C-change?

I'm a bit baffled at the term c-change in Stan Beer's article on Apple's share of the computer market but he makes some good points about whether Apple's market share is actually higher than the statistics suggest.

Web views aren't a bad measure, although they can very between sites. PC Rescue has a surprisingly low 2% visits from Apple users, while this blog has 12%. So we have to be cautious with statistics for individual sites.

It's somewhat unfair to criticise the shipping statistics from IDC and Gartner as these are the key measure on how much money the vendors make. Apple's 2007 annual report shows Mac sales made up $10bn of their $24bn sales. Peripherals, software and services made up 2.7bn.

So sales do matter for the company and analysts are right to focus on that.

But Stan is right about the Mac's longevity. In our comparison between Macs and Windows systems on the PC Rescue website we made exactly that point. The fact there is a vibrant resale market for Macs changes the cost of ownership dramatically in Apple's favour.

Given green IT is going to be such an issue in the next couple of years, we can also expect the longevity of the Mac to become a factor in people's purchase decisions. The fact a Mac is less likely to end up in landfill after five years is a serious point in their favour.

Greenpeace doesn't take take that into account in their Guide to Greener Electronics. It might be worthwhile considering this in future as re-use is even more environmentally friendly than recycling.

Stan's main point is more people switching to Macs (I'm assuming C-change means "computer" change) and I've certainly found this true with the number of people asking me about it. I wouldn't say though it is a huge proportion of users, more are concerned about whether they should get XP or Vista.

While Stan's right that the shipping numbers probably don't tell us the full story, it's still hard to see how the current uptake of the Mac is "opening the floodgates of an exodus from Windows in the consumer space".

It's good news for Apple, but I wouldn't be giving the last rites to Windows for some time yet.