However, to say they don't care about market share is crap. Market share dicatates how many developers you have working on your platform.
No, the absolute number of machines in any market dictates that.
Any developer who is looking for income, not just making what they want to, would rather sell into 2% of a 1,000,000 seat market than into 98% of a 1,000 seat market. Because at the end of the day, income is decided in concrete terms, price times sales, and percentages are abstractions that fall out in post hoc analysis. That's not even considering things like piracy, which skews Windows sales down well below what market share would predict (and which is significantly worse than piracy on the Mac side).
In absolute terms, the Mac OS X market is plenty big enough to accommodate a lot of developers. This, coupled with the ease of developing on OS X, is why the number of OS X developers is steadily growing.
Quote:
All you gamers who think that gaming drives sales, must also realize that the dearth of games on the Mac is because of low market share.
This badly oversimplifies the real issues, but to only consider market share for a moment: As you say above, what matters is the market in question. The market for Mac games is much smaller than overall marketshare would indicate. A game that sells a million copies on the PC might break 10,000 on the Mac. To consider the other variables in question: As I've concluded in another Mac gaming thread, the most effective way to target Mac using gamers is to release a PlayStation version of your game.
Any increase in market share will only improve this state of affairs if it improves the actual number of Macs in the hands of people who want to play games on Macs. If the Mac mini is a grand slam home run in enterprise, dragging the iMac by its coattails, then Mac marketshare will tick upward substantially and A-list games will continue to sell by the... thousands. To the extent that consoles remain a simple and common alternative, I don't see the Mac gaming situation changing all that much—the wild card would be a Myst-style blockbuster that just doesn't translate well to consoles.
Quote:
The fear of not having quality apps on the Mac platform I'm sure was one reason why Apple went ahead with all the iLife apps. They stepped on some toes in doing so, but if those weren't there, do you think such quality stuff would have been written by someone else for an OS with 3% market share?
Have you seen anything of that quality written by someone else for the OS with 90% market share?
Great software is written by people who are willing and able to write great software. A huge market share simply means that there's lots of room for successful mediocrity. But even in the dark days, it was widely known that Mac software had more spit and polish because the user base demanded it. Any app that didn't pass the "Mac like" test was rejected.
Also, to invert your argument: For a small platform, the developers are more likely to be writing for it out of dedication, instead of just doing something well enough to get enough people to pay.
Quote:
I don't think Apple needs big market share, but they need to be percieved as growing not shrinking. If they doubled to 6% they would be happy in the black, with lots of great financial press and still be a small player on a global scale. However, in the near term that would be enough to keep the doom sayers away and keep developer interest up.
I think they are perceived as growing, and I think it's because they are growing. To simplify, if they have this cute, cheap little box that doesn't get viruses and doesn't crash a lot (remember, there are a lot of people still on Win 98 or ME, or on XP Home with the firewall off — MS doesn't make it easy to find the checkbox that turns it on), then people aren't going to care about what the market share is now. Most newer, better solutions start out with a lower market share than the Mac's.
Please stop talking like you know something. Gamers don't push the PC market at all business does. I'm working on a quote for 36 desktops and 10 laptops. Nobody is trying to get rich selling to gamers. LOL..get real man.
The Mac mini has a 4 week wait. Powerbooks sell as fast as we can get stock. For the love of God would some of you posers please stop trying to sound like you know "what's hot and what's not"
No offense but unless you're selling computers everyday for a large reseller you probably don't have a clue what's really going on.
You are out of touch, Gaming is a Billion dollar business. Gamers are pushing the video card industry and computer industry not iphoto or email. next?
I agree with Aurora. Try mega-billion industry. The gaming business has now far outstripped Hollywood and is growing by the minute. It may not be "driving" the computer industry per se, but it is already, and will be more and more, a HUGE factor.
Gaming addicts are contantly upgrading their machines. They don't put in orders for 36 desktops, but over time, they drop a LOT of cake on their boxes. Several users like this add up to big $$ spent in the industry.
An analogy: it would like the film industry focussing on the dad who takes his family to the movie theatre once a year. He buys 8 tickets and a whack of coke and popcorn. Big spender. But his teenage daughter goes to the theatre once a week, buys 52 tickets, 40 bags of corn and enough coke to fill a bathtub.
