iCards: The Key to the Market

- 2002.03.13

What's the most used application on Windows?

If you answered Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, or even email, you're wrong. It's solitaire, a greater drain on corporate resources than all the other Windows blights put together.

I'm serious - every Windows user seems to spend some downtime playing solitaire on the computer. I know they do it where I work, and if there are Windows PCs in your home, office, or school, I'll be it happens there as well.

Is it any wonder that Windows has become the dominant operating system when they give away a free game?

If Apple wants to grow market share, they need to look beyond the incremental growth attracting users to iTools, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and the like brings. That's nothing compared with a little game that can take your mind of the task at hand for 5 minutes.

If Apple wants to grow market share, particularly for OS X, they need to offer a free, fully Aqua-fied solitaire game.

iCards

Instead of the Mickey Mouse (no apologies to Disney) cards seen in the free version of solitaire that comes with Windows, the Aqua appearance manager could give OS X users the most visually stunning suite of solitaire games to ever grace a computer.

It would look perfect on an iBook and the flat panel iMac. More than that, people would flock to the Macs at CompUSA and elsewhere to play the game, drawing them away from the uninspired Wintel boxen littering the stores.

Apple's done it in the past. Early Macs came with a tile puzzle that was pretty lame, and in the early 90s Macs came with Eric's Solitaire Sampler. It's time to do it again and remove the last obstacle keeping Windows users off the Mac.

It's time for iCards.

- Anne Onymus

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