Adrian’s Curatorship » John C. Dvorak on Macs. — A Mac user and a blogger who actually agrees with me on my latest PC Mag column about the Mac and the psychology of its pricing. I’ve become quite reluctant to write these Mac-related columns, but the basic concept in this particular column needed saying since I’ve been thinking about quality related issues recently. I’ve concluded that the marketing forces in place that are solely designed to get us to buy junk are perhaps impossible to thwart. When given a choice most Westerners will buy the cheaper product most of the time. It takes an extreme marketing effort to sway people against this trend.
IMO, support for the developer community is where Apple is weakest. Apple itself has always done an extremely poor job of encouraging new development on its platform. The attitude always seems to be “We’ll make the users want our platform, so you better develop for it.” Whereas Microsoft’s attitude has always been, “We’ll make it easy for you to develop stuff on our platform so people will buy our product to get your programs.”
From a developer’s POV, most of my developer colleagues that worked with Apple, found them to be incredibly arrogant. IMO, it has always been this fatal flaw that would eventually seal their doom. Whether there is evidence to support that feeling is another story of course.
Microsoft talks a good game, and was clever in coming up with their various certification programmes. And if you are successful enough, they put you out of business.
You have to wonder about predictions of doom based on conditions that have been in place for the past 20 years. There seem to be no new reasons for Apple to be doomed, just the same old reasons that were used as past predictions of doom. If Apple is doomed (in the short run), we cannot have much confidence it is for any of the reasons offered so far.
As its ‘share’ of internet usage increases, so has the number of developers, particularly for OS X. The move to OS X drew in a lot of developers for platforms like Sun and Silicon Graphics as BeOS and NextStep. Not a lot of people there, relative to the Windows developer community, or even the Mac developer community, but high powered people for the most part.
OS X also has support in the Open Source developer community that is better than support for Windows. Increasingly this will be a factor in the ‘ecosystem’.
I think the trends are pretty clear … with respect to share of internet activity Windows is starting to slip ever so slightly ( if we accept the W3C stats with some confidence) over the past two years (3.5%), and Linux and Macintosh are increasing at a good pace. On the Linux front the main dark cloud is the SCO affair, and this will probably evaporate as an issue this year. On the Mac front the big question is whether Jobs can subsume his ego long enough to get a successor in who can beat off the suits if he should decide to step down … it was a suit invasion that almost killed Apple in the 1990s, and would do so again.
But in the end it will be Linux and not Apple that forces Microsoft into a OS niche market position (though they will still be a big big player in other software). But wider Linux adoption will also increase Apple market share since acceptance of Linux as an option voids most of the arguments against Mac OS X in principle.
Thanks for the information.