Needless to say, Hollywood knows who their target market is.
I'm NOT saying gamers drive the market. But they certainly have a representative at the table. Maybe several reps.
And, no, I'm not a gamer myself. We're on macs, remember
CDW does 23 million dollars a day in sales on the avg. How many gamers do you suppose they sell to.
Apple's marketshare is due to increase simply because of the Mac mini. The Powermacs have been stagnant but that's reasonable because
1. They are huge.
2. They are more computing that many people need
I've never seen Apple in a position as good as this with such a breadth of products and positive mindshare. Let us see how they parlay their lead in digital music. I think you'll be suprised at how far they can take this.
Did I read somewhere that gaming has surpassed the motion picture business in revenues?
Ignoring the games, Gamers upgrade almost every year, businesses upgrade very two to three years.
Yeah...and?
I have clients that buy $1500 of toner every 6 weeks. There's are a lot more things that companies need beyond the normal desktops. Of course the gaming industry has more revenue than Hollywood. Do the math
Game avg $40-50 for a new release.
Movie $8-9 for a new release. Come on guys..Duh. Put your thinking caps on.
I don't think Tiger is the key. Apple never markets their OS like other products. I think the keys are the mini and iLife. The mini offers the price and iLife offers the ease of use that many have already been introducted to with iTunes.
You and I may understand that Tiger will make things all around better, but the real interaction with a computer should be focused on the apps, not the OS. I think Apple knows this and that is why they don't market the OS (except for developers) but rather market the apps.
Sorry, I didn't switch to a mac b/c of the wonderful apps, although they are nice. I switched b/c I was sick and tired of the crappy windows OS. It was the MAC OS that won me over. Tiger IS going to be very important.
People are switching b/c windows is not a good OS - period. I've never heard of people complaining about WORD or EXCEL or even ACCESS; it was always about windows.
On another note, IT people won't switch b/c of hardware like the mini or apps like iLife - c'mon, seriously. They're going to switch b/c of the OS.
If anything Apple's hardware keeps people from switching. The iApps are very good, but some of the windows apps are rapidly catching up (i.e Picasa). The Mac Mini is really the first semi mainsteam desktop Apple has had since since the 6500. When it all comes down to it, OSX is stable and easy to use. Windows is not.
I think that both windows XP and OSX are fairly easy to use, that is, if you know what you are doing. It is just as easy in both to kill the OS if you command delete or shift delete the right folders. OSX was fun the first couple of days, but it got old after that for me. If you know how to care for your computer, it will run fine for years and then some.
Our university's problem is that we have rampant virus problems on campus. People just don't know how to take care of their computers (aka Dells, i really hate that company). We have resorted to scanning computers for suspicious outgoing packets and then blocking their MAC address from network access (another mac guy and I recommended buying a mac mini for everyone, it would have been cheaper than deploying that software, Perfigo).
I work for my Universities IT department and since i bought my powerbook, I know people i work with who are considering buying macs (laptops only). They like it because the OS is different than what we work on everyday and because it is so small, yet so powerful. and they look real purdy too.
As for the gaming driving the market, i know people who would throw down around $500 every six months or so just to get the latest graphics card and better memory. These guys who don't live the greatest lifestyle, but they always make sure they have the newest/best games and newest (i wouldn't call an X800 the best.... at least on the PC side) hardware to run those games.
Computer enthusiasts don't like macs that much either. They enjoy putting a computer together from the ground up. Apple does not let you do that, so it drives a portion of the market away. but if they did allow people to build macs, they would not work nearly as well. I would get booed out of any lan parties i used to go to because of my PB.
I recommend macs to anyone who is not a gamer. XP, for me, is a gaming OS, whereas OSX is for everything else and then some. And if they insist on using XP, i recommend Shuttle XPC cases. soooooo small
You are out of touch, Gaming is a Billion dollar business. Gamers are pushing the video card industry and computer industry not iphoto or email. next?
I agree... but only so far as that the gaming industry is absolutely massive.
However, it is important to realize what these numbers include.
Normally, the stats include sales of hardware and software. Since software makes up the bulk of sales, it is a misleading figure to use as evidence that apple is missing out on hardware sales.
