At 11:27 AM +1100 11/14/02, Ken Williams wrote:
On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 03:58 PM, Rich Morin wrote:
At 8:45 PM -0500 11/12/02, John Gruber wrote:
Even Apple admits that they expect only 20 percent of the Mac user
base to be running OS X by the end of 2002. It could be quite a long
time before that number gets to 50.
There are ~25 million Macs out there. 20% of this is ~5 million. If
Apple sells ~5 million Macs in 2003 (all running OSX) and another 10%
of the existing base switch over, you have ~50% by the end of 2003.
Eh? 5M new Macs, all on OS X, brings the ratio to 10M OS X, 20M
MacOS. Then 10% or the existing base is 2.5M, which would bring it
to 12.5M OS X, 17.5M MacOS. That's still only 41.7% for OS X.
Sorry for the sloppy math. Bear in mind, however, that I also left out
the issue of folks who simply abandon their old Macs. This tends to bring
the percentage back up. In any case, my point was that it won't take all
_that_ long to reach 50%.
However, I'm generally optimistic about it - I'm guessing that most of the
MacOS users are in one of the following categories:
1) People who can't upgrade hardware or software for various reasons, so
they keep a "static" system which doesn't need (and can't get anymore)
much support
2) High-end users who are dying to switch, but need to wait until their
software is properly supported, or until they can properly do a massive
switchover of technologies in their business
There are doubtless some people who stick with MacOS because they just
like it better, but I bet there aren't very many of them.
There is also the group that is sticking to Mac OS for reasons of caution.
I expect many of these folks to switch over in the next year, however...
-r
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