Last week I posted an editorial extolling the virtues of Apple-branded routers: I think the AirPort Extreme, Time Capsule and AirPort Express make a lot of sense, even if their price and performance can be trumped by other products. There are loads of other cases where I wouldn’t even think twice to go with a third party instead. Here are some of them.

Mice

I admit that the Magic Mouse is nice for its support of gestures on the smooth, featureless surface, but I have to tell you that of all the products that Apple makes, it’s my least favorite. I infinitely prefer the feel and features of third party mice.

Lately I’ve really been enjoying the Razer Taipan mouse that I reviewed back in July. It had a terrific feel and remarkable sensitivity, loads of programmable buttons and absolutely amazing software drivers that let me get the most out of it.

One of the reasons I prefer third party mice to Apple’s own is because I play games, and for the most part, games play wretchedly with the Magic Mouse. That’s because most game developers assume – rightfully, in the case of PC gamers – that their users will have scroll wheels, distinct right buttons, possibly programmable macros and other things that make playing games easier.

While the Magic Mouse may be well-integrated with the operating system and with plain-vanilla apps, games are a different story. I realize I’m an edge case here, but there are other arguments for third-party mice too — they come in a variety of shapes and sizes to fit different hands, designs vary to accomodate different mouse holding techniques and more.

Keyboards

I have an Apple Wireless Keyboard and I use it with my Mac Pro, but I don’t really like it all that much. My desk setup for my Retina MacBook Pro incorporates a Matias Mini Tactile Pro keyboard, which I infinitely prefer for its mechanical design.

Apple’s keyboard is nice and quiet, but Matias’ has a much stronger key feel that I like, as I prefer to get a bit of resistance from my keyboard as I’m typing. I’ve been using personal computers since the late 70s, when almost all computer keyboards were mechanical, so I’m a bit old-school in this respect.

Even if Matias’ products don’t suit you, it’s not that hard to find a keyboard with Mac-specific layout. Assuming you’d rather go with a commodity keyboard designed for Windows, that doesn’t matter: OS X’s support for PC keyboards is spectacular. If it doesn’t recognize your keyboard, it simply asks you to press a few keys so it knows what type of keyboard you’re using, and it’s off to the races.

Displays

Apple’s Thunderbolt Display is, as I’ve opined before, too long in the tooth for me to bother with. What’s more, it’s $999 — way, way out of my price range. That’s why the last two displays I got came from an online reseller called Newegg.com. I got good deals — sales, in fact — on ViewSonic displays that I’ve been very happy with.

Of course, the downside of buying a third party display is that it often doesn’t integrate visually with your Mac as nice as you might like — the Thunderbolt Display’s design language is consistent with the Mac’s, even if it echoes an older iMac design. But the ViewSonics’ black bezel basically disappears for me when I’m using it (I pay no attention to it), so I haven’t found it to be that much of a distraction.

It may cost you a bit of extra money to get the display working with your Mac. If your Mac is equipped with mini DisplayPort or Thunderbolt, you’ll need to buy an adapter to connect a DVI or (heaven forbid) a VGA display to your Mac — that means budgeting another $20-$30 depending on whether you go with Apple or get a third-party interface. But compared to what Apple charges for its one, singular display, you’ll still be get a much better value shopping for a third party display and buying the adapter.

Cables and memory

Apple charges a premium for its own branded Lightning and 30 pin Dock Connector cables. You can find less expensive alternatives anywhere — I even see them at the gas station near my house. But stay away from the really cheap ones. I’d spend a bit more money and get something that carries the Made for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch logo, which shows that it’s been given the thumbs up by Apple.

In the case of Macs that have upgradeable memory — the standard MacBook Pro, the 27-inch iMac, the Mac mini and older models — you can save a fair amount of cash by going third-party instead of paying Apple’s premium price when you get your Mac configured at the factory. Now, in the case of systems like the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro, you have no choice, since the memory is soldered to the motherboard. But I’ve never had a Mac with upgradeable memory that I didn’t go with third party RAM on, and saved myself a ton in the process.

How about you?

There’s other stuff I left out, like external storage and printers, since Apple doesn’t make any devices like that anymore. But I imagine there are some peripherals and accessories that I’ve left out which you prefer to get from third parties rather than buy from Apple. So what do you have? Let me know.

Sometimes it’s best for your Mac to be seen and not heard. Applications and services often make a sound associated with their notification, but did you know that sound can be deactivated? Here’s how.