Most gaming is done on console systems. The systems typcially lag behind desktop PCs in terms of performance. This doesn't seem to support the assertion that apple is missing out on gaming hardware sales due to having slow hardware.
Gaming hardware is also typically sold at a loss, with money being made back on in house software titles. Once again, this doesn't support the premise that apple is missing out on the gaming hardware market.
I think it is flat out impossible for apple to compete in the gaming-rig scene and that it was wise of them not to try.
Apple has little hope of competing with the hundreds of manufacturers producing for the x86 platform... at least in raw performance. Where apple succeeds is in providing a high-quality complete-package that just works. Not suprisingly, their superior, complete system design ends up costing more than a pieced together gaming rig.
Professionals and home users can fairly easily justify the purchase of a system which doesn't have the best price/performance ratio. Gamers, on the other hand, would feel foolish for spending tons of money on something that is 100% pure luxury. Gamers care only about the price performance ratio, not the OS which is hidden by their games. Home users and professionals care about more than frames-per-second. They care about the things that apple focuses on.
Since the MacOS isn't a neccesity for a good gaming experience, Apple wisely chooses to focus on markets with needs that match up to Apple's strengths.
It isn't that Apple has unwisely missed the gaming boat. Instead, they've stayed out of a market in which their core strengths would be of little use.
Yeah, I have. iLife is good, but there is plenty of software for Windows that is just as good.
True story. I don't think iLife is all that great. I mean, the software is good, but there is windows software that is just as good
iTunes: well, uh, iTunes. In this case, it is the best imho
iPhoto: Google's Picasa (free) in my opinion is better than iPhoto, which has the goofiest and most sluggish database ever
Haha, that's all i really know. How is windows movie maker? Probably crappy. I guess garage band is good, but if we're talking about the mainstream market, all they really want is iTunes, iPhoto, and maybe iMovie
and i'd love to upgrade iPhoto (the only one i use) for less than $79.
Progmac
I think Apple should split the apps up. At first it made sense to bundle them all together because iLife was $50 but now at $80 I see the problem with people wanting to use only 1 or 2 of the apps and looking at $80 as not quite the same value.
I have clients that buy $1500 of toner every 6 weeks.
What does this have to do with PC sales and market share?
Quote:
ease of use that many have already been introducted to with iTunes
I use winamp, iTunes, MS Media Player 9/10, and Beoplayer. I only have MP3s/ MP3Pro/ VQF (not a sucker for DRMed anything). MS Media Player is just as easy to use as iTunes. WinAmp is close, but is a lot easier to customize.
Quote:
The iApps are very good, but some of the windows apps are rapidly catching up (i.e Picasa).
Actually, there are better programs out there (compared to Picasa) and have been there for a while. Completely free. One such program is Irfanview. Its algorithms for a lot of filters/ operations, such as resizing, are considered by many to be better than in iPhoto and Photoshop.
Quote:
iLife isn't perfect but there is no suite of applications on the PC side that are truly comparable for $79.
DV/HDV editing
Audio multitrack recording with loop support
DVD burning
Photo management.
With that line of argumentation I can name you a lot of PC applications which simply aren't available for Mac period, at any price. So let's not go there.
With that line of argumentation I can name you a lot of PC applications which simply aren't available for Mac period, at any price. So let's not go there.
Well stop running your mouth and get to typing rookie. "I can" doesn't get you anywhere here. Bring it.
What does this have to do with PC sales and market share?
Reading is fundamental..comprehension is godly. My point was that Gamers buying a new computer every year means squat for overall sales. Biz people buy computers on refresh cycles but they buy a lot of stuff in between.
Quote:
Its algorithms for a lot of filters/ operations, such as resizing, are considered by many
LOL nerd alert. I guess that "considered by many would be you right"
dude go pay for a girlfriend or something. Get out more.
Comments
Originally posted by Carson O'Genic
However, to say they don't care about market share is crap. Market share dicatates how many developers you have working on your platform.
No, the absolute number of machines in any market dictates that.
