When Buzz Is Just White Noise
Tim O'Reilly ponders on Radar if Ubuntu is a threat to OS X market share, citing recent high-profile alpha nerd switches of Mark Pilgrim and Cory Doctorow (but lets not forget Tim Bray). He also ponders about Ubuntu vs. RedHat.
The short answer is that Ubuntu will not capture any signifigant part of the OS X market. The linux part is a bit complicated because there is Fedora and RedHat Enterprise Linux. Ubuntu could certainly take a chunk of Fedora users, but Fedora is more of a test bed for RHEL. RHEL could suffer with fewer people running Fedora, as their bug reports could potentially go down. Ubuntu vs RHEL isn't even really a match-up people should be thinking/worrying about.
But back to the OS X issue. First off, too much is made of high profile alpha nerds coming to OS X. Sure, Mark was a lifelong mac user, but like most nerds he didn't have just one computer. He was always running the latest and greatest of Windows (and Linux?). Alpha nerds, or at least the ones I know about, are never really happy with their computer. There are always bugs and annoyances that they are poking at, or rather are poking at them. They tend to use whatever they hate the least at the time and have their feet dangling in the water of any number of pools.
What I think Apple has lost most are users that have loud megaphones to voice gripes, which is a double-edged sword. There will be fewer C|Net and Register stories about Mark Pilgrim tearing apart a new app or feature but at the same time there will be less pressure on Apple to fix things that these users uncover. So, yes...in a very indirect way these defections could lead to a hit in market share is Apple doesn't keep their quality high. But it would be quite impossible to calculate exactly how much impact these users have on product quality and how much product quality has on current and future market share. Unless you simply want to say that we now stand at Current Market-share - 3, with more coming and going everyday.
If Tim is right and I'm wrong, which is the more likely story, the good news is that the canary in the coal mine dies so that the miners might live. But I think in this case the canary just flew away because it didn't like the miners anymore and not because of the toxic fumes in the mine. At the same time I'm sure Mark would say it is the toxic fumes of DRM that helped kill his relationship with Apple.