First of all, you can always mute the audio on your Mac all together — and sometimes that’s a good idea. But other times you may want to hear audio from some apps (like iTunes, for example), but you may want to selectively shut off notification noises from others.

It’s pretty easy to tailor these sorts of sounds, though it can be an arduous process. Here’s how to get started.

To turn off notification sounds on your Mac

1. Click on the  menu.
2. Select System Preferences….
3. Click on Notifications.
4. Click on the name of the app whose behavior you’d like to modify.
5. Uncheck Play sound for notifications.

That’ll do it. Now you’ll continue to get alerts from the application, but you’ll be free of any annoying notification noises associated with it.

I said it’s an arduous process up front. That’s because Notification Center in OS X doesn’t give a global setting to shut off audio notifications from all apps. You’ll need to click on each individual application in that list inside the Notifications system preference and uncheck the Play sound for notifications preference to shut them all up. But this does give you fine control over what can and can’t make noise at you while you’re using your Mac.

This won’t shut off all sound from those applications — if they’re active, and sound is part of what they do, they’ll continue to make noise. But if you find the constant “ding” of incoming mail to be distracting, for example, this is an easy way to shut that off without taking away from the auditory experience of the rest of your Mac.

Any questions? Let me know!

With apologies to Mark Twain, the reports of Intel’s death on the Mac are greatly exaggerated

Former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée recently offered his opinion on the future of the Mac. In his blog post Macintel: The End Is Nigh, Gassée predicts the imminent demise of Intel-based Macs. Is he right?

Intel’s dominance of the Macintosh platform, in place since Apple migrated away from PowerPC in 2006, will end with a future generation of Apple-made silicon, Gassée surmises. Is it possible? Yeah. Is it going to happen tomorrow? No.

The chips Apple uses in iPhones and iPads today certainly aren’t suitable to replace the silicon inside the Macintosh. iOS devices are radically different in their design and execution from the Mac, and there’s a whole host of technology inside a Mac that don’t concern an iPhone or iPad. Instruction sets are very different between the two chip architectures, too, and that raises a whole host of other issues.

Having said that, if there’s anyone that can manage a major architecture transition, it’s Apple. They’ve done this repeatedly. They moved the Macintosh from Motorola’s 68K architecture to PowerPC, then later from PowerPC to Intel. And while there were some growing pains along the way, each move has, on balance, yielded positive results for Apple, for developers and for customers.

Why does Apple switching the silicon inside the Mac keep coming up, from Gassée and others? A lot of the speculation is driven by a drought that Apple has seen this year from Intel, which has had trouble getting a new 14 nanometer manufacturing process to produce acceptable chip yields — something it needs to do to get its Broadwell microprocessors into production.

Broadwell’s behind schedule, but it is coming. And it’s coming fairly soon.

“I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday,” Intel CEO Brian Kraznich said to Reuters in May.

So later this year we’ll begin to see new computers featuring Broadwell microprocessors, and I have very little doubt that Apple will be one of the first, if not the very first, PC manufacturer to offer a new computer with one of the chips inside.

Broadwell promises to be more power efficient and to have some distinct performance improvements in areas like integrated graphics — something of key importance to Apple, of course, since graphics hardware, whether integrated or discrete, is used so thoroughly throughout the entire operating system.

In that same interview Kraznich also said that Intel wasn’t going to get Broadwell into production in time to meet the back-to-school schedule, so it’s no surprise Apple’s refreshed its most popular student machines (and realigned prices on some of them) already, rather than waiting.

One of the reasons Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel went as smoothly as it did in 2006 is because the operating system itself had been running on Intel processors for years. NeXTStep, the OS upon which OS X was based, ran fine on Intel processors, and Apple kept the technology working on Intel hardware even as it sold PowerPC-based Macs, and published PowerPC-based development tools, operating system and application software.

And that transition has yielded big benefits for Apple. One of them, for example, is the Macintosh’s innate ability to run Windows at native speeds using Boot Camp. Running Windows on the Mac wasn’t unique to Intel-based systems: You could run emulators like Virtual PC in the PowerPC days. They just didn’t scale to native hardware speeds at all. Even now, virtual machine software like Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion run leagues better than Virtual PC ever could have dreamed of, thanks to the Mac’s Intel underpinnings.

Windows compatibility — and the Mac’s ability to operate as a host to many other x86-friendly operating systems — is a selling point both with consumers and with enterprise that shouldn’t be underestimated, and something that likely would be sacrificed if Apple transitioned away from Intel.

