Siracusa on Boot Camp

Terrific essay from John Siracusa on Boot Camp, including this bit on the rampant fear that Boot Camp will lead to developers abandoning real Mac software development:

This naturally leads to the fear that Mac users will simply snub themselves out of the software market entirely by rejecting the supposedly inevitable “just boot Windows” crumbs offered to them. Here’s my favorite rebuttal of that scenario, from a comment on Seibold’s article page, by Dogger Blue. (Emphasis added.)

Consumers don’t compete for developers. It’s the other way around. Any developer who wants any significant presence among Mac users needs to release an OS X version. That is never going to change, and any developer who thinks that will change, might as well just write off all their Mac business because some other developer will come along and take advantage of the fact that they have just left the door wide open for competitors.

There is money to be made in the Mac software market. (Just ask Microsoft; Mac Office is incredibly profitable.) As long as the number of people with Apple hardware stays about the same, that’s not going to change. And if it increases, as seems likely given the removal of one more barrier to entry (“Can it run my Windows?”), the pool of Mac software money will only get bigger. Software makers are competing for that pool. They have to satisfy us.

Siracusa’s observations on what this means for Mac game development ring true as well.

★ Monday, 10 April 2006