5 Percent? (Premium)

When Steve Jobs stepped onto the stage at the Bayside Expo in Boston in August 1997, Apple was in a precarious state, just months away from bankruptcy. But Jobs had a few tricks up his sleeve, the most momentous of which was a verbal agreement with Microsoft CEO Bill Gates to continue supporting the Mac with new versions of the crucial Office apps suite. Gates also agreed to invest $150 million in Apple in return for nonvoting shares, a necessary cash injection that would help keep that company afloat.

This moment is forever etched in time for all kinds of reasons--the Big Brother-like image of Gates looming over Jobs on a video screen, the boos as Jobs announced that Internet Explorer would be the default browser on the Mac, and so on--but my clearest memories of that day are of two Steve Jobs comments, one that's stood the test of time and one which still reads as both audacious and deceptive.

"If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy again," Jobs explained that day, "we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose."

This still resonates today. To that moment, and in some ways through the early 2000s, Microsoft and Apple were direct competitors in some ways, with rival personal computer operating systems. But even in 1997, things were changing. Microsoft was moving into the business space with Office and a Windows that would soon be based on NT, and Apple was a smaller company that would shift its focus from creative professionals to consumers and see great success with devices. Today, the two companies are among the biggest in the world, and while the Mac and Windows still compete, this is much less of a concern for both and their biggest successes have collectively come from other markets.

"Sometimes points of view can really make you look at things differently," he also said that day. "When I was looking at the statistics, it hit me that ... Apple plus Microsoft equals 100 percent of the desktop computer market."

The audience applauded here, apparently not understanding--or maybe just trying desperately to ignore--that approximately 93 to 95 percent of that market was controlled by Microsoft, not Apple. So, yes, the two together were essentially 100 percent. But Apple's share of that market was miniscule and in danger of disappearing.

At the time, I found this comment to be clueless and even laughable.

Flash forward 28 years (!) and for obvious reasons, I was immediately reminded of that day in Boston when I saw headlines over the weekend about Linux surpassing 5 percent market share--really, usage share--for the first time ever. But I also understood without reading any of those articles that 2025 isn't going to be like 1997, to channel a classic Apple marketing line.

First, the obvious caveat: When I finally did look at this story this morning, I found that the 5 percent Linux usage share figure, which comes from Statcounter, the last...