Overall market share numbers have always been particularly unimpressive for Apple, because the company similarly has never participated in large segments of the PC market. Apple sells premium computers with a unique operating system. This leaves it with no direct equivalent in the market. In fact, all the focus on driving up market share turned out to be a red herring, and spawned disastrous business decisions that made Apple’s actual problem worse.

Low-end PC sales are a high volume, low profit business, but a critical segment of the Windows PC market. By keeping sales volumes high, Dell and HP can lower overall manufacturing costs by benefiting from large economies of scale. They are also very much aware that every PC they fail to sell will be sold by a competitor, because demand in the PC market is huge.

Macs weren't ever part of the overall PC market, because they weren't PCs at all. They couldn't run DOS or Windows, which was the definition of PC ever since IBM applied the letters to its first home computer Thinking that Apple could simply follow the success stories within the PC world, analysts determined that Apple needed to be more like HP and Dell, or alternatively more like Microsoft. They were disastrously wrong, primarily because Apple wasn't selling the same product as either the PC makers or Microsoft.

Apple struggled to expand the Mac market in 1992 by broadening out into new retail outlets, including Sears, with a new, low-end Performa line. This effort to sell Macs more like HP failed due to poor marketing and poor retail presentation. If Apple wanted to sell more Macs, it would have to learn how to do that itself. That didn't happen until 2001, when Apple opened its first retail stores.

  Apple began experimenting with Mac clones. It licensed hardware designs and Mac OS 7

software to Motorola, Power Computing, and several other hardware manufacturers, with the intention that they would expand the market for Macs, particularly into the growing low-end of consumer PCs. This was supposed to make Apple more like Microsoft, earning its profits from hardware reference designs and licensed software. However, the assumption that Microsoft's business plan would be easy to copy was wrong.

  Additionally, cloning also attempted to sell Mac hardware more like Dell: target the large

low-end market with cheap hardware and trade lower profits for higher volumes using a direct sales model. It turned out that the analysts were wrong. Cloning didn't work for Apple for the same reasons that Apple was having its initial problems: the company had a limited potential share of the market.

  Prior to Windows, Macs held an obvious advantage in running desktop publishing and

graphic design applications. As Windows began to develop into a comparable product, Apple fell behind in progressive development of differentiating features.

After buying NeXT in the final days of 1996, Apple spent several years investing in its new, NeXT based operating system. Apple was forced to dump its initial plans to quickly migrate Mac users to NeXT STEP under the code name Rhapsody, and instead undertook an extensive engineering effort to completely reengineer a new hybrid operating system and development environment. Despite fixing the obvious flaws in Apple's operating system offering, Mac OS X did not in itself solve Apple's problem. The company now only had an improved platform that nobody had any reason to buy.