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Originally Posted by ducasi Yeah, interesting article. I pretty much agree with his analysis... |
I'm not so sure. The "
make Windows the Mac-ghetto" argument has some merit, but there's definitely a flip side - yes, the reasonably large companies will bring out OS X versions. But for a smaller company, supporting Mac and PC has quite a high cost; not just in coding, but in terms of things like documentation and technical support as well. It's something they'd much rather avoid if they could.
Now currently, telling Mac customers "buy a PC if you want to use our product" is not a terribly realistic option, so if you don't support Mac, you lose all of that customer base. But once you're telling them "you'll have to run a virtual Windows session to use our product", there are a lot more customers who will grumble, but won't actually baulk at it. So the business case for a Mac OS version is weakened. For example, the general consensus on the game development forums seems to be most developers won't bother with Mac OS versions - they'll just tell people to run the games from Windows. Of course, only a few (typically larger) game developers currently bother with Mac versions anyhow, so this may not mean too much!
I think you're going to have two opposing tensions. If enough software runs on OS X and looks a lot better there, there will be a lot of pressure on "borderline-cases" to go that extra mile and bring out an OS X version. But conversely, if lots of software runs well enough in a Windows session, some of those borderline-cases will be saying "you know, is it really worth our while bothering with OS X?".
Who knows how it will turn out? The biggest factor looks to be MS's implosion with Vista - if it's as bad as the rumours say, it may well tip things in Apple's favour.