Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

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IMO, some of it is due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory. One developer starts with an advert, somebody else has two, a third developer gets paid to sneak in some toolbar, the first notices "hey, I can make money that way, too", and the ball gets rolling.

Now, the question is why this has not happened for Mac Software, at least not on that scale. Gruber (2004) claims it is due to zero tolerance (http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows).

I think that is partly true, and it sort-of started with the original PC. Installing a DOS program such as Lotus123 was a nightmare, where people had to answer such question as "number of lines on a page" and "how does your printer do bold" to configure a printer. Installing hardware, similarly, was a nightmare (what IRQ should we use? Do you have extended or expanded memory? etc).

Interesting analogy, it's certainly true that there is some sense of "community" for both Linux and Mac users in that people will generally choose these platforms because they have certain beliefs about how things should work and won't tolerate things that fall outside of this.

Windows on the other hand has no community and is kind of an multi-cultural wasteland where everything goes thus will tolerate more BS.

Not sure I agree with Gruber's conclusion though, if Mac had a large uptake in market share then that community would become diluted.

As it stands the random Grandma that uses a Mac without understanding computers gets a sort of herd immunity because there is a larger percentage of more nerdy and vocal users who won't tolerate BS.

If grandmas become the overwhelming majority of Mac users they lose some of that because the crapware vendors know that grandma is very unlikely to read the blogposts condemning their software.

It's low market penetration which explains the difference between OSX and Linux on the one hand and Windows on the other.

The iOS and Android app stores are full of crapware. Yes, that crapware does not have all the features of it's counterpart in the Windows ecosystem. Yet, much of it provides little value or functionality and even functional applications collect vast amounts of data not necessary for that functionality.

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