So I've just read this article at Ars Technica on how Apple can gain significant OS market share. There are various topics to do with Apple that seem to be attached to boomerangs as they just keep coming back no matter how hard you try to make them go away. It goes through all the usual suspects of how Apple has to gain market share to survive and how it needs to do better in the enterprise market, ultimately settling on the old "Apple needs to licence OS X" claim. Now there is nothing wrong with this, if market share was really relevant any more.

Macs are too expensive

Yes. And no. There are two things you need to take into consideration when looking at figures, the absolute values and the relative values. If you saw a figure saying you were 25 times more likely to be hit by an meteor on a Tuesday then you'd probably want to stay in a bunker on Tuesdays, except that in absolute terms the chances are you being hit are still too small to even consider. Conversely, if you were to see a figure saying that deaths caused by a disease were up by 0.5% this year you may think that it isn't too big a problem, except that last year 20 million people died from this disease which means that 100,000 more people died from it this year, and that is no small number.

The same goes for Macs. In absolute terms, yes Macs are more expensive. In relative terms they are far from it. It just so happens that Apple competes in form factors that are inherently more expensive. Compare the iMac to any other all-in-one desktop and it's a damn good deal. Compare the Mac Mini to other small form factor computers and it isn't too bad. Compare the MacBook to other 13.3" laptops and it is very competitive.

The problem here isn't that Apple is ripping off customers, it is that it doesn't have the same range of products as PC vendors. Two of the most common products are the low-mid range tower and the low end laptop (this is generally a 15.4" laptop with specs approaching that of a MacBook). Apple doesn't have computers in these form factors though, so when you see figures like "the average Mac desktop costs $1,000 more than a Windows PC", it isn't because the Apple is fleecing customers, it is because they don't sell the cheaper, more popular types of computer.

Money, money, money

So the article at Ars says that Apple should stop focusing on hardware and instead focus on software. Now lets stop a moment. Apple is a publicly traded company. As much as people would like to think they care only about their customers, their legal obligation is to their shareholders and this means trying to make as much money as possible. Now we have that in our minds lets look at what you gain from being a software vendor vs being a hardware vendor.

For simplicities sake let us assume that Microsoft has 96% global market share and Apple has 3% market share (the remaining 1% is for everyone else). Below are tables showing the revenue and profit from Windows and from the Mac for the last 4 quarters, both in absolute terms and per market share point.

NB: Apple doesn't provide profit figures for Macs, so I've used the gross margin figures for each quarter to get the quarterly Mac profits

I don't know about you but I'd rather be gaining $1.6 billion extra in profit for each market share point than $0.136 billion. And this is why Apple is a hardware company.

The enterprise ball and chain

A lot of hoo-hah is made about the enterprise market. Historically Apple hasn't paid too much attention to the enterprise market and the enterprise market hasn't paid much attention back. Pretty much the only real enterprise scale implementations of Macs have been at universities.

With the iPhone Apple is starting to flirt with the enterprise and Snow Leopard shows signs of adding support for enterprise features. But I don't see Apple pushing too hard to make it big in the enterprise market. For some that may seem crazy, but simple reason is that Apple knows what happens when you try to make it big in the enterprise market: Windows.

Microsoft may have had questionable practices in the past and you may not like their software too much, but you cannot deny that Microsoft has some incredibly talented engineers that can do some great things. The problem is that they're constantly dragged down by the ball and chain that is their enterprise user base

The enterprise market is incredibly slow moving and doesn't like updating software unless it absolutely has to. And by software I don't mean the operating system, I mean the software they use to run their business. As such they want their software to run on the new operating system, which means backwards compatibility. Unfortunately backwards compatibility means that you aren't just supporting older APIs, but also supporting bugs in those APIs. Much like web developers writing websites to work round bugs in IE, desktop developers work round bugs in the Windows APIs.