I have very little doubt that somewhere in the bowels of Apple’s Cupertino skunworks, sit Mac devices that already use some generation of A-series ARM processors. Apple would be crazy not to leverage its skills at owning the entire process not to have such a machine in operation. But there’s a huge difference between having a prototype showing a proof of concept and a machine that’s ready to unleash on the world.

In all likelihood, at some point in the future, Apple silicon will be able to make the transition to desktop use. But I don’t think Intel’s delays with Broadwell have been enough to put Apple off from using Intel hardware in the Mac.

Contrary to what some impatient Mac fans might want us to believe, Intel does have its act together, and they remain an incredibly important manufacturing partner for Apple. We’re yet to see the best of what’s to come from Intel and Apple, that’s for sure.

iTunes Match is great, but what happens when you hit the 25,000 song limit? The solution isn’t pretty

You can keep iTunes Radio, Spotify, Pandora and the like. I like collecting my music, just as I have since I was a kid. I’ll never sell my audio CDs or get rid of vinyl. Between that and stuff I’ve downloaded from iTunes and other music services like Amazon.com and Emusic.com, I’m somewhere in the vicinity of 24,000 songs. I also use iTunes Match, which has a 25,000 song limit. What happens when I hit the limit? Turns out things get weird.

Recently Kirk McElhearn, who writes the iTunes Guy column for Macworld, explained to a reader what will happen when that limit is reached. McElhearn writes:

One problem is that when you hit the 25,000 track limit, all sorts of strange things happen. I’ve heard from people who’ve told me that uploads get wonky, that iTunes displays various error messages about connecting to the servers, and that, even after a number of tracks are culled, there can still be issues. Sometimes, even after getting a library below the 25K mark, it won’t upload new songs, even though iTunes Match says it’s updating. Sometimes it’s hard to download songs. And automatic updating can be unreliable.

Based on my current rate of acquisition, I’m less than a year from hitting that 25,000 song threshold. It’s an existential dilemma for me. for obvious reasons. There’s some good news here, though. If you’ve bought music from iTunes, that doesn’t count against your 25,000 song limit. Only music you’ve acquired through other means — ripping from audio CD, or other download services — seems to affect the limit.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably used iTunes and a lot of other methods of adding music to your library. If you want to know how many of your songs are from iTunes, there should be a “Purchased” list in the iTunes sidebar, right below “iTunes Store.” That may not give you a complete list, however. To be sure, you can create a Smart Playlist to figure it out. Here’s how:

To make a smart playlist that shows all your iTunes songs

1. Open iTunes
2. Click on the File menu.
3. Select New then select Smart Playlist.
4. Make sure Match the following rule: is checked, then…
5. Select the pop up menu that says “Artist” and change it to “Kind.”
6. Make sure the next pop up menu says “contains.”
7. type “Purchased AAC” in the text field.
8. Click the OK button.

iTunes will generate a smart playlist containing all of the files that you’ve bought from iTunes. For me that’s 2241 songs, so I’m a little further back from my 25K limit than I thought.

But if you have hit the limit, or you’re close to it, the best solution — again, according to McElhearn — is to actually split your iTunes library into smaller chunks. Your library has to be under the 25,000 song limit for iTunes Match to work.

To split your iTunes library

1. Open iTunes.
2. Click on the File menu and select New, then select “Playlist.”
3. Name the playlist “New iTunes library.”
4. Drag any music you want to move from your existing library.
5. Click on your Mac’s desktop to activate the Finder.
6. Click on the File menu.
7. Select New Folder. Name it “New iTunes Library.”
8. Return to iTunes. Make sure you can see the folder you just created on your desktop.
9. Make sure the “New iTunes Library” playlist is selected, then click the first song in the playlist. It should be highlighted.
10. Type Command-A (Select All) to select all the songs in that playlist.
11. Click and drag them into the folder you created on your desktop.
12. In iTunes, click the File menu, select Library and select Export Playlist. Save the playlist to the desktop or somewhere else you can easily find it.
13. Quit iTunes.

That will copy (duplicate) all the songs in your New iTunes Library playlist into that new folder. Move that folder to a safe location, such as inside the Mac’s Music folder. It will also generate a .XML file that iTunes can read which contains all the metadata associated with those files — whatever ratings you’ve applied, play counts and other details that aren’t actually embedded in the music files themselves.

