Interesting static website generation app

Posted by Skywatcher
Jan 6, 2018 at 12:57 PM

bobmclain wrote:
There are quite a few of these around. For example, Hugo (unlike Spelt)
>supports Mac, Windows, and Linux:
> >https://gohugo.io
> >Also unlike Spelt, Hugo doesn’t cost money, it’s full featured, and its
>developers haven’t excluded 90% of the market.
> >

I’ve seen this argument thrown around often here in some other threads, but it’s based on a false premise. Developers develop for where the USERS are, not just based on abstract market share. The fact that Windows has overall 85% of market share doesn’t mean users in a particular field all spread out evenly across that distribution ( and of that 85%, how much are « passive » machines ? Servers, etc.. ) .

For example ( and I know this first hand since I’m that field), audio and music professionals are 80% Mac users. Pretty much all professional music studios are based around Macs, as well as a majority of both amateur and pro musicians. Same thing with graphic designers , the overwhelming majority are Mac users.
. And there are historic reasons for that : in the 90’s , it wasn’t as easy as today to make the computer talk to external devices ( mainly audio interfaces, and the MIDI protocol that makes the software communicate with synthesizers, drum machines, mixing consoles, all sort of devices used by musicians and audio engineers ), and the Mac had a huge edge in ease of use compared to PCs in reliability and ease of installation of drivers.
Same thing with graphics and video ( Apple’s emphasis on graphics meant that fonts were handled better on Macs, and Quicktime made it the de-facto platform for video editing.) . Apple also marketed itself very heavily to those users, touting its superiority ( at that time ) in those field.

Therefore if you’re an audio or graphic software developper, it would have been crazy not to develop your software for Mac, since that’s where 80% of your potential buyers reside, and even today, there’s still a lot of audio and graphic software that is Mac only.

This has changed now, and Macs and PCs are pretty much equal , but partly for these historical reasons, the market share in those fields remains the same.
The same way that corporations overwhelmingly use Windows, even though Macs are perfectly able to run business software, has also to do with a deep penetration of the business and corporation market by IBM and Microsoft that happened very early on, and a very solid support by Microsoft towards corporations in a way that was far superior to the way Apple handled that market ( and even today, still doesn’t handle it as efficiently as Microsoft) Therefore , if you’re a business software developper, it would be crazy not to develop for PC’s, because that where 80% of your potential buyers are. Same if you’re in the server software market ( that’s probably 99,9999 % Windows and Linux based ), it’s safe to just entirely ignore the Mac platform.

It’s probably the same with writing and outlining software. Developers are not idiots, they’re aware of the fact that Windows is 85% of the market, but it seems that the majority of users of this type of applications are Mac users ( I honestly don’t know why ), and so they develop for where the USERS are.