Any developer who is looking for income, not just making what they want to, would rather sell into 2% of a 1,000,000 seat market than into 98% of a 1,000 seat market. Because at the end of the day, income is decided in concrete terms, price times sales, and percentages are abstractions that fall out in post hoc analysis. That's not even considering things like piracy, which skews Windows sales down well below what market share would predict (and which is significantly worse than piracy on the Mac side).
In absolute terms, the Mac OS X market is plenty big enough to accommodate a lot of developers. This, coupled with the ease of developing on OS X, is why the number of OS X developers is steadily growing.
All you gamers who think that gaming drives sales, must also realize that the dearth of games on the Mac is because of low market share.
This badly oversimplifies the real issues, but to only consider market share for a moment: As you say above, what matters is the market in question. The market for Mac games is much smaller than overall marketshare would indicate. A game that sells a million copies on the PC might break 10,000 on the Mac. To consider the other variables in question: As I've concluded in another Mac gaming thread, the most effective way to target Mac using gamers is to release a PlayStation version of your game.
Any increase in market share will only improve this state of affairs if it improves the actual number of Macs in the hands of people who want to play games on Macs. If the Mac mini is a grand slam home run in enterprise, dragging the iMac by its coattails, then Mac marketshare will tick upward substantially and A-list games will continue to sell by the... thousands. To the extent that consoles remain a simple and common alternative, I don't see the Mac gaming situation changing all that much—the wild card would be a Myst-style blockbuster that just doesn't translate well to consoles.
The fear of not having quality apps on the Mac platform I'm sure was one reason why Apple went ahead with all the iLife apps. They stepped on some toes in doing so, but if those weren't there, do you think such quality stuff would have been written by someone else for an OS with 3% market share?
Have you seen anything of that quality written by someone else for the OS with 90% market share?
Great software is written by people who are willing and able to write great software. A huge market share simply means that there's lots of room for successful mediocrity. But even in the dark days, it was widely known that Mac software had more spit and polish because the user base demanded it. Any app that didn't pass the "Mac like" test was rejected.
Also, to invert your argument: For a small platform, the developers are more likely to be writing for it out of dedication, instead of just doing something well enough to get enough people to pay.
I don't think Apple needs big market share, but they need to be percieved as growing not shrinking. If they doubled to 6% they would be happy in the black, with lots of great financial press and still be a small player on a global scale. However, in the near term that would be enough to keep the doom sayers away and keep developer interest up.
I think they are perceived as growing, and I think it's because they are growing. To simplify, if they have this cute, cheap little box that doesn't get viruses and doesn't crash a lot (remember, there are a lot of people still on Win 98 or ME, or on XP Home with the firewall off — MS doesn't make it easy to find the checkbox that turns it on), then people aren't going to care about what the market share is now. Most newer, better solutions start out with a lower market share than the Mac's.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Aurora
Please stop talking like you know something. Gamers don't push the PC market at all business does. I'm working on a quote for 36 desktops and 10 laptops. Nobody is trying to get rich selling to gamers. LOL..get real man.
The Mac mini has a 4 week wait. Powerbooks sell as fast as we can get stock. For the love of God would some of you posers please stop trying to sound like you know "what's hot and what's not"
No offense but unless you're selling computers everyday for a large reseller you probably don't have a clue what's really going on.
You are out of touch, Gaming is a Billion dollar business. Gamers are pushing the video card industry and computer industry not iphoto or email. next?
Gaming addicts are contantly upgrading their machines. They don't put in orders for 36 desktops, but over time, they drop a LOT of cake on their boxes. Several users like this add up to big $$ spent in the industry.
An analogy: it would like the film industry focussing on the dad who takes his family to the movie theatre once a year. He buys 8 tickets and a whack of coke and popcorn. Big spender. But his teenage daughter goes to the theatre once a week, buys 52 tickets, 40 bags of corn and enough coke to fill a bathtub.
Needless to say, Hollywood knows who their target market is.
I'm NOT saying gamers drive the market. But they certainly have a representative at the table. Maybe several reps.
And, no, I'm not a gamer myself. We're on macs, remember
CDW does 23 million dollars a day in sales on the avg. How many gamers do you suppose they sell to.