To see your new iTunes library

1. Open iTunes while you hold down the Option key.
2. iTunes will tell you to Choose iTunes Library. Click the Choose Library… button.
3. Select the folder containing your new iTunes library.
4. Click the File menu.
5. Select Library then select Import Playlist.
6. Find the .XML playlist file you just created. That’ll rebuild the metadata associated with those files.
7. Quit iTunes.

The final step is to relaunch your old library and delete those files. Right now those music files in your New iTunes Library folder exist in two locations: there, and the old iTunes library.

To delete the new library files from the old library

1. Open iTunes while you hold down the Option key.
2. Click the Choose Library… button and find your original iTunes library (again, probably in your Music folder).
3. Click on the New iTunes Library playlist you created.
4. Click on the first track in the list.
5. Type Command-A to select all.
6. Hold down the Option and the Delete keys.
7. iTunes will ask you if you’re sure you want to delete these copies of the selected items. Click the Delete button.

It’s a really convoluted process, but Apple doesn’t give us a good way to handle it when our iTunes libraries get larger than the authorities decreed we should be able to have. I expect this isn’t Apple’s doing as much as the music publishers it has licensing arrangements with.

Whatever the situation, it’s ugly. I’ve ranted about iTunes before – I think it’s a fat, bloated pig on the Mac, and having to jump through hoops like this just to manage my music library and a service I pay Apple for besides certainly isn’t making me change my mind. But whatever. You do what you have to.

Have you had to split your music library? Or did you decide iTunes Match wasn’t worth the hassle? Let me know what you think in the comments.

FileVault 2 can protect your drive’s data by encrypting the data on your drive. Is it worth using?

An administrator password only goes so far to protect your Mac, but what happens if someone circumvents it or boots from another volume? The contents of your Mac will be vulnerable — unless you encrypt it. Fortunately Apple enables just such technology with FileVault 2 encryption, and it’s built right into OS X Mavericks. Here’s how to enable FileVault 2 encryption on your Mac.

MacBook buyers guide: How to choose the best new MacBook – the thin, lightweight MacBook Air, or the robust and powerful MacBook Pro.

You’ve decided that it’s time to replace your aging Mac with one of Apple’s new laptops. Or maybe you’re jumping onto the Mac platform for the first time. MacBook Air, MacBook Pro both old and with the new Retina display — there are a lot of options. They run the gamut of prices, too. What do you get for your money? And which model is best suited for you?

Want to control your Mac without having to touch it? You can, today. But there are some limitations

Many people have been wondering what Apple will do with the technology they acquired when they bought Primesense, the Israeli developer of the 3D sensor technology Microsoft used in the first Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 video game console. That’s still anyone’s guess. But if you’d like a Kinect-like interface for your Mac, you can buy one today thanks to Leap Motion. How well does it work? Let’s take a look.

The Leap Motion Controller measures three inches long. It connects to your Mac using a USB cable, and you lay it in front of your Mac’s keyboard. When it’s active, the Leap Motion Controller can detect your hand and finger movements and interprets them, working with custom-designed software to understand what you’re doing. You can point, you can wave, you can reach for objects on the screen and grab them. Pick them up, move them.

Setting up the Leap Motion Controller is pretty easy. You plug it in and install a software package from the Leap Motion web site. Airspace is the software that controls the device; it’s also the name of the online store where you can download apps designed to support the Leap Motion Controller.

The device itself has sensors that detect your hand and finger motion as you move above it. Settings enable you to customize the height of the “interaction area,” so you don’t trigger it accidentally, along with tracking priority and other functions.

The basic software doesn’t support any sort of built-in emulation of mouse or trackpad movements, so you’ll find yourself working within Airspace to get started. There are packages you can download — both paid and free — that enable you to use Leap Motion gestures to interact with the system, however – opening windows, positioning your cursor, clicking on buttons and more. There are about a half a dozen different apps to control your Mac using the Leap Motion Controller.

Predictably, gaming is a huge part of the Leap Motion Controller experience. There are dozens of downloadable games, many free, many others costing only a few dollars, that demonstrate the peripheral’s ability to sense motion. One of my favorites, Vitrun Air, plays a bit like Super Monkey Ball, with you pushing, pulling and sliding a ball through increasingly complex and treacherous mazes suspended in space. Famed comic book creator Stan Lee’s gotten into the Leap Motion game with Verticus, which puts you in the role of a superhero trying to save Earth from alien destruction.