There's a quote that I remember and always use when talking about this (unfortunately I can't remember where I saw it): "The difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Apple knows the meaning of 'deprecated'". Apple isn't afraid to say, "This is old and buggy, lets take it out so it isn't cluttering up our system." Apple is always looking for ways to improve existing parts of the OS and remove dated parts, Microsoft simply adds a new layer on top. Essentially Apple goes and fixes the cracks in its walls, Microsoft just puts another layer of paint over them.

It is this attitude of Apple's that doesn't bode well for them making it big in the enterprise market. Either enterprise software needs to be updated more frequently or Apple needs to stop removing dated technologies and to be frank, I can't see either of those happening. That is not to say that Apple won't make ground in the enterprise market, I just wouldn't expect them to ever come close to dominating.

Apple "winning"

So ultimately all these arguments always come down to someone saying, "Well if Apple just licensed OS X to PC vendors it would beat Microsoft." Why does Apple need to beat Microsoft? If Apple was to be in Dell or HP's position they'd have considered that winning. They would have 20% of the market...

...which brings us full circle back to absolute vs relative. 20% of the market may not sound too impressive, when you consider that Microsoft has the other 80% of the market. But imagine you're on a bus with 50 other people. In theory, 10 of those own a Mac. They won't have beaten Microsoft by any means, but they would have won simply due to the fact that odds are you are surrounded by several Mac users wherever you go.

Licensing OS X would boost Apple's market share by a huge amount, but for what? It would damage Apple's profits and open up the huge can of worms that is hardware compatibility. The only possible reason to do it would be to gain market share. But why is market share so important? Because of developers? I don't know if you looked around recently but the Mac is doing pretty damn well developer wise for it's "tiny" 3%.

Maybe it is users who care about it, worrying that the smaller market share means that it will be hard to get help or find software or hardware for the Mac? Maybe a bigger market share will get more people looking. Problem is, market share isn't what gets people to look at a product, if it was then nothing new would ever arrive. People look at a product to see if there is something compelling in it, and the core reason for Apple's success is that it simply offers one of the most compelling products on the market.

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In previous posts we've seen some of the features that will make up Lighthouse Keeper 1.0. In this final post is focused on what is missing from 1.0, why it's missing and what the aims for the future of Lighthouse Keeper are. I feel it's important to let people know where something is going so they don't get any misconceptions about it.

So what features of Lighthouse are missing? Below is a list of things that haven't made it into 1.0 and roughly when you can expect them:

1. Milestones with no due date. This was brought to my attention during the beta. As I'm very strict with my versions I do not put any new features into a version after it has reached beta. The reason for this is simply that new features (even small ones) add bugs and in a beta you're meant to be removing bugs, not adding them. This will be coming in 1.0.1.

2. Creating/modifying/deleting projects. This is one of those things I simply didn't have time for. As it's a relatively rare occurrence I opted to leave it out. This will be making an appearance in 1.1.

3. Editing a ticket's body. Unfortunately the Lighthouse API doesn't support this at the moment. There are quite a few things in this category and I'll look into adding them as soon as the guys at Lighthouse manage to get them into the API.

4. Changesets. I'll be blunt, I've never used them. As such I first need to familiarise myself with them before I can start designing how they'll work within the app. Hopefully these will make an appearance in a later 1.x version.

5. Messages. These are in the same boat as changesets.

6. Editing user profile. The is another one of those things not in the API.

7. Modifying user permissions. And another.

8. Share a ticket bin with others. And another.

Obviously this isn't an exhaustive list of what I have planned. I'm wanting Lighthouse Keeper to go beyond what Lighthouse offers on its own and take full advantage of the fact that its a desktop app, but I will reveal these in due course.

So this concludes this series of blog posts introducing you to Lighthouse Keeper. Lighthouse Keeper 1.0 will be being released next Wednesday, the 27th of August so make sure you come back to download a free trial, which allows you to manage the first project in your account and only update your accounts manually. In the mean time, make sure you sign up for a Lighthouse account and get the benefits of the best issue tracker on the web right now.

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So far in this series I've shown you the power the desktop gives with offline viewing, a more responsive user interface and faster and easier access to tickets. In this post I will be covering another feature which is key to issue trackers, but is made better when combined with the power found on the desktop: searching.

