Day 1 at LeWeb and Apple's take over of the Conference
Today was day one of LeWeb in Paris. My mind is reeling at all the information and useful tips I gained throughout the day. There were product announcements, histories, and demos, as I tweeted live about. There's still one more day left, the 10th of December, so if you missed the Tweets today be sure to catch them tomorrow.
More substantial posts will be written in due course, offering analytical and opinionated views on subjects discussed at LeWeb. If you want to view the conference by speaker and section, you can watch it here. This is also the link for the live feed tomorrow. As a participant, there were some basic things that stuck out in my mind. The most obvious was observed simply by a quick look around the room. Everywhere I looked, I saw iPhones and Macbooks. iPhones and Macbooks. Not Nokia N97's and HP laptops. iPhones and Macbooks. Clearly, Apple dominates the smartphone market so this is hardly surprising. Although, I would have expected to see a few more models of smartphones being used by other participants. The real interesting part is the statistics about Apple laptop usage. Over 1300 unique devices were connected at LeWeb - and over 60% of these were made by Apple. Considering Apple has less than 10% market share in computers, this figure is absolutely phenomenal. If the leaders of the tech industry are all using Macs, surely this gives us an insight into what the market may be like in a year or so. You may argue that these leaders of the tech industry are easily able to afford Mac computers, while the average consumer is not able to. While I would have agreed with this point 6 months ago, I now feel that Apple offers a range of laptops, of which one will fit almost every consumer's needs. For what you get, the white Macbook really is not all that expensive, if you are looking for a budget option. This is even despite the fact that Microsoft AND Nokia were both gold sponsors at LeWeb. It is fundamentals like this which leads me to believe Apple will overtake Microsoft soon. If they do decide to cater to businesses (they currently do not, arguing that they make higher margins off consumers), the task will be all too easy for them.
Stay tuned for more updates, Blogs, Videos and Live tweets on Day 2 at LeWeb
Social Media NZ
Michael Moore-Jones @mmoorejones and @smnz
Dec 10, 2009
tommorris said...
Well, there is another part to this: a lot of developers started using Macs back when Apple moved over to OS X. Designers have been using them since way back when. The developers who moved over did so because they could have a UNIX workstation running much of the same technology that runs on the server and they can run things like Adobe suite for design and they can run Office and other business apps for work. The "Mac takeover" was completely apparent at many Web-focussed tech conferences back in about 2006.I can't speak to why the tech business and social media crowd use Macs though.
