No, Apple is not an open source company (though it has made use of some interesting open source technology to build an exceptional operating system, browser, etc.). But I love to see news like this that it has, yet again, blown the doors of Wall Street expectations. Companies that build beautiful things should prosper.
But the bigger news, for me, is how quickly Mac sales are growing:
Apple shipped 1,517,000 Macintosh® computers and 10,549,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 36 percent growth in Macs and 24 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.It was the most profitable (March) quarter in Apple's history, and bodes well for the company that is making computers cool again."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.
Now if only Novell and Ubuntu could make hardware as sexy as Apple's for their respective Linux desktops....(Btw, if you bump into Mark Shuttleworth, as him about his ideas for innovating the desktop. If he can pull them off, I think he has a chance to make the Linux desktop sing. I agree with Marc Fleury that replicating the Linux desktop is a bit of a tired theme, but only so far as it's meant as a retread of Windows (or the Mac).
Mark and the Ubuntu crew are actually thinking of what a desktop could be, not what it has been. (And I'm sure Novell and team are doing the same - Novell has been a star on the desktop.)
Posted by Matt Asay on April 25, 2007 10:34 PM
