| Home > Of things Mac > Are Mac shareware buyers more honest than Windows users? Or just more grateful? |
| Are Mac shareware buyers more honest than Windows users? Or just more grateful? | | Date Created: 27 Apr, 2007, 01:15 PM |
 If you're a long time Mac user who happens to have also been part of Mac communities of practice known as MUGs or Macintosh User groups, you'll know that pre-Internet, one of the roles of such groups was to make available on floppies various utilities and system enhancers.
We're talking pre-OS X days, in ye olde times of INITs, CDEVs, and Control Panels, way before iLife and iWork when Apple bundled apps. like MacWrite and MacPaint.
Each month before the main meeting of the MUG and its subgroups known as SIGs or Special Interest groups, there for sale in the foyer would be the latest set of floppies, laboured over by volunteers assembling collections of goodies to enhance the emotional satisfaction of being a Mac user. I'm talking pre-Windows 95 here, and there was a constant buzz about the shareware that was part of being the Mac community.
Shareware on the Mac has always been something special. Way before MS-DOS users knew anything about Windows, and ranted that the Mac with its GUI and mouse was a toy and not suited for the enterprise setting (oh, how the wheel turns...) it was Mac users who had the pleasure (and occasional frustration) of tweaking their operating systems, something current Windows users say is their platform's main advantage over the Mac.
All those little System Folder extensions and control panels helped users individualise their Macs, from variations in grayscale desktop settings, through to clocks in the menu bar. Sometimes, they were pure timewasters and proof-of-concepts like the famous Talking Moose, other times they picked up on Mac shortcomings and added real enhancements to productivity, such as Boomerang, and Windowshade.
All of which goes to say there is a rich history of shareware on the Mac platform. The same of course can be said for Windows. Indeed, once Windows became the populist choice for so many people in the days when Apple lost its way, its supporters often pointed at the immense choice of software available, from commercial through to shareware.
After I bought my first Windows box in 2001 (having also been one of the first users of Connectix Virtual PC), I too became aware of the situation of choices on each platform.
As a long time user of the Mac, and an early adopter of OS X, I learnt to work within the Mac limitations. One thing I learnt is that in a small community, your shareware had better be up to scratch or any below-par examples will be found out very quickly through the beating of jungle drums within MUGs and on user-recommendation sites, like versiontracker.com and macupdate.com which allowed mini-reviews to be placed by users.
So while there may be a comparatively small number of suitable apps. to satisfy a specific need on the Mac, we users have grown accustomed to their being of a high to superlative quality. Any app. that was a dumb port from Windows was cast aside because it just didn't sit right with all the for-Mac-only shareware. As Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court once said, "I know when I see it", and the same can be applied to Mac software written for the Mac compared to a bad port.
Over on the Windows platform, my joy of being able to walk into any PC store and see shelves filled with software soon turned to disappointment when I explored their quality. For every one great Mac app., there'd be five lousy Windows apps, each approximating what I wanted but none quite suiting my needs perfectly.
And their interfaces! It was a free-for-all in terms of user interface, so that each app. seemed to live in its own world, bearing little similarity to other apps. Anyone forced to move from the Mac to Windows, perhaps for work, will acknowledge this gulf.
To put it another way, there is little point in having such huge choice, if at the end of the day, you are still left with just one or two good apps, and dozens of examples of shareware drek.
What this also means, I think, is that so much Mac-based shareware can be considered "keepers", while on the Windows platform so much is disposable. Loyalty to the developer therefore becomes an important consideration. |
 Would it be too much to suggest that Mac users enjoy a particularly close relationship with developers? Go look at those reviews and see how often recommendations include such phrases as "developer responds quickly to suggestions" and so on.
From loyalty comes the desire to best support the work of developers, and so I have pondered whether Mac users more often than not buy shareware once the trial period is over. I've also wondered if Mac users more than Windows users out of hand reject crippleware, where you get to see only a partial set of features of an app, and for which you must pay a premium to see the full app in action. Such as is highlighted in the current "bloated" I'm a Mac - I'm a PC" advertisement. |
Mac shareware can also be limited, either by the number of times it can be opened, the placement of a watermark on a printout, a time limitation since first used etc. Crippleware is now rarely seen in the Mac arena, and I'm guessing if it does appear it's more likely to be part of a bad port from Windows, where the developer will get a swift lesson in how the Mac community functions.