But games are only one starting point for using the Leap Motion Controller. Developers of educational software have figured out how to use the controller to teach geometry, astronomy, even biology with virtual dissection of things like frogs, tarantulas and human skulls. Creative tools abound with musical composition products, virtual sculpting tools, painting, even a plug-in for Photoshop. You can download a tool that lets you control PowerPoint presentations.

Using the Leap Motion Controller is at once an exhilarating and frustrating experience. It’s a lot of fun to be able to control on-screen actions without ever touching your Mac, but I recognized the limitations of the controller fairly quickly. It would occasionally lose track of my hands and fingers, and I’d repeatedly have to reorient my hands in order for it to “see” them again. When this happened in games it was usually at the worst time, and I’d reflexively push or punch or do whatever action I was supposed to even harder to get it to work, usually without success. The Leap Motion Controller can also get confused if there’s anything covering the sensor area, or if there’s bright, directly light on it.

You’ll also likely run out of software to buy or download before too long. Much of the offerings in the Airspace Store are fun, but ultimately novelties — not apps that you’re bound to make part of your permanent workflow or come back to again and again because they’re fun to use and play.

Having said that, Leap Motion has been steadily improving the quality of the Leap Motion Controller drivers since its inception last year and are focused on bringing more developers on board to create products that support the technology.

The good

• Small, compact and portable
• Easy to set up and use
• Lots of free software to get started

The bad

• Software tends to run towards novelty as opposed to truly useful
• No built-in system-level interface management; though free third-party tools are available
• Occasional inaccurate or altogether nonexistent tracking

The bottom line

At $79.99, the Leap Motion Controller is in the same ballpark as a premium game controller or a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse. While it is a novelty item at this stage, it gives a fascinating peek into the future of gesture-based control on the Mac. If you’re looking for a unique way to work and play on your Mac, the Leap Motion Controller might be a good investment.

• $79.99 – Buy now

The iPad 2 is finally gone, and in its place is an iPad that’s a much better value.

While the iPhone 5c 8 GB model didn’t merit even a peep from Apple’s PR department, they certainly were happy to announce that the fourth-generationiPad has replaced the iPad 2 as the value-priced model in the lineup. Will the iPad with Retina display have the same sort of extraordinarily long run as the iPad 2?

One hell of a run

Let’s toast the iPad 2. It had one hell of a good run for a device in as fast-moving a market as tablets. The second generation iPad was introduced in March, 2011 and lasted three years and one week. It was the first refresh of the iPad, a then still-novel tablet device that had come on the scene in April of 2010.

Apple trimmed the device, made it lighter, changing the shape of the back to make it easier to hold, putting inside a new, faster A5 processor and a rear-facing camera, which gave rise to the pheonomenon of iPad users blocking your view of special events by holding up their devices to record them.

The iPad 2 has remained around since then, surviving not one, not two but three refreshes to the 9.7 inch iPad line. The third and fourth-generation iPads sported Retina Displays and significantly better electronics inside the case, but kept the same case design. And then last fall Apple scrapped that form factor all together in favor of a totally redesigned full-sized iPad — the lightweight, nimble and incredibly powerful iPad Air.

Through all of it the iPad 2 stayed in production, a steady target for schools, institutional buyers and others interested in a lower-priced iPad device.

New (old) kid on the block

But that changed on Tuesday when Apple replaced the iPad 2 with the fourth-generation iPad as the value-priced model; it’s available for the same price as its predecessor, but comes much better equipped.

The iPad with Retina display, as Apple calls it, touts a lot of other features besides just the higher-resolution display: It has an A6X chip, better iSight and FaceTime cameras and ups its cell offering with optional 4G LTE for another $130. Like its forebear, the new “old” iPad is limited to only one memory configuration — 16 GB, but that base model sets you back $399, $100 less than the iPad Air. You have a Lightning connector-equipped device so you don’t have to jockey different charging/sync cables everywhere you travel.

What’s more, you have a device that not only runs iOS 7, but runs it well. The iPad 2 was left out of video sharing via iCloud. AirDrop didn’t work on the iPad 2. The iPad 2 didn’t have Siri, either.

All told, this new value-priced iPad is a much better deal than the iPad 2, and certainly worth considering if you’re in the market for a new laptop and haven’t got the cake for a new iPad Air.

Low-end value improves

Just like before, the new low-end iPad is the same price as the entry-level iPad mini with Retina display. Comparing the iPad with Retina display to the iPad mini with Retina display, the mini clearly wins out on spec — it has a dramatically faster processor. It’s thinner, more lightweight, a bit more future-proof.

