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

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

Actually I have to say we should stop idealizing Apple that much, they
are a company which basically has gone from being the desktop leader to
today being a fringe player. They have survived partly by clinging onto
a couple of niches like graphical design and to some degree education.

They have over the last few years managed to grow a little into the
tech geek segment and the multimedia market, but even using things like
iPod and iTunes to push their desktops they seem to have managed little
apart from not slipping further down in market share and instead staying
around their allotted 4% to 5%. 

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.
Nothing objectively wrong with many of the approaches Apple takes, but
obviously the market doesn't care enough about them to reward Apple with
any significant market share gains.

Over the last decade there has been many 'must have' technologies hyped
which turned out to marginal and worthless. For instance many of
probably remember that one of the last battles fought in the browser
wars where in the area of 'push technology'. All analysts seemed to
agree that who of Microsoft and Netscape that managed to come up with
the best push solution would be the winner of that generation of
browsers. Well both active Desktop and Netscape Netcaster was released
with much fanfare only to relatively quickly fade into obscurity and be
discontinued.

Apple's 'cool' is a bit like 'push technology' it is this thing people
talk about, but if you look at the marketplace it isn't obvious it
matters.

Christian


On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 18:57 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="BJ�Lindqvist">
> 
> > All this talk about the "target audience" scares the hell out of me.
> > Because if is decided that the target audience is the white collar office
> > worker (or some other stereotype I don't belong to) it means that GNOME
> > wont benefit me anymore.
> 
> That doesn't have to be true. Consider OS X - if anything, their target has
> been 'creative professionals' (which reaches into all kinds of places) for a
> long time. But they've been able to amass a *huge* number of hacker and geek
> users with their development platform, UNIX heritage, 'just works' approach,
> and lustful upmarket / cool kids attractiveness.
> 
> "Picking an audience" doesn't necessarily mean picking *only one* audience.
> 
> :-)
> 
> - Jeff
>