Re: Developing for 10.3
Re: Developing for 10.3
- Subject: Re: Developing for 10.3
- From: mmalcolm crawford <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:43:55 -0800
On Dec 17, 2003, at 10:00 AM, Alex Perez wrote:
Has anyone got any info that they'd be willing to share about the
percentage of the Mac user-base that have upgraded to 10.3?
John Gruber has some interesting info up at http://daringfireball.net.
Specifically:
http://daringfireball.net/2003/12/panther_adoption_rate
http://daringfireball.net/2003/12/graphic_communication
As of November 30th, 77% of Safari using visitors to his site were on
Panther.
What a bunch of useless crap!
Did it ever occur to you that the people that are eager to upgrade
to 10.3 are also the folks who are going to be visiting mac-related
websites religiously?
Anectodal statistics like these are more than worthless.
Many statistics are only useful if you understand how they were
collected, and in what context. In this case I think it is clear to
anyone wanting to use the information how the population was "sampled".
Whether this is of use to you depends on your target market.
If your target market happens to intersect largely with the user base
that reads DaringFireball, then the information Duncan referred to may
indeed be useful. Conversely, suppose that Apple announced that 50% of
the Mac OS X user base had upgraded to Panther(*). This information
would be primarily useful if you are targeting a very broad range of
users. The average might hide the fact that, for whatever reason,
users in your target market have generally not upgraded, so this
"non-anecdotal" statistic might, for you, be "more than worthless".
Another actual data point. 46% of Watson-users were using Panther *by
the Monday after launch*:
<
http://weblog.karelia.com/2003/10/>
As Dan notes in his log, this is also "anecdotal" information, however
if your target market is similar to Watson's, it may nevertheless be
extremely useful in determining how much effort you as a developer
expend in supporting older platforms, and how much you might benefit
from adopting features only available in new ones.
Executive summary: Know your demographics.
mmalc
(*) I stress that this is a hypothetical example. I do not know what
the real figures are.
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