Apple True Market share

[Massimo Marino]

Your logic is faulty on one respect: you assume that if you ship the 
product to the 90% market share (ie Windows platforms) THEN that 90% 
WILL buy your product. BZZZZZ Does not work that way.

On the most sold SW products on Windows, the first 10 are all virus and 
defrag tools, then comes Office, then few more, then a pletora of 
others. Know what? Apart the virus chasing tools, starting from Office, 
all up to #20 or so do exist for the Mac as well.
Most sold Games: The first ten or so do exist for the Mac, the others 
do NOT get a market share visibility profiting from the  90% of Windows
their sales are lousy the same. Their presence on the market would be 
roughly equivalent if they shipped for Mac too (of course if Mac people 
bothered to buy and install sub-quality products, that is). Another 
thing they do no tell you is the existence of HYBRID CD.
An Hybrid CD always is on the PC shelves only and it counts as a PC 
sale even when the user is a Mac person: again, biased statistic 
figures.

If you release a CRAP product on the 90% market share you might sell to 
0.5% of the audience. Same for an Apple version. If you release a good 
product you are profitable on both platforms, big companies would not 
care producing for the Mac otherwise. They are sometimes more 
profitable on the Apple platform because the costs of updates and 
technical support are less!
The only ones who truly need to care are the crappy product 
distributors: 0.5% of 90% is much more than 0.5% of 5% hence the market 
share weights alot. Their product will disappear after a couple of 
years anyway.

Being on the Mac is a great crap-filter: if it exists for the Mac it is 
ALMOST for sure a quality product.

It is ludicrous when the average peecee user complain about the 
overwhelming majority of sw available for PC and not for Mac when you 
discover for the vast majority that they are using Office and a couple 
others product which ALL do exist for Mac.

Ignorance is a bliss!

On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 02:36 PM, PowerBook G4 Titanium 
List wrote:

> Well...if you're a program developer, and there's a 90% slice of the
> computer market held by the Windows OS and a 5% "slice" held by Apple
> (give Linux at least 5% of the market...)...and assuming that this is 
> NOT
> a multimedia or some "specialty niche/thing like Photoshop..just plain 
> old
> stuff for Joe Blow....Or maybe an exciting new application...where 
> would
> YOU go? My $$ says - with the 90% crowd...which leaves us with a GREAT 
> OS,
> GREAT hardware...and no applications...All dressed up and nowhere to 
> go!
>
> Think I'm wrong? Look at the figures!
>
> THAT'S my concern...
>


Massimo Marino
NERSC Division - HPC Department
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~marino
On leave at CERN, CH, EP Division, Atlas experiment
phone: (+41) 22 767-1288 fax: (+41) 22 767-8350 Office: 40-3-D16
alternate email: marino at slac.stanford.edu, marino at mail.cern.ch, 
Massimo.Marino at cern.ch