Windows to Mac Switchers on the rise? You bet!

Scaling / December 11, 2006 / Alykhan Jetha

So today I saw ‘Growth rate of Apple switchers may rise’ on MacNN – referring to a Piper Jaffray report on the subject.

Apple also states that 50% of the people that purchase Macs in their retail chain are new to the Mac. Looking at the general Mac audience, you would think that these are mostly consumers as opposed to businesses.

Being a software developer on the Mac and catering to a business audience, I can tell you that there is a definite rise in interest from the business audience as well.

For instance, before Apple announced their Intel hardware transition, the Marketcircle site would get about 8% to 11% of traffic from PC users (unique visitors, various flavors of Windows). Since the announcement and the concrete availability of Intel Macs and of BootCamp and Parallels, we have seen a rise in the number of PC users visiting our site and subsequently buying our one or more of our products. We are regularly seeing 20% to 22% unique Windows visitors these days.

That’s impressive considering we are not a very well known company.

Most people out there think that the PC is better for business than a Mac. I may agree when it comes to Fortune 2000 firms, but when it comes to 98% of small businesses, I say that that statement is a load of crap.

When I say that to people (literally), the second thing they say to me is ‘I need MS Exchange’ (the first thing is Word & Excel and we all know the answer to that). My answer to them is with Daylite (Productivity Suite), Apple Mail and any mail server (even the one included in Mac OS X Server or your ISP’s email server), you can pretty much replace the need for Exchange and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper in licensing costs as well as TCO. Most people require shared calendars, meetings, shared contacts and linked email. All of that is available on the Mac … today!

And we have some testimonials to back that claim.

Here is the downside to all of this. If Daylite does not work for a business switcher, they promptly ask for a refund (which we oblige) and return all the Mac hardware they purchased. Luckily that doesn’t happen too often.

There have been times when sizable Apple hardware orders are held up until someone can confirm that a certain feature works in Daylite or not (or even if there is another alternative).

One of the reasons I choose to do Mac software when we started (late 2001) was because I felt it was important that the world have another operating system choice and I had to do what I could to make that happen – but that is a topic for another day (and no, I’m not kidding – I was idealistic back then).

I’m happy it’s working out.

Until next time…
AJ

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