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

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:27:26 +0200
> From: Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>
> To: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
> Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org, Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>,
>      Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>,
>      Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
> Subject: Re: Mac shipments up 12% [Was: focus!]
>
> On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 10:58 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 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.
>
> So lets create our own market?!

Or we could be creatively flexible with how we define market share...
;)

Firstly Gnome can be described in a more inclusive manner and the
community of applications with a loose connection to Gnome is quite a bit
larger than those who necessarily run a full Gnome desktop.

Also (and forgive me for stating the obvious) Gnome is not an operating
system or kernel.  Gnome does already runs on at least one proprietary
operating system namely Solaris, so as more and more Gnome applictions
become available on Mac OS and Windows there does come a point when we can
flexibly describe them as Gnome users too.  (I see it as a win to get more
users started with Free and Open Source software even if they dont switch
to a free operating system in the short term, and I wont try to predict
the longer term consequences.) One can try and be very specific about what
a Gnome user is and exclude those who use a few Gnome applications on a
largely KDE, XFCE or other desktop but there isn't any benifit to
underestimating the userbase of what you might call occasional Gnome
users.  Microsoft have long feared the threat of a platform on top their
platform making them largely irrelevant (Netscape, Java, and to a lesser
extent the web based tools provided by Google).

So when market share is brought up I'm surprised porting to other
platforms is not mentioned more often.

-- 
Alan H.