Hi, Dar,
This is important for me to know. That some percentage are OS X and some greater percentage are pre OS X means little of those of the older OS are not spending money.
Speaking from experiences with my customers (publishers, marketing agencies) I can say: Many MAC users still refuse to switch to Mac OS X because their applications are not available or suffer from first version problems. Many other MAC users cannot switch over due to incapable hardware resources and prefer to continue using their machines (as these are not faulty) with software they know.
Most of those customers of mine that have switched noticed a (partly dramatical) increase in support costs for their Mac clients. Some have therefor switched back to Mac OS 9, which results in paragraph one observations (stability problems with applications and or users - user error, please replace!)
With Quark and Photoshop slowly coming along for Mac OS X the pressure to switch to X is increasing. The "installed base" of Mac machines is quite large at those customers, so I would tend to say: You will have Mac OS <=9 users at least for the next 2 years at a ratio of at least 40-60% of all installed Macs. It is difficult to predict, though, since I do have customers leaving the Mac completely for PCs due to cost/support ratios, partly performance issues and others. But that has nothing to do with your question, I admit.
I have to echo this. As far as I can tell a lot of users just don't want to upgrade. In one place I visited the support costs had sky rocketed and they switched back to MacOS 9 or risked losing their Mac altogether and having PCs forced on them. They were lucky, they were/are using G4 that could still boot MacOS 9.
It's also the reluctance to take a step backward in terms of UI, the MacOS 9 UI is just so dammed good, especially when emblished with extentions that improve productivity. I'm a C/C++ developer and just navigating around the disk is MUCH faster under 9. The dock in X is just terrible!
It also doesn't help having Command Line snippets all over Mac magazines like MacWorld etc. It just makes the Mac look geeky and if they wanted geeky they would have gotton a PC.
No, those not switching are not generally refusing to INVEST. They are just refusing to go for the latest Xmas-tree just because it's new. They have working tools that they have learned to know for years - and one pro of the Mac platform always has been: If you know one application, you know all of them. Getting Mac users to "love" a new system (which Mac OS X is) is harder than getting a PC user to admit that a Mac has advantages at all :-)
I agree, I was at a place before Christmas and they had just taken Delivery of 5 of the latest G5s and Apple Studio Monitors (the really wide ones). When the manager of the department found out they could no longer boot MacOS 9, he sent them all back and got PCs and a couple of used G4's.
This is happening all over the place and I think the main reason for it is the UI. If they had made it more like 9, then I think that people would have taken to it more readilly. As it is now, it's like driving a car, but all the controls are in weird places, you know you can probably get done what you need to get done, but it will take a lot more effort, so why bother to change?
Just my 5 cents worth!
Does anyone have a MacOS 9 Run-Rev license they want to sell? Is that allowed?
Your's hopefully....... All the Best Dave _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
