In my last post I mentioned how the raising popularity of virtual machines was working good for the popularity of Macs. The more I think about it though, the more it works the other way around also. I have been recently checking out if some pieces of software I need have Mac ports. Without mentioning specific names, I am generally talking about thin clients to server-based services or games, which for some reason so far have had a Windows-only thin client.
I went to check out web sites and forums, and I was surprised how often the following discussion takes place in public forums (or blogs) between users and developers:
User: When will we have a Mac version?
Developers: Mac version is not planned for the moment.
User: Why? How is this possible??? You are loosing customers! And you will be losing more!!!
Developer: Uuugh… according to our statistics, we are not losing customers, they simply run our software in Parallels/VMware/Bootcamp.
It turns out that virtualization works against the pool of software for Mac growing. And we all agree that the best OS is the one that has the largest variety of software. So, as even though virtualization technology is helping Macs grow, it is also slowing down the native Mac software growth.
