Re: Developing for 10.3
Re: Developing for 10.3
- Subject: Re: Developing for 10.3
- From: Dave Rosborough <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 21:04:34 -0800
On Dec 17, 2003, at 10:00 AM, Alex Perez wrote:
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?
Hate to be a stickler, but I'm a high-school math and science teacher
currently midway into a unit on statistics, so it's been on my mind
lately.
Anectodal statistics like these are more than worthless.
This ain't anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal would be "my aunt Mary
switched to OS X 10.3 last week". This is just what we call a biased
sample.
Any time you look at a statistic, you have to consider the sampling
method used. In this case, the sampling type is essentially what is
called a "convenience sample". It simply takes the data that is easily
and readily accessible and uses that. Pretty common actually, and a
lot of people will unwisely draw broad conclusions from this sort of
sample.
The other thing you have to consider is the population you are trying
to sample. If you're trying to get a feel for the 10.3 adoption rate
of ALL mac users (or at least, all those with Blue&White G3's and
later), probably the statistic quoted above won't give you a good
estimate. But if the population you are considering is the group of
Mac Users that's most likely to try out the latest & greatest shareware
utility, I'd guess that that population is rather similar to the
population visiting sites like "daringfireball". Honestly, I don't
think most people on this list are interested to know whether my
grandpa, who still happily works away at his Macintosh LC 520 (and
thinks it's pretty new and up to date, for that matter), have adopted
10.3 - because he's not likely to "adopt" any new applications, for
that matter.
So those statistics, far from being "useless crap", can actually
provide some pretty meaningful information IF you take the time to
figure out exactly what they are measuring and what they AREN'T
measuring.
And on the flip side, if you're trying to figure out if it's time to
start developing just for 10.3 or any platform for that matter, you
need to identify who your target population is before trying to blindly
find statistics to help you make your decision.
TTYL
DaveR
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