Why Boot Camp is Not The End of OS X Development

It's been one day, and already the 'sphere is buzzing about Boot Camp and how allowing XP to run on the Intel Macs is going to allow software developers a way out from building Mac OS X versions of ther software. Why, they ask, would a developer spend the extra money to build for OS X when now they can simply ask their Mac customers to boot into XP?

Huh? These people are missing the point. We're talking about a dual boot setup! You have to leave OS X to run XP, and vice versa (we'll leave the Parallels announcement for another topic). 

Any developer that says "just reboot into XP instead of using OS X" is seriously delinquent in their customer service. Does anyone really think that software developers could get away with requiring customers to purchase an XP license just to save them money?

Mac developers will remain Mac developers.  Virtual PC didn't seem to harm the Mac OS development ecosphere, although that could be explained by the slowness of full processor architecture emulation. But remember, the successful companies are the companies that put the customer first. Saying "buy an XP license and boot into XP just to run our software" is exceptionally poor customer service... it's engineer-centric rather than customer-centric.




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