CineDiver:
Hello my fellow 'scubians'
I challenge Suunto or any other Manufacture to give a logical response to this problem! I always find that friendly competition only means better results in all ways from Application to Support.
-CineDiver, churning the waters
I just re-read your post. Oops.. Sorry. This doesn't
really address the question
that you asked but it does explain how vendors choose
not to support the MAC platform...
--- bill
I can give what I think the answer is.....
Its economics/Money plain and simple.
If you look at the number of people that own/use PCs vs those
that own/use ONLY MACs, you'll see that even by conservative
estimates the MACs only have around 10% market share.
To support a product on both platforms usually doubles your
overhead to maintain the product. Sure you can argue that
there is some overlap of work and can share some
amount of code but you still have to have to design it to
work on both, debug, test, and maintain support staff
to provide customer support for it.
So if you make the assumption, that SCUBA divers own MACs
in the same percentages as the world at large, then at
least 90% of your total available market customers are
going to be served by a PC product offering.
So in pure business terms, it is hard to justify doubling your
s/w development overhead to pickup less than 10% more sales.
NOTE: I say less than 10% because some MAC users will
buy the product anyway because they either have alternative
solutions or don't intend to use the download capability.
Companies may also be choosing to put their R&D dollars
into developing newer, lower cost, more feature rich, better dive
computers rather than in supporting additional lower volume
computer platforms for their dive software.
I mean if it came down to it, would you rather have support
for a certain existing dive computer on your MAC
or have a dive computer with more features that costs less?
I was involved with a company that developed DSL modems.
I sat through numerous meetings where we HEATEDLY debated
MAC support. You have no idea how painful it is to have to make
the decision to blow off that section of the market. We decided
it was better to focus on increasing market share
and sales volumes rather than breadth of market support.
That meant developing new lower cost DSL modem designs
rather than support the Apple machines. I.e. having lower
cost newer designs increased sales & profits more than the
amount we could have gotten if we added support for the MACs
and delayed our new product offerings.
In our case, eventually,
we did get there but it was several years later and the market
matured enough where we didn't have to do as much custom
work on the Apple platforms as well.
And keep in mind that once you go down a path of not supporting
a platform like the MAC, it is harder to go back and add it.
There never is a good business time to do it, since it always
involves adding risk and taking a hit on budget and schedules
of products that are already making money. All for a tiny
incremental bit of revenue.
In our case, in the long run, the Apple users got lower cost
better products by benefiting from the higher volumes
(100k+ units per month) created by the PC users.
The interrim time period was painful for them since they had
no support.
Such is the pain of living in a free market capitalistic society.
--- bill
