Rich Burridge wrote: > Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote: >> I am not saying we shouldn't take good ideas etc., from Apple, but lets >> try to remember that Apple is basically a failure in the desktop market. > > What were you smoking when you wrote this? >
Well, it depends on your "success metric" when talking about "failure" Christian is right in many ways if you are talking about marketshare... their marketshare is in the 3-10% range (depending on who you ask) and has not really shown signs of exceeding that... and most of it is based on a historical market that Windows never really had (creative professionals) so Apple's track record of getting people to 'switch' is even worse than 3-10% might indicate. There's recent health caused by getting out of the "switch people's desktop" rut and creating something new with the iPod/iTunes/etc. line of stuff. That brand equity has rubbed off on the desktop a bit. But basically Apple's desktop remains a premium product for certain audiences, with no real chance of having 20-50% marketshare anytime soon. GNOME could learn a lot here. Both OS X and Firefox illustrate to me that even with near-perfect branding, marketing, and usability, the "switch from A to B in the same category - same benefit to same audience" premise for a product will not be a blockbuster success vs. the market leader. While with something that's really a new category with no clear market leader yet, you get breakout successes - in many cases _despite_ bad usability, low quality, lack of marketing, and other issues. That's why qualitative/disruptive difference in kind is so much more interesting than quantitative "betterness" along some continuous dimension, if your goal is to have a huge impact on lots of people. I do think OS X has some qualitative/disruptive differences in the apps Apple offers, but in those cases the apps are sort of boat-anchored by the OS; that is, offering the apps' benefits minus having to switch to OS X would make the apps take off far faster. For example, if iTunes/iPod were Mac-only it would be much less successful. Anyhow... you could definitely say that OS X is a design success or serves its audience well or has made Apple a lot of money, i.e. in many ways it's not a failure, not really interested in arguing that. But in marketshare terms it isn't the best kind of product for rapid/mass adoption. Havoc _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
