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Why the Mac Matters

Stefan Tilkov,

A tiny detail in Tim Bray’s report from the Atom community meeting caught my eye:

Looking around the table, I see 11 Macintoshes and 3 other computers

This leads to an observation that I believe isn’t clear enough to a lot of people: The Mac as a platform matters a lot, because even if its market share is negligible from a percentage point of view, it’s actually pretty significant among certain people. Thus, even if there may be no justification (judging potential license revenue) to develop something like, say, Weblogic for Mac OS X, it’s clearly a good idea to do so simply because it makes sure a lot of people will be able to play with it or do some research.

Luckily, OS X’s excellent Java support makes this pretty easy, at least for Java apps, unless you end up doing something as stupid as packaging your all-Java app in an installer that’s only executable on Windows.