So this week, when I had a chance to sit down with a developer, one of a group whose primary task is the user interface aspects (he's not a coder) I took the opportunity to ask him some questions that have been on my mind.
I won't name him or his software, but his company's first piece of software, priced quite inexpensively has been very successful. So successful in fact that various Apple staff pestered the group to let them bundle it with each new Mac sold. Why? Because nothing like it was on the Windows platform, and it represented all those good things about Mac shareware: reliable, pushed the limits, fun, great interface, and exemplified the difference between the cool fun Mac guy, and the stodgy Windows guy.
So eventually it was bundled with each new Mac sold.
And eventually, it was ported to Windows, with the explanation that coding it for Windows was a more challenging exercise than it was for the Mac. The developer was particularly praiseworthy of Apple's giving to developers ease-of-use tools to make their tasks simple.
After exploring some of his dealings with Apple, we discussed some of the points so far made in this blog about quality of shareware on Windows versus Mac.
That's when he stunned me (and those sitting aorund the table listening in) by discussing who pays for shareware.
Let's set the groundrules here first. We know the oft-quoted marketing figures stating Windows has 95% of the desktop and Mac and Linux make up the other 5%.
Of course, those figures only tell some of the story. A proportion of that 95% are dumb terminals, inside airline terminals showing arrivals and departures, in retail outlets, in banks and financial institutions, powering billboards, all of which have very little user contact, and certainly no chance to install shareware.
Then there are other institutions, like educational settings, creative industries, scientific establishments and the like where somehow I don't think the same 95/5 split occurs, and where shareware is installable.
And then there's the domestic consumer market where judging by this week's figures, Apple is definitely on the march. |
 Then there is the situation of the apparent frequency of one-way switching reported in the Mac-centric media. In particular, those who have been long-time Windows users who have either had enough of the platform (I've called them "dumpers" in a previous blog entry because of the ferocity expressed in leaving Windows), or because the move to Intel-powered Macs has allowed them to install Windows and Linux and see three operating system running in parallel as it were and thereby give themselves more objective exposure to what works and what doesn't.
Some have remarked to their surprise as to the richness of the Mac shareware environment having previously bought into the FUD about the lack of software options. They have enjoyed discovering the range and quality of software, as well as the richness of the Mac community in welcoming them and bringing them up to speed on what's out there, as well as answering system-oriented questions during the initial steep learning curve some experience when trying to rid themselves of Windows muscle-memory.
That said, let's return to the conversation with my developer friend. Despite the apparent numerical outnumbering of Windows users to Mac users, it was his assertion (and he would know) that his company's income is equally split between Mac and Windows users.
Even though there are many more Windows copies out there. If I understood him correctly, Mac users are far more likely to actually buy their shareware rather than crack it, or find other ways of extending the demo trial period.
What might one conclude from this small piece of data? Perhaps Mac users are indeed older, better educated and more affluent than the great teeming mass of Windows users. Perhaps through long-time community practice they have learnt to value the Mac developer community and as long as the price is reasonable are happy to pony up 20, 30 or 40 dollars for really good software that adheres to the Mac philosophy of "it just works" with the emphasis on "works", not "just".
Maybe Windows users are more used to trial-, bloat-, mal- and cripple-ware and so devalue shareware. Maybe what makes them Windows users is not so much that they like Windows, but "hey everyone uses it, and Cousin Ernie has all this free (=pirated) software he can give me, and support me too when it all crashes."
Perhaps because a long time ago Steve Jobs acknowledged that we humans can have an emotional relationship with well-designed products - hardware and software - and incorporated that intuitive sense into Apple's design philosophy, that those of us who chose Macs despite being assigned to a minority brought other characteristics to the technology marketplace. Imagine a Dell phone representative in Mumbai asking, "Which Dell are you?"
And perhaps loyalty and honesty are part of that mix that differentiates the platforms, despite the commonality of CPUs. An interesting combination, don't you think, given recent SEC activities involving the Apple boardroom?
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