The search field is ever present in the top right of the screen. From here you can search your tickets at any time. Lighthouse limits you to searching through tickets on a project by project basis, but Lighthouse Keeper allows you to search through all your tickets in all projects across all of your accounts. It does this via the filter bar, which appears every time you start typing in the search field. Depending on your selection in the source list it will also offer options for narrowing your search by the selected project or selected milestone/ticket bin.

One thing that is key to Lighthouse Keeper, is making as much of it function in the same way as Lighthouse itself. One requirement of this is the search syntax. Any query that you can use in Lighthouse you can also use in Lighthouse Keeper to give you the same results. For a full overview of the searching syntax visit the Lighthouse help page.

One feature that a surprising number of people don't seem to pick up on in Lighthouse are Ticket Bins. These are essentially saved searches, a bit like Smart Playlists in iTunes. Lighthouse Keeper offers support for ticket bins on an equal footing with milestones to help you take better advantage of them.

Over the past 3 posts I've talked about some of the features that will make it into Lighthouse Keeper 1.0. In the final post in this series I'll be describing what hasn't made it and why as well as what you can expect from the future.

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In my last post I introduced you to parts of Lighthouse Keeper that help make issue tracking much easier and more hassle free. In this post I'll be going into more detail about the most vital unit of currency in any issue tracker: tickets. To be a good issue tracker you need to allow users to quickly and easily add, view and update tickets. Lighthouse Keeper takes this to a new level.

You will likely spend most of your time in the tickets list in the top right of your screen. This gives you an overview of the tickets in the selected project, milestone or ticket bin (or just all your tickets if you haven't anything selected in the source list). There are columns available for almost every bit of information about your tickets, and you can show or hide them by right clicking on the menu.

Now when you look over to the left of the tickets list you may have one of two reactions:

- "Ooo, purty colours!"
- "My eyes, they burn!"

This will depend on your affinity to the Lighthouse defaults for state colours. If you're finding these colours a bit bright you can edit them in Lighthouse in your "Edit Project" page (these are project specific). Unfortunately you can't change this from within Lighthouse Keeper yet, but I will be adding it in a future version.

Below the ticket list is the ticket details pane. This give you more detail about the ticket, including body and its history. Each comment and change is displayed in the bubbles below the body. Nothing much special here... yet.

So we've covered viewing, what about adding and updating tickets? Well as I said when I introduced Lighthouse Keeper, the metaphor I finally settled on for a ticket is that of email. As such the Add/Update ticket windows are pretty similar to what you would find in Mail. I'm not going to go into this in too much detail, a picture says a thousand words:

I will give a useful tip for when adding or updating a ticket though. As you would expect you can tab all the way through the fields on the window, but when you've reached the bottom you'll find that you're reaching for the mouse to click the submit button in the toolbar. You can instead use the Cmd-S short cut to submit the details of the front-most ticket window, allowing you to submit a ticket without removing your hands from the keyboard.

One of the very first requirements I had for Lighthouse Keeper was to be able to start adding a ticket quickly and easily from anywhere. There were many times I got a support email about a bug but never filed a ticket because I would have had to open Safari, log into Lighthouse, select the project and choose "Add New Ticket" before filling out the details. As such Lighthouse Keeper lets you set a global hotkey to start adding a new ticket.

Another useful feature is the ability to copy a ticket. Copying is essentially adding a new ticket with all the fields auto filled with those of a previous ticket. How is this useful? Well it helps if you have a ticket similar to one you want to file, but it also makes the task of moving a ticket to another project much easier, which is great for those with a public project for customer issue tracking and a private project for internal issue tracking.

All issue trackers make it easy to manage tickets, but Lighthouse Keeper is helping take that to an all new level of speed and usability. But adding, viewing and editing tickets are only part of the equation. These features aren't very useful if you can't find the ticket you want quickly and easily. Come back in a few days to see the 3rd post in this series: Searching.

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