Mac Site Survey

[msalsbury]

I have to keep some of this information vague because what I am doing is NOT officially sanctioned by my employer, but is at the request of development and QA staff who are fighting to keep Mac products alive at our company. In order to focus our development and QA efforts properly, we need to know what the "state of the Mac desktop" looks like in companies where there are "lots" of Macs or where Macs are the primary desktop in use. I've put together a small survey that anyone reading this message is welcome to respond to. Since I'm limited by the survey site to 100 responses, I ask that you please respond only if you are representing a site where the Mac is widely-used. If you are a home user or just have 1-2 Macs in a company where there are 80-90 Windows PCs, I'd prefer you didn't respond (but can't and won't stop you). Thanks in advance for your participation and interest.

The survey can be found here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=451973622478

 

[fryke]

It's still a thread about Macs, so this does _not_ belong to the Café. Moved.

 

[msalsbury]

I tried to pick the spot where I thought it fit best. I don't want to make any enemies here of people who could be potential customers for the product being discussed. Thanks for moving to an appropriate area.

 

[ora]

You'd be well advised to try some design forums, as you may well find more people from mac-cetric companies. Would love to help but at my place of work Mac's are a beleaguered minority .

 

[msalsbury]

I can't tell you too much without revealing where I work, and that would potentially get me into trouble. (Hopefully not, but you never know.) What I can say is that our products are much more at home around information professionals than artists.

Again, without revealing too much, we offer both web-based services and software products. The marketing arm of our company seems to get final say on what configurations we support with those offerings. They tell us we need to support everything from MacOS 8.5 to 10.5, everything from the early PowerPCs to the Xeon, all the office suites, all the web browsers, etc. Naturally, that only makes sense if there is a sizable chunk of the market using those technologies. Hopefully this survey will tell us which OS releases are not being used much, which browsers Mac users prefer, which office suites they work with, and thus allow us to have our efforts focused on the things people actually use as opposed to trying to support everything the customer might "possibly" use.

If we can, without alienating customers, eliminate certain configurations and products from development and testing, the costs of the Mac release go down significantly, and the profitability of the Mac product increases... thus its life span.

 

[sinclair_tm]

well, you should cut out everything before os x 10.2 as apple is going to finiallt kill classic when 10.5 comes out. that and so little works with 10.1 and earlyer anymore. and the largest share of those that are still using older macs regularly are mac geeks, and wouldn't be needing services like that, as they can do it on their own. thats my 2-bits.

 

[MisterMe]

well, you should cut out everything before os x 10.2 as apple is going to finiallt kill classic when 10.5 comes out.

Where did you hear that one? Did I miss a memo?

... and the largest share of those that are still using older macs regularly are mac geeks,

One would think that users of older machines are simply satisfied with their machines as they are and see no reason to upgrade. These would be the antigeeks. OTOH, Mac geeks want the shiniest new toy with the bitten apple logo.

and wouldn't be needing services like that, as they can do it on their own. ...

Any business worth its salt learns how to create its own market, not just exploit an existing one. Identify an audience with a potential need and the money to satisfy that need. Talk to them in the way that they like to be talked to and success is yours.