Re: focus! (was Re: Focusing on innovation re: mono, python et al)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

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