IP: OS X and the "new mac market"

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim () oreilly com>
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 07:37:09 -0700
To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Cc: Rael Dornfest <rael () oreilly com>
Subject: OS X and the "new mac market"

Dave,

I was recently visiting some folks at the Microsoft Mac Business Unit as a
result of Kevin Browne's recent comments that MS would have to re-evaluate
their commitment to the Mac market if Apple didn't do more to market OS X.
(See http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1805 for details.)

I met with Tim McDonough, the Director of Marketing for the BU.  What was
really striking to me in the conversation is that all of Microsoft's focus
is on the conversion rate of OS 9 customers to OS X.  Whereas so much of the
excitement I've seen comes from the "switchers."  And Apple's switch
campaign notwithstanding, a lot of the switchers don't just seem to be from
Windows, but from Linux and other Unixes.  People used to marketing to the
Mac audience think of a fairly limited group--designers, educators, and the
rest of Apple's old core market--and they forget about the new folks who are
coming to the party.  I've seen a huge amount of excitement about OS X in
the software development community (a lot of the key Perl developers, a lot
of well-known Java developers, as well as folks from other open source
projects, and many web developers).  I'm seeing some purchase in the
bioinformatics community.  I'm curious who else is taking up OS X, what
their previous platform was, and why they made the switch.

I'm trying to put together an article entitled "The New Mac Market", as well
as a talk on the same subject for our upcoming Mac OS X Conference in Santa
Clara (http://conferences.oreilly.com/macosx/) at the end of September.
(BTW, Dave, I know you're an OS X user, and we'd love to have you there.)
I'd love to hear from IP readers who have adopted OS X.  Were you switching
from OS 9, Windows, Linux, or Unix?  Are you still using your old system as
well, or fully switched?

Even though it's only anecdotal information, I'm hoping to get some good
stories that will help to illuminate what I think is a fairly significant
trend.

P.S. If IP readers want to come to the OS X conference, I'd be happy to give
you a 30% discount.  Just tell the registration folks that you heard about
it on IP.

-- 
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472
1-707-829-0515 http://www.oreilly.com, http://tim.oreilly.com



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