Mac vs. PC survey on Netscape.com

[spmaudio]

Here's an interesting piece of food for thought:

Over the last few weeks, Netscape.com has had this Mac vs. PC preference survey running off and on, which simply reads something like:

Which computer platform do you prefer - Mac or PC...followed by 2 radio buttons. (Presumably "PC" means "Windows.")

Just for laughs I checked the results of this survey 2 or 3 times, and they're interesting - 46% Mac, 54% PC. Although this is not a scientifically conducted survey, when taken in context with Apple's actual market share in terms of annual sales (something like 5% or less), Windows dominance (over 90% of the world's computers), and some of the platform-related political issues pointed out on this site, I can only draw one conclusion:

That A LOT of people using Windows do so ONLY because they had no other choice!! (Or they THINK they had no other choice...unfortunately Microsoft has been very successful at preying upon the ignorance of the masses when it comes to computers!)

[nix]

a lot of this may be due to the fact that netscape and ie set your start page to their respective page by default, and many mac users don't know enough about their box to change it, or they like netscape.com as their homepage as it is.  also, most macs run netscape, don't they?  so, you're getting tons of mac-users taking a poll about whether or not they like their os better than x86.

[ January 27, 2002: Message edited by: nix ]

[voidmain]

First of all both "Mac" and "PC" refer to *hardware* not operating systems.  And my answer would have been "either" *or* "neither" because no matter if I had a Mac, a PC, a Sparc/UltraSparc, an Alpha, a Mainframe, a PDA, or many other architectures I would be running Linux on it.

Having said that, polls like this are completely meaningless no matter which way they favor because they would never get a true sample for reasons like the previous poster mentioned, and many other.  And there are a lot of people in my category that would never answer a web pole anyway.  It's usually kids or MS software engineers that fill these polls out.  Apparently the MS software engineers haven't found this one as it must not be break time yet.  See the article on www.zdnet.com about how MS engineers ballot stuffed the .NET/Java poll.

[ January 27, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[gump420]

quote:Originally posted by nix:
a lot of this may be due to the fact that netscape and ie set your start page to their respective page by default, and many mac users don't know enough about their box to change it, or they like netscape.com as their homepage as it is.  

So, essentially you're implying that Mac users might view this poll more often because they're stupid?

Well, fuck you too.

 

quote:also, most macs run netscape, don't they?  so, you're getting tons of mac-users taking a poll about whether or not they like their os better than x86.

Actually, Netscape's biggest market is Linux users, not Mac users. Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is a far stabler product than the Windows counterpart, believe it or not, so many macheads use that. There's also the fact that Netscape for Mac OS is a truly horrible product, which causes those Mac users who prefer not to use Internet Exploder (like myself) to use alternative web browsers (such as OmniWeb, which I use).

[voidmain]

Netscape sucks, period.  At one time it was a decent product.  On the other hand the newer version of Mozilla is MUCH better.  I don't know how this can be since I thought they came from the same source.  At any rate, I don't like Netscape *or* IE, too many phone homes strewn throughout.

[Calum]

Macs ship with IE and Netscape installed already. i am using one and i find both browsers are problematic and they stick and crash a lot. You need to have both open, so if you can't get something on one browser, you get it on the other.
with re: to Linux browsers, isn't it commonest to use Mozzila or Konqueror?

[voidmain]

That's a good question.  I don't like the term "commonest", sounds too much like "Communist" and both go against "freedom" and "choice".

That is, what is the good in knowing the result of that kind of poll? It leads some to believe that just because more people use one over the other that the most used one is the "best" when usually that is not the case at all.  And the best for one is not necessarily the best for another.  Which is why one should try all for a while and decide what is best for them.  Just like Windows compared to any other OS.  Sure Windows is the commenest/Communist, but it isn't necessarily the best.  Most people don't know about any other OS though because they have never tried it.  They assume since it is the most widely used that it is the best, or they don't even know that there is anything else (which is the category that most people fall in to).

That is one of the reasons MS has such a marketshare, many people are too lazy to do the research on their own.

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[CommonSense]

That Netscape poll was mentioned on at least a couple of heavily-visited Mac websites.  We Mac users are very united in situations like these, and I can assure you there was at least some degree of ballot box-stuffing going on here.