Re: Mac shipments up 12% [Was: focus!]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Calum Benson wrote:
> True up to a point, although MacOS in its various (and sometimes more 
> usable than current) guises has been around since before any of those, 
> and although you can't necessarily say it's "outlived" OS/2, BeOS, 
> Workbench or GEM[1], it's certainly left them eating considerable dust, 
> in terms of widespread adoption.

I mentioned this briefly before, but I wonder what percentage of Mac's 
audience has never been a question of 'switching' but is the 
publishing/graphics market they have had from the beginning - that they 
created, that Microsoft never had - if it's a large percentage, the 
historical frequency of 'switching' starts to look even lower.

It would show that even if you're the Microsoft monopoly you can't 
easily get the publishing/graphics market to switch, and that much of 
Mac's marketshare doesn't come from getting people to switch.

If we look at GNOME, the success is perhaps not from switching either; 
it's from people who were already using some sort of UNIX, or it's in a 
computer lab or other context without an established existing set of 
apps on some other platform.

All just speculation though.

Havoc