A recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing has revealed that Apple now considers Linux a potential market challenger. Apple"s K-10 form – a review of its past financial year for the SEC – reveals that as well as contending with competition from Microsoft, the company now perceives a threat from open source software.
The filing says: "Over the past several years, price competition in the market for personal computers and related peripherals has been particularly intense as competitors who sell Windows and Linux based personal computers have aggressively cut prices and lowered their product margins for personal computing products."
Apple"s filing continues: "The Mac OS has a minority market share in the personal computer market, which is dominated by makers of computers utilising other competing operating systems, including Windows and Linux. [Apple]"s future operating results and financial condition are substantially dependent on its ability to continue to develop improvements to the Macintosh platform in order to maintain perceived design and functional advantages over competing platforms."