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Getting Rich Writing Mac Software
Udo Schmitz writes "Look at this as kind of a followup to an article from yesterday, which was weak and boring although the author had a point. Enter Wil Shipley of Omni Group and Delicious Monster fame. At WWDC 2005 he gave a talk (PDF) about why he develops software for the Mac, when "all the other kids" are programming for Windows. Choice quote: "Windows users only ever use three apps: Word, IE (for e-mail), and iTunes"."
courtesy of Google Cache
Is that the Windows market is oversaturated. I'm going to suggest that the number of commercial software developers a platform can support is related logrithmically to its user base. Given how massive the Wintel platform's market share is, there is just no room for a small shareware developer looking to break into the market.
Just do a Tucows or Download.com search for _anything_. You'll find about 30 other apps, many of them freeware. And frequently a couple of them will be huge well-established behemoths. Omni would have been insane to make OmniGraffle a Windows-only program with Visio already there. Go do the same searches on the Apple secion of VersionTracker, and you won't find nearly as much stuff, and frequently a bunch of it will have only half the features you want.
And the games market for Macs is so tiny that you can write almost anything and bet that you will get at least some following. There's a Mac-only MMORPG that, technology-wise, is far far behind anything else on the market, but it still manages to keep a loyal community even in the face of games like World of Warcraft.
(Of course, that's probably because there also seem to be a lot of cheapskate, half-assed Mac gamers like me who were unsure about paying $50 for the game PLUS $10-15/mo subscription (My Sirius radio cost less than that!) when we know there's a good chance we would get bored and quit 3 or 4 months into it when that price including startup costs still works out to $30 or so a month. And when we saw that the minimum specs were way above what we had sitting on our desks, that was the nail in the coffin. The shaky, half-assed attempt to get back on topic moral: If you write Mac games, make sure they will run on well-mildewed hardware. On average, Mac users let their computers age much longer than PC users do (I've heard twice as long quoted a few times), and there are not many among them who are the kind to buy a new computer just to be able to play the latest game. If we really cared about games anywhere near that much, we never would have ditched Windows in the first place.)