But the iPad mini with Retina display is just that — mini. And that 9.7 inch screen is a popular choice for schools buying iPads for students, for corporate use and for people who just simply don’t want a smaller 7.9 inch screen.

There’s undoubtedly still a place at the table for the iPad with Retina display. Whether it’ll stick around as long as its predecessor will depend on how many get sold and how the iPad itself and the iOS platform both develop. One thing’s for certain: you’re getting better bang for your buck today. Suddenly a low-end iPad is an attractive purchase.

At least until the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina Display get refreshed. Then all bets are off.

What do you think? Is the new low-end iPad a more attractive proposition? Are you considering picking one up to replace an older iPad? Tell me what you think in the comments.

2014 will be the year that the sale of Apple devices reach parity with Windows. That’s the word from well-respected industry analyst Horace Dediu, who published his thoughts recently along with some graphs on his site Asymco.

But the bigger story is how Apple’s mobile platform has nearly reached the sales volume of Windows. In 2013 there were only 1.18 more Windows PCs than Apple devices sold. Odds are that in 2014 they will be at parity.

Compare that to the historical high – in 2004, Microsoft sold 56 times more PCs than Apple did Macs. Apple had less than a 2 percent marketshare. Ten years later it’s a very different story. Dediu expects that in 2014, Apple’s combined unit sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs will be the same.

Comparing Macs to PCs, it’s a different story. PCs still dramatically outsell Macs per unit, but Dediu is doing – pardon the pun – an apples to apples comparison of all Apple device sales (iOS and OS X combined) vs all Windows unit sales. PCs still dramatically outsell Macs (by a factor of 19 to 1), but when you factor in iOS, it’s a very different story. That reduces the factor to 1.18 times in Windows’ favor in 2013. It’s been falling, which is what makes Dediu think that 2014 is the year that Apple and Microsoft finally meet on even marketshare terms.

The takeaway, of course, is a story we all know – that Apple has dominated in smartphone and tablet sales, while Microsoft has struggled for relevance in those areas. But it’s something that no one could have dreamed – never mind accurately predicted – 10 years ago. Just as with QuarkXPress when InDesign hit the market, a combination of hubris and calcification made Microsoft badly fumble its dominant position. It’s something that Apple and Google should both be mindful of, because the smartphone and tablet markets both require very long-term thinking. Things can change, just as they did before.

It’ll be interesting to come back to this at the end of the year and see if Dediu’s prediction holds true, or if this is finally the year that Windows Phone picks up some momentum.

We’ve seen it happen over and over again. A company exercises almost monopolistic control over an industry (BlackBerry and smartphones, Atari and video games, Microsoft and…well, everything) and then they lose their footing. More nimble competitors sweep in and eat their lunch. Nowhere is this lesson underscored more than in the desktop publishing market with QuarkXPress. So writes Dave Girard in Ars Technica:

To say that InDesign made a splash would be optimistic. Most of us were too busy using XPress in hardened, well-established production routines under tight deadlines. We didn’t immediately notice something that had as good a chance at taking over our honed workflow as did a reversion to Letraset. But things swiftly changed, and by 2004, Quark’s market share reportedly declined to 25 percent. That is what we in the publishing biz refer to as “totally insane.”

In the late 90s, QuarkXPress was the dominant software in desktop publishing. Newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, graphic design firms – everyone used QuarkXPress. And QuarkXPress knew it. And abused their position of privilege by not giving a damn. They were slow with updates, slow to adopt new technology, arrogant and treated their customers like crap.

Adobe gave QuarkXPress users every reason to switch as soon as they could be convinced to do so. And initially Adobe had its work cut out for it – very expensive, very elaborate workflows had been developed using QuarkXPress. Many companies were in no hurry to change processes that worked. But eventually InDesign met their needs and Quark failed to keep their business, and the rest, as they say, is history.

QuarkXPress lives on, and some would say it’s better for having been through that. But Quark itself is unlikely to ever regain the market dominance it had before Adobe cleaned its clock.

Classic literature teaches us that when a Roman emperor returned to the city to celebrate a victory on the battlefield, amidst the adulation of the crowds a slave would stand beside him, whispering “Memento mori” – “Remember that you will die.”

It’s a good lesson for any company in any dominant market position. No matter how safe you think you may be, smaller, more lithe and responsive competitors are always snapping at your heels. Adobe, I’m talking to you.