Apple's marketshare is due to increase simply because of the Mac mini. The Powermacs have been stagnant but that's reasonable because
1. They are huge.
2. They are more computing that many people need
I've never seen Apple in a position as good as this with such a breadth of products and positive mindshare. Let us see how they parlay their lead in digital music. I think you'll be suprised at how far they can take this.
Ignoring the games, Gamers upgrade almost every year, businesses upgrade very two to three years.
Originally posted by slughead
Did I read somewhere that gaming has surpassed the motion picture business in revenues?
Ignoring the games, Gamers upgrade almost every year, businesses upgrade very two to three years.
Yeah...and?
I have clients that buy $1500 of toner every 6 weeks. There's are a lot more things that companies need beyond the normal desktops. Of course the gaming industry has more revenue than Hollywood. Do the math
Game avg $40-50 for a new release.
Movie $8-9 for a new release. Come on guys..Duh. Put your thinking caps on.
Originally posted by Carson O'Genic
I don't think Tiger is the key. Apple never markets their OS like other products. I think the keys are the mini and iLife. The mini offers the price and iLife offers the ease of use that many have already been introducted to with iTunes.
You and I may understand that Tiger will make things all around better, but the real interaction with a computer should be focused on the apps, not the OS. I think Apple knows this and that is why they don't market the OS (except for developers) but rather market the apps.
Sorry, I didn't switch to a mac b/c of the wonderful apps, although they are nice. I switched b/c I was sick and tired of the crappy windows OS. It was the MAC OS that won me over. Tiger IS going to be very important.
People are switching b/c windows is not a good OS - period. I've never heard of people complaining about WORD or EXCEL or even ACCESS; it was always about windows.
On another note, IT people won't switch b/c of hardware like the mini or apps like iLife - c'mon, seriously. They're going to switch b/c of the OS.
Originally posted by slughead
Did I read somewhere that gaming has surpassed the motion picture business in revenues?
Yes, the gaming industry has surpassed the motion picture industry, but only at the theaters.
This doesn't count all the toys, DVD sales, marketing, books, etc that the movie biz holds the rights to.
This is fact, the motion picture industry still makes boat loads more than video games do.
Our university's problem is that we have rampant virus problems on campus. People just don't know how to take care of their computers (aka Dells, i really hate that company). We have resorted to scanning computers for suspicious outgoing packets and then blocking their MAC address from network access (another mac guy and I recommended buying a mac mini for everyone, it would have been cheaper than deploying that software, Perfigo).
I work for my Universities IT department and since i bought my powerbook, I know people i work with who are considering buying macs (laptops only). They like it because the OS is different than what we work on everyday and because it is so small, yet so powerful. and they look real purdy too.
As for the gaming driving the market, i know people who would throw down around $500 every six months or so just to get the latest graphics card and better memory. These guys who don't live the greatest lifestyle, but they always make sure they have the newest/best games and newest (i wouldn't call an X800 the best.... at least on the PC side) hardware to run those games.
Computer enthusiasts don't like macs that much either. They enjoy putting a computer together from the ground up. Apple does not let you do that, so it drives a portion of the market away. but if they did allow people to build macs, they would not work nearly as well. I would get booed out of any lan parties i used to go to because of my PB.
I recommend macs to anyone who is not a gamer. XP, for me, is a gaming OS, whereas OSX is for everything else and then some. And if they insist on using XP, i recommend Shuttle XPC cases. soooooo small
Originally posted by Aurora
You are out of touch, Gaming is a Billion dollar business. Gamers are pushing the video card industry and computer industry not iphoto or email. next?
I agree... but only so far as that the gaming industry is absolutely massive.
However, it is important to realize what these numbers include.
Normally, the stats include sales of hardware and software. Since software makes up the bulk of sales, it is a misleading figure to use as evidence that apple is missing out on hardware sales.
Most gaming is done on console systems. The systems typcially lag behind desktop PCs in terms of performance. This doesn't seem to support the assertion that apple is missing out on gaming hardware sales due to having slow hardware.
Gaming hardware is also typically sold at a loss, with money being made back on in house software titles. Once again, this doesn't support the premise that apple is missing out on the gaming hardware market.
I think it is flat out impossible for apple to compete in the gaming-rig scene and that it was wise of them not to try.
