Cat said:
Most of Macintosh software (~80-90% ballpark) is not software ported from windows, but developed specifically for the Mac. Why would that cease?
I guess the question needs to be asked... were you a Mac user during the
Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X transition?
If so, when did you start using Mac OS X daily? And what was it that enabled you to start using Mac OS X?
I use a lot of Mac only software... in fact I use a lot of Mac OS X only software which is why I can still use Rhapsody as a primary platform for doing work today.
What stopped Rhapsody? Why did Apple bend over backwards to add Carbon to Mac OS X?
Two words...
Adobe and
Microsoft.
Most of the people I know didn't even give Mac OS X a thought until the summer of 2002. Why do you think that was? Do you think it was the release of 10.2? No! It was the release of the last hold out app for Mac OS X from Adobe, Photoshop.
Get this, pretty much all the other major apps (all Adobe's apps save Photoshop, and even Microsoft Office) had been released for Mac OS X by this point, and yet people held off.
You have to qualify your statement, which, by the way, does note follow from what you said above, where you essentially agreed with me that Apple is in a very different situation from all those other companies. The developers you are talking about are only those that already develop their applications both for windows and OS X. All the windows specific people are not going to care, all mac developers will see the installed user base and marketshare of Apple grow and they will be happy about it (cf. the Omni comment.)
Not really sure what you are arguing here. I'm saying that at best this is a risky move and at worse a fatal mistake on Apple's part.
If you wish to turn a blind eye to it, that is fine... but you really can't argue the possibility that what I'm saying isn't there. And no amount of spin can change that.
Now those that develop for both the platforms will have to ask themselves how they can maximize sales and profits versus investment in codebase and expertise.
And there you have the primary (and really only needed) argument for what I'm saying.
If Adobe, Microsoft or anyone else can save more money by dropping their Mac versions and still keep any significant number of those Mac users by doing this... they will.
It's business.
My humble opinion is that it is profitable for both Adobe and microsoft to keep distributing their products for OS X. As long as Mac marketshare does not decline below say 1% all mac-only companies are going to keep developing for OS X. I fail to see why BootCamp would actually _reduce_ marketshare
And there is the problem... we don't have to lose
any market share for these developers to think twice about the type of move I'm suggesting to happen. We could even gain, and they still may consider dropping the Mac specific versions of their software.
That is the scary part of all this.
If it earns them the same (if not more) money to drop Mac development by not losing
all their Mac users, they will do this.
Ask yourself this question... what percentage of Mac users of a product are needed to pay for the development of that product? The remainder of those users are profit for the company.
If Adobe or Microsoft thinks that they would still get equal amount to the remaining users buying the Windows version of their software to run in Windows on a Mac... they will drop the Mac version in a heart beat.
It's business.
Has The Gimp killed Photshop sales on any platform?
No one I know buys the Unix version of Photoshop any more (of course it is stuck at version 3.0.1). And Gimp still doesn't match Photoshop for features or usability.
More to the point, has Gimp hurt Photoshop sales on the Mac platform? No! Why? There is
no native version of Gimp for Mac OS X.
I don't see "photoshop-on-the-mac-rebooted-in-windows" killing Rosetta Photshop either. People who rely on PPC-native speed programs will hold out at least until the "Pro Mac" (dual-dual/quad) intel towers come out. I'm sure Rosetta Photoshop will run well enough on them
Professional Mac users don't buy top of the line Macs to run their primary apps
well enough. These same people could have run almost all their apps but Photoshop natively in Mac OS X and run Photoshop
well enough in
Classic and still they stayed with Mac OS 9.
Apple is going to have a hard time selling high end Intel systems until after their is a native version of all the major apps that those systems are being bought for.
That is just the facts.
And users who are willing to pay that much for a high end Intel system may also be willing to pay for a crossgrade to the Windows version of Photoshop to actually run Photoshop in Windows at the speeds they bought the hardware for to begin with.
fryke said:
Yeah. It's your own point that Photoshop on the Mac is better than Photoshop on Windows. I mean: Even if Photoshop currently (!!!) performs better on WinXP on an intel Mac than through Rosetta, I'd *still* use it through Rosetta - and most graphics artists *I* know, would, too.
But the question that Adobe is going to be asking is if enough of those people would be willing to run Photoshop in Windows to afford them to drop Mac development.
Most graphic artist want to use Photoshop... would they be willing to use it in Windows on their Macs if there was no Mac version? Would enough be willing to do this that Adobe would either break even or profit from this?
Neither Adobe nor Microsoft are in the business of making great software... they are in the business of making money. And if they see a way to make money without the Mac development costs, they'll do it.
And I _also_ truly believe that OS X has advantages over Windows so the general movement will be towards the Mac and away from Windows for users of intel Macs.
I don't have blind faith like that. The best software doesn't always win... and we both know this.
C'mon... it's me you are talking to... I have plenty more to say on the subject.
Have I ever been short for words?
Captain Code said:
All those platforms with the exception of probably SGI(since I don't know much about them) didn't have any existing programs like Photoshop, MS Word etc did they? We do, so it's not like those companies have to do any more work than they already are.
SGI did.
More importantly, NEXTSTEP had Adobe Illustrator which (with PageMaker) was one of the biggest apps in desktop publishing in the late 80's early 90's. It also had WordPerfect and FrameMaker early on.
One has to remember that Photoshop didn't take off until much later when things like 24 bit displays were more common place. In the late 80's early 90's most desktop publishing designers were concerned with screen size rather than color. People as late as 1993 were willing to pay $1,200US for a 21" grayscale display for their systems. NeXT didn't even offer color until the release of NEXTSTEP 2.0.
But yes, Illustrator left NEXTSTEP even though NeXT was a big client of Adobe.
To create a linux verision of Photoshop is a lot more work than maintaining the Mac version. Also, Macs are well entrenched in the publishing and multimedia firms.
A little history of Photoshop...
Photoshop was a Mac only application when first released. How Mac only? It was written in Pascal.
At version 2.5, Adobe rewrote all the code in C to make it portable to other platforms (like Windows and SGI).
So, how hard would it be to make a Linux version of Photoshop? Not very. They already have most of the Photoshop interface for X Windows finished and would only need to port the underlying structure to Linux (or any other Unix for that matter).
And that is actually something that we should worry about too. What if Adobe drops Mac development for X Windows? Mac OS X has X11... so Mac users could still use their products.
Myke said:
What do we care about most here? Is it the OS or the applications? If popular software such as Photoshop or Word can be made to run seemlessly on the Mac - even if it takes Windows running in the background - where is the problem?
The main problem as I see it is... well, one of
temperature.
None of this is like throwing a live frog into boiling water. It
is like putting the frog in luke warm water and bringing it up to a boil.
I am just hoping that enough of you
frogs start jumping around before our little platform is slowly boiled alive.
tomdkat said:
He should change his avatar to the grim reaper or something.
I actually look good in black.