Posted on Friday 15 July 2005 - Popularity: unranked
There are about 12 million active Mac users according to Apple. Compared to PC users this is’nt a lot, but often pure numbers don’t tell the whole story and sometimes even the clear winner by numbers is’nt the best option for a software developer. Now how could that be? Om Malik from Business 2.0 has a good answer with a follow up to this question:
I think these companies are focusing too much on the numbers and missing the more promising opportunity. Why? Because rolling out a product for the Mac platform ensures a certain buzz and élan, which begets more buzz, which begets sales … among them are most of the influencers — high-profile bloggers, most (if not all) technology journalists, and, of course, the hipsters.
So while there are less people you can reach with an OS X application, it’s much easier to reach a high percentage of them and the feedback you get not only from the users that help you find the bugs, missing features and usability problems, you get the press, the weblogs, the enthusiasts as well, mostly without the need to spend lots of money. Not to mention that you don’t have such a wide range of hardware to support, what gives you a lot more time to focus on features and the usability of the app, something that often ends in great applications, applications that when later ported to the PC, will have a great chance to be a success there as well.
Fredi
