Now and again, we'll be speaking to a prospective customer and, at the last second, they'll drop into the conversation that they use Macs rather than PCs.
Outside of the design and media industries, Apple use has always been in the minority. Indeed, looking at the Google Analytics stats for the PropertyADD website, only 5% of visitors are using a Mac.
On this blog, as you might expect with social media savvy agents, that figure rises to about 10%.
But it's still relatively small potatoes. In the last year, just 50 people have visited the PropertyADD website after searching for Mac-based software. A small enough number that we can't yet justify offering an alternative to using Microsoft Office integration for the mail merged letters, etc.
That said, the numbers are growing. Macs are cool and more agents are looking to reap the image benefits that come from using the brand.The thing is, there is a way of running PropertyADD on a Mac - a software product called Parallels allows you to run Windows within a Mac, without rebooting.
If your heart is set on a Mac, but you still want top quality and fully featured estate agency software, that's the way to go.
I understand the whole 'small potatoes' argument for mac users, but I feel it's a little short term sighted. Sure in terms of business users, macs only count for a fraction compared pc users…. but the days of saying macs are just for media and design businesses are long gone. A few years ago there wasn't much in the way of alternatives for Microsoft Exchange, now services Google apps and growing steadily. As more and more home users switch to macs, so I think we will see businesses wishing to do the same.
When it comes to estate agents and estate agency software, the biggest reason so few use, or migrate to macs, is simply down to the lack of mac compatible estate agency software. Only a few weeks ago did and Estate Agency owner say to me that they really wanted to switch to Macs, but can't because of the lack of available software. I realise parallels is an option, but it's far from ideal.
Until a software company takes a brave step forward and starts developing mac compatible software, you're not going to see your Google Analytics stats for mac visitors rise much.
I see your software is web/cloud based. In theory web/cloud based applications should be ideal to cater cross platform use… except for the insistence of the use of .net and the requirement of Internet Explorer. With the technologies available today, there shouldn't be a reason to force users to use one platform. It begs the question if facebook was only accessible from IE, would it be as successful?
I'm not knocking your software at all, I'm sure it's great. All I'm saying is at some point there is going to be Software Company that develops estate agency software for macs and it's going to be successful!
Over the last few months we certainly have had a couple more requests for Mac compatibility.. If only a couple!
We do have some further plans in this area during 2011, so keep an eye out.
Martin
Thanks for your comment.
We've now committed to going fully multi-browser compatible by the end of March next year, as part of winning recent deals.
If you'd like to get in touch with the office and leave your details, I'll happily keep you in the loop with progress.
Martin