Over the weekend I took some time to read through some of Apple's fiscal reports to see what could be inferred about Camino's potential user base. Since OS X 10.0 arrived in 2001 Apple have sold 17,024,000 Macintosh units. You can find this information here and here.
The Camino trunk is already OS X 10.3 or newer only. Since OS X 10.3 was released October 2003 that means that Camino is only able to target 7,824,000 users (who have a compatible system out of the box). (It was pointed out to me that support OS X 10.2 was becoming impossible because many of the bugs were OS-related and there is not much we can do about that. There is a bugzilla entry that relates to this here)
It is relatively obvious that many users upgrade their Operating System, but we cannot infer anything about the number of people who are upgrading to a sytem that Camino is compatible with.
As things stand it would be great if we were able to have 1% of our easily reachable user base using Camino (78,240). It's pretty difficult to find any statistics about how the current user base of Camino so hopefully by the end of the summer we will have a system in place to help us keep track.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Taking a look at the market
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4 comments:
Would an informal poll at a Mac-using community maybe give you a better sense of the percentage of the userbase?
Granted, people who frequent Mac-related communities are probably more in-the-know about their options than the typical user who just plugs it in and uses Safari, but it might give a sense of just how well it's known?
You could always ask me for download numbers... ;)
I don't have accurate numbers for 1.0, but for 1.0.1, we've had 134,411 downloads (as of June 3, 2006 at 4:16 PM PDT.
The latest Mac OS X Hints poll (from February, begun the week before Camino 1.0 arrived) says that we have 11% of the Mac OS X Hints readership ("the geeky kind").
Well, there is GNUstep ( http://www.gnustep.org/ ) which implements an open source variant of Cocoa and which currently lacks a decent web browser. Once Camino is cleaned of all the Carbon / Quickdraw specific stuff Camino could be ported over to GNUstep. GNUstep in turn runs on nearly every Unix, on Windows (and on Macs too)
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