From: Joel M. Sciamma (joel_at_inventors-emporium.co.uk)
Date: Sat Apr 17 2004 - 10:20:10 PDT
David,
Macs running "Classic" versions of the OS which are properly set-up and
maintained have shown themselves to be pretty resistant to viruses over the
years and those that are circulating now are tuned to exploit weaknesses
elsewhere.
Should I ever move to Mac OS X, I will certainly look afresh at virus
issues.
Anti-virus software is a pain in the proverbials on Mac OS 9 and has caused
me a lot of conflicts and inconveniences in the past. On balance I prefer to
be cautious about whet gets into my machine in the first place than have an
anti-virus program destabilise my machines. It has worked for the last 20
years so I'll just keep being vigilant.
The only MS software I possess is Outlook Express 5.0.6 which has done a
good job for me.
> Apple's market share is number of Macs sold out of the total number of
> computers sold in a given time. That is different that the installed
> base. The installed base is how many Macs there are and how many other
> computers there are. The installed Mac base is around 30 million. Now
> the Windows installed base is around 300,000 million or something.
Market share is still a critical element in attracting developers and
standards to your platform. We used to argue that most car manufacturers
would kill for the 10% market share that Apple used to have. Now it's down
to 2.5% and one wonders what is considered viable - 1%? 0.1%? We have seen
the inability of QuickTime to make any impression due to this.
If the installed base of Macs is 30M then about 12M are running OS X so a
developer is targeting perhaps 10% of that for an expensive product so 1.2M
seats - still a good prospect now but Adobe recently abandoned FrameMaker
for the Mac. It will be interesting to see what happens when they also
abandon Photoshop as it becomes clear that the platform development costs
don't justify the sales. It wont happen for a while but the pressure is
gradually increasing. Already, developers like Adobe regard the PC as their
premiere platform for creative users.
Newton might have owned a very big chunk of the PDA market if Apple had
stuck at it. I'm not convinced that Apple's survival was critically
dependent on whether Newton continued or not but given the internal politics
of the time and the coolness towards it from various quarters, cancellation
would have seemed logical.
I hold the seemingly unpopular view that Mac OS X is actually a rather
poorly designed product _from a user's perspective_ and has undermined
rather than bolstered Mac OS as a platform because of this. All it has done
is to fragment the user base and the majority still on Mac OS 9 might just
as easily move to Windows XP than they will to OS X - the costs and effort
are similar.
All this was completely avoidable while still enjoying the benefits of a
UNIX code base.
Selling iPods is all very well but Apple better start moving Mac OS forwards
in a genuinely innovative way instead of being the vendor of just another
substitutable commodity - which IMHO is all OS X is at the moment.
Regards,
Joel.
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