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| Architosh News Reports | |
| Architosh Staff ([email protected]) |
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AIA Suggest Mac Architects May Have Cheated on Online Poll!
An article entitled, "Mac OS vs. Windows: Who's the Real Winner?", featured on AIAOnline comments on the difficulty of excepting the Mac vs PC CAD poll results. The AIA seems to doubt the online poll numbers that ran recently and showed that 50.4 percent of architects were PC only while 32.6 percent of architects were Mac OS only. These numbers are clearly higher than what one would expect from poll results of over 1600 participants. Moreover, the AIA states that these numbers don't jive with a July 1998 survey by Architectural Research Associates, that showed that Mac architects were less than 10 percent. The AIA wants to know why the Mac numbers were so high.
Unfortunately, in asking this question, the AIA made a terrible suggestion, based on a misleading interpretation from a generalizing iTalk post by an architect. They suggested that Mac architects may have altered their browser settings in order to vote more than once. This was an unfortunate suggestion, for obvious reasons. The iTalk remark simply stated this: "'I know for a fact that when cyber-polls are conducted regarding Windows vs. Mac that the Mac contingent seems to vote in solidarity, and tends to "stuff the ballot box", so to speak.'" That comment does have a ring of truth in it, but "voting in solidarity" and "stuffing the ballot box" doesn't mean that Mac architects, and Mac users in general, lie and cheat! What it means is that Mac users usually respond to these polls in force, spreading the word around faster than their PC counterparts, and in doing so hit the ballot box in full force. The Architosh site, for example, announced the AIA poll. This probably sent over a few hundred readers in a very short period of time.
Yet there are other reasons why the recent poll numbers could be so high. The AIA even suggested that perhaps Macs for CAD have increased since last summer. Certainly, in some degree, this has been the case -- as Apple has dramatically increased its market share since the iMac introduction last August. Yet there are other probable reasons that the AIA article fails to take into account. Like the percentage of Mac vs. PC architects that are connected to the Internet from their office. Or the percentage of Mac vs. PC architects who have computers at home connected to the Internet. And the percentage of Mac vs. PC architects who surf the web regularly, or at all. For better or for worse, the AIA has already made its suggestion. Can they take it back and show a kinder face with optimism for the Mac poll numbers? Maybe. And perhaps next time this poll is run the Mac numbers will be even higher. After all, why is it so unbelievable to suggest different from a company that is doing just that?
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