From: Norman Palardy (palardyn_at_shaw.ca)
Date: Sun Apr 18 2004 - 13:18:01 PDT
On Apr 18, 2004, at 2:05 PM, Joel M. Sciamma wrote:
> Eric,
>
>> Installed base is what matters, pure and simple.
>> You don't sell software to a market share percentage, you sell to an
>> installed base.
>
> When 98 of every 100 computers sold are not new potential customers,
> for
> your software or your virus, it makes a difference.
>
> The installed base is also gradually shrinking due to the age of the
> equipment and more fragmented, IMO, due to OS X.
>
> Most new releases for Mac OS are OS X only - the economics of
> developing and
> testing for 9 and X simultaneously don't look too good - most shareware
> authors have made the switch, quite rightly. FileMaker (Apple) is now
> OS X
> only. Most other core packages are too or shortly will be. Does
> developing
> for 9.x make any commercial sense despite the much larger installed
> base?
>
> So, the installed base we are addressing for Mac OS is effectively 12M
> users, a handy potential market where you can be a bigger fish in a
> smaller
> pond, but growth will be harder to sustain.
>
> If your software is cross-platform, what would you say is the point
> where
> maintaining a team to code/test/support for the minor platform becomes
> uneconomic? 10% of total revenue? 5%?
>
> I have a new product that is wholly developed on the Mac (9.x) but
> hosted by
> a cross-platform (9.x/OSX/Win) CAD package. The Mac used to be a real
> force
> in CAD but is being gradually rendered irrelevant - all my customers
> and
> prospective customers use Windows - how much of my limited resources
> do I
> commit to Mac-only features?
>
> If it were 2, or even 5 in every 100 customers, would it be worth it?
>
> A lot of good people committed themselves to coding for the Newt and
> were
> badly hurt by its cancellation. Was their motivation a tiny installed
> base
> or the promise of a serious and growing market share?
I guess the answer is what kind of market are you going after and what
customers are you going after ?
There is the "sell 1,000,000 copies" philosophy and all the issues that
come along with it (tech support, etc) that have, in some cases,
largely negated the huge revenues in associated costs for small
vendors because they don't have the capability to support every known
PC configuration.
Or, as some folks continue to do even on the Newton (yes), sell to a
smaller market at a slightly higher price and limit the issues because
that target market is much more well defined.
One thing in business is to decide what kind of customers you think you
WANT and then to woo them.
You also have to decide what kind of customers you DON'T want and
decide to push them away because they can be a real drain on resources.
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