Following the herd can be wildly profitable, but it's also easy to get trampled. Sometimes it's better (and easier) to carve out a small but profitable niche.

Following the herd can be wildly profitable, but it's also easy to get trampled. Sometimes it's better (and easier) to carve out a small but profitable niche. Back when OS X was a fledgling platform, marketshare looked like a rounding error next to Windows. There were still a number of small third-party vendors that did pretty well for themselves by selling to a tiny market of fiercly committed early OS X adopters. The Omni Group and Panic spring immediately to mind. Put simply, your cashflow is not a direct function of the install base that you're selling into. Other factors, like ease of development or customer demographics, may be more important. For the current thing that I'm working on, it would be stupid not to consider the Pre. Their development model matches our current project so closely that including support should be easy. Even if it only gets us another 500 customers, that would be more than enough to make the effort worthwhile.