Business 2.0 : Many of the new startups in the convergence space — such as Grouper, Mercora, Orb Networks, and Sling Media — have developed their products only for the Windows platform, though there are vague promises of Mac support sometime in the future. They might be missing an opportunity here. Going with the stylish little guy can give you hip hype with a lot less effort and money. Continue reading at Business 2.0 site…
I think there is a lot of truth in marketing to the Macintosh, particularly if you have a new innovative product that takes a big marketing push to convince people that they need it.
I’ll stand corrected if I’m wrong, but I believe in the early days of Palm, a big percentage of users were Macintosh despite the Windows/Macintosh ratio at the time. The same I believe was true of Visioneer PaperPort and their sheetfed scanner product in the mid 90s.
The only caveat I’d add would be to add Linux to the mix. If you want to go ultra-cheap on marketing and development, why not create your product on Linux first? If the business model can handle the source code being available to competitors, not only does Linux help get you a community of avid users quickly, it also gives you a better channel to communicate directly with your users, strengthen the robustness of your application, and help identify future features that are key to your success. It puts some risk to the business plan, but it certainly gives a company momentum if they are first to market.
Will, Linux is cool but I guess when I wrote the piece I wanted folks to know that this mac thing is what gets people writing about your stuff and create the buzz any new company needs sorely. linux is not mainstream desktop use right now –
I’ll put my vote in for Linux as well. I’m seriously considering moving from Windows to Linux and would love to see more “mainstream” products and services working on the platform. With that said, I’m sure a group of Linux software developers will create a sourceforge project that will do what Orb does and make it freely available with no monthly fees. The trick to this application is to have your PC at home optimize the files for your mobile/remote device (Orb uses their own servers for this process).
Side note: Om, checkout Xandros and Novell SUSE Linux desktop — both kick major butt. Also one of our eHomeUpgrade readers listed his Linux Desktop Media Center PC configuration (http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=685)
Om – dont forget, Mac users also tend to be early adopters of newer technology.
Oops – you did say it in your article. Never mind
Great post. Especially if you’re working in the multimedia space you’re making a huge mistake by not embracing the Mac crowd.