Accord­ing to online trend research firm Net Appli­ca­tions, Apple con­tin­ues to gain market share. Last month, Net Appli­ca­tions reported that Apple’s share was up to 6.8% with cor­re­spond­ing declin­ing Win­dows market share. Today, Net Appli­ca­tions reports that the Mac has crested the 7% bar­rier and is at 7.31% for Decem­ber 2007. Mean­while, Microsoft’s Win­dows OS con­tin­ues to decline in market share, with a still dom­i­nant 91.79% in Decem­ber having eroded from 92.42% in Novem­ber. Apple (and to a lesser extent, Linux) have been steadily taking market share from Microsoft for the past 6 months.

Some­thing old, some­thing new, some­thing boring some­thing blue… yeah ladies and gen­tle­men it was just a recap of the stuff we already knew! Some nice things: Safari 3.0 beta (also avail­able for Win­dows), Quick Look, new Dock, new Uni­ver­sal GUI, Stacks and the new Apple web­site (sweet! and about time). The web­site changes often give us a glimpse into the future… Who knows?

When Apple rebranded iTools to .Mac, Apple made fun of Microsoft’s .Net (.Net is Microsoft vision of an appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming frame­work for future Win­dows appli­ca­tions). When Apple bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP and WebOb­jects were part of the pack­age deal. NeXTSTEP and WebOb­ject were light years ahead of any­thing out there. The pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment was capa­ble of run­ning on sev­eral dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems. Parts of NeXT’s soft­ware were later used as the foun­da­tion for Mac OS X. WebOb­jects is suc­cess­ful being used for the Apple Store, iTunes Store and .Mac (.Mac is Apple’s vision of easy to use Web Ser­vices).
I see .Mac as (online) soft­ware and soft­ware has to be improved and get new fea­tures over time. The devel­op­ment of .Mac is slack­ing and get­ting behind other ser­vices, is .Mac ever going to improve? Even Apple’s board of direc­tors asked Steve Jobs what was going on? If you com­pare .Mac to Google or Yahoo you’ll soon get the pic­ture. 1GB disk space… common Apple, that’s old school! Where’s the PHP sup­port? Where’s the stan­dards sup­port? You’ll have to keep up!!! I am even con­sid­er­ing drop­ping my .Mac account! 99 dol­lars a year for this? Sorry, Apple you’ll have to do better! But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, if we can believe the rumors. Leop­ard (Mac OS X 10.5) will offer loads of enhance­ments and even tighter inte­gra­tion with .Mac. I’ll sit this one out till Leop­ard, but if Leop­ard doesn’t bring any improve­ments I’ll def­i­nitely end my sub­scrip­tion and say .Njet to .Mac (njet means “NO” in russian).