sales in order to not lose money.
YMMV as to why they do this, but you might recall that they had financial pains from the 2G iMac in that some colors did not sell as well as others, and because of how they had apparently structured their production orders, Apple ended up leaning on their retailers to buy them in equal quanbreasties of each color.
The capital cost of a having a larger manufacturing facility is not insignificant.
For example, in 2003, IBM's Fishkill NY chip fabrication plant underwent extensive rennovations to go from using 200mm wafers to 300mm wafers.
Cost: $2.5 Billion. Yes, that's a "B". If you prefer, its $2,500 Million.
At the current rate of 0.001 Billion Mac's sold per fiscal quarter, you can sort out how long it would take to recover the cost of this size of investment, especially if you're proposing slashing the profit margins which would normally pay for such amortization. Sure, you might make some up on higher volume, but its still a not-insignificant risk.
We do. What we don't buy is the "Macs are not populasr enough" argument. SOMEBODY would have surely...
Not at all. Its just that most people have absolutely no clue how much manufacturing facilities cost, which is then compounded by their very poor personal finance skills (as evidenced by credit card debt, etc) to have any clue as to how to manage the supply-demand balances to price a product so as to minimize losing huge amounts of money on it.
Businesses exist to make money. Having market share can be helpful in putting bread on the table, but in of itself, it is not a guarentee. Price stratgies have to balance profit rates versus downside risks of each decision, and what is their acceptable risk exposure, to determine where they can place their products.
Then you are admitting to being yet-another liar. The last mask you had on said that...
As a rule of thumb, the easiest way to make a good profit is to have a compelling product that people will beat a path to your door for, with sufficient demand to buy as many as you're willing to risk making. In such situations, you can raise your price to "drive away" customers so that there is very roughly a balance between supply and demand. In doing so, you've optimized profits.
By that reasoning, the ratio of malware would reflect the EXACT ratio of users of each platform. It obviously is not, so there is a flaw here. But the Mac market share was larger before...
An example of this is the Jungfrau cog railway train in Switzerland, which goes to Europe's highest rail station. Its a huge tourist attraction:
A railway ticket to the Jungfraujoch is 68 plus 1.40 Euro's (round trip), which is over US$85 (2nd Clbutt). The reason it is so expensive is because they cannot economically increase the supply (how much would a second tunnel cost?), and even at this high price point, the demand is still sufficiently high that they often sell out of seats...even though this works out to roughly 80 cents *per minute* (52 minutes up, 50 minutes down) that you're on the train, which for the most part is inside a pitch black tunnel.
FWIW, there's live webcams here:
...it will be sunset momentarily there, but it looks like 5-5-06 wasn't a very good day for a pair of tourists to drop $160 for a ride to the top for the view.
-hh