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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Why don't people switch?
The Mac community is starting to wake up to the fact that Apple's "Switch" ad campaign is a colossal failure, with the company losing market share in the time since it launched the campaign. Over at Low End Mac, they're trying to come up with some positive way in which Apple can deal with this problem ("Marketing the Mac: The Myths Keep People from Switching"), but honestly, there's no easy answer. I dropped the author of that article a note that sort of summarizes my feelings on this topic: "I appreciate what you're saying, but I think it's really the "Mac realities" that keep people from switching. It's hard to drop a platform. It's impossible, inexpensive or slow to run your old applications, and that's a huge investment for many people. An even bigger investment, of course, is their data, and though there are certainly ways to get data from the PC to the Mac quickly and easily, this is the type of thing Apple might offer out of the box to make life easier. In the end, the reason people don't switch has nothing to do with the elegance of the Mac platform, the niceties of OS X, or anything else you might tout as a Mac advantage. It has to do with very real costs of time, money, and effort. It's just too difficult for most people to bother."

[ Posted at 11:28 AM | Permalink ]