Apple has little hope of competing with the hundreds of manufacturers producing for the x86 platform... at least in raw performance. Where apple succeeds is in providing a high-quality complete-package that just works. Not suprisingly, their superior, complete system design ends up costing more than a pieced together gaming rig.
Professionals and home users can fairly easily justify the purchase of a system which doesn't have the best price/performance ratio. Gamers, on the other hand, would feel foolish for spending tons of money on something that is 100% pure luxury. Gamers care only about the price performance ratio, not the OS which is hidden by their games. Home users and professionals care about more than frames-per-second. They care about the things that apple focuses on.
Since the MacOS isn't a neccesity for a good gaming experience, Apple wisely chooses to focus on markets with needs that match up to Apple's strengths.
It isn't that Apple has unwisely missed the gaming boat. Instead, they've stayed out of a market in which their core strengths would be of little use.
Have you seen anything of that quality written by someone else for the OS with 90% market share?
Yeah, I have. iLife is good, but there is plenty of software for Windows that is just as good.
Originally posted by skatman
Yeah, I have. iLife is good, but there is plenty of software for Windows that is just as good.
True story. I don't think iLife is all that great. I mean, the software is good, but there is windows software that is just as good
iTunes: well, uh, iTunes. In this case, it is the best imho
iPhoto: Google's Picasa (free) in my opinion is better than iPhoto, which has the goofiest and most sluggish database ever
Haha, that's all i really know. How is windows movie maker? Probably crappy. I guess garage band is good, but if we're talking about the mainstream market, all they really want is iTunes, iPhoto, and maybe iMovie
iLife isn't perfect but there is no suite of applications on the PC side that are truly comparable for $79.
DV/HDV editing
Audio multitrack recording with loop support
DVD burning
Photo management.
I'd love to buy such a suite for my PC. There's stuff that's close but Apple's solution is affordable.
Originally posted by hmurchison
I'd love to buy such a suite for my PC. There's stuff that's close but Apple's solution is affordable.
and i'd love to upgrade iPhoto (the only one i use) for less than $79.
Originally posted by progmac
and i'd love to upgrade iPhoto (the only one i use) for less than $79.
Progmac
I think Apple should split the apps up. At first it made sense to bundle them all together because iLife was $50 but now at $80 I see the problem with people wanting to use only 1 or 2 of the apps and looking at $80 as not quite the same value.
I have clients that buy $1500 of toner every 6 weeks.
What does this have to do with PC sales and market share?
ease of use that many have already been introducted to with iTunes
I use winamp, iTunes, MS Media Player 9/10, and Beoplayer. I only have MP3s/ MP3Pro/ VQF (not a sucker for DRMed anything). MS Media Player is just as easy to use as iTunes. WinAmp is close, but is a lot easier to customize.
The iApps are very good, but some of the windows apps are rapidly catching up (i.e Picasa).
Actually, there are better programs out there (compared to Picasa) and have been there for a while. Completely free. One such program is Irfanview. Its algorithms for a lot of filters/ operations, such as resizing, are considered by many to be better than in iPhoto and Photoshop.
iLife isn't perfect but there is no suite of applications on the PC side that are truly comparable for $79.
DV/HDV editing
Audio multitrack recording with loop support
DVD burning
Photo management.
With that line of argumentation I can name you a lot of PC applications which simply aren't available for Mac period, at any price. So let's not go there.
With that line of argumentation I can name you a lot of PC applications which simply aren't available for Mac period, at any price. So let's not go there.
Well stop running your mouth and get to typing rookie. "I can" doesn't get you anywhere here. Bring it.
What does this have to do with PC sales and market share?
Reading is fundamental..comprehension is godly. My point was that Gamers buying a new computer every year means squat for overall sales. Biz people buy computers on refresh cycles but they buy a lot of stuff in between.
Its algorithms for a lot of filters/ operations, such as resizing, are considered by many
LOL nerd alert. I guess that "considered by many would be you right"
dude go pay for a girlfriend or something. Get out more.
Originally posted by hmurchison
LOL nerd alert. I guess that "considered by many would be you right"
dude go pay for a girlfriend or something. Get out more.
Dude drink less coffee you Seatle bastard!
I think skatman was agreeing with you