Boston, MA 02/21/2014 (wallstreetpr) – Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) are known as business competitors. Usually it is such that what one gains the other loses. As such, they are different in the way they do their businesses and recently a very interesting difference has emerged.
The two companies started off serving the personal computers market and then somewhere along the way Apple Inc sensed something and decided to take a different route to the future. The company branched out to smartphone and then to tablets business which have since become its primary business, though it still has a presence in PC market.
Analysts agree that had Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) not acted fast enough to consider an alternative business to PC, it would be no more by now. Perhaps this theory is supported by the trouble that has gripped companies that are large in PC business, Microsoft being one of them.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) made its wealth from PC, but the market has grown less attractive of late and the company can be seen trying to get its hands on tablets and smartphone business. Talk about smartphone and the company is just about to assume ownership of Nokia’s handset business for a deal valued at approximately $7.3 billion.
Ways apart
As the two legacy companies fight for survival in their respective niches or vying to expand to high rewarding niches, it is emerging that while Apple Inc’s presence in PC has diminished, users of its machines and operating system are seemingly more alive than those using Windows.
Said differently, Mac users are four times more likely to upgrade to newer versions of OS than Windows users. Figures reveal that since 2001, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) managed to convince only 11.6 percent of Windows users to upgrade their OS. In contrast, over the same duration, Apple Inc managed to convince 41.6 percent of its users to upgrade their systems. Note these figures reflect active users of the platforms.
Explaining the difference
So then, what gives? Well, many reasons are given and the highlights are that cost and ease of performing the upgrade are factors. Mavericks was a free upgrade of course, but even the previous Apple Inc OS upgrades were competitively priced compared with Windows.
Away from the cost, it has emerged that Apple Inc allowed easy features updates that were easy to perform than the case of Windows that brought about major changes to the user-interface. Moreover, Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s OS was just as friendly on older hardware, but not so with Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Windows OS.
