[gvnonor]

Your points are valid, but I think the percentage of inexperienced Windows users far outnumbers the users with 'expertise'. Those type of people

1. Do appreciate applications that "just work" and are willing to spend time choosing the right apps that suits them.

2. Haven't learnt of BT yet or even if they have, they're willing to pay to save the hassle of checking for viruses, trojans etc.

3. Do appreciate user friendly applications, they'll choose a better looking application with lesser features over a featureful app with bad UI.

Going after this crowd can be lucrative indeed, just ask patio11 ;)

[mattgreenrocks]

Yeah, it just seems like it is hard to write an app that less-experienced users will both appreciate and use...much less pay for. After all, they may think MSN Messenger feels like it was written for twelve year-olds, but do they care enough to switch? Do they even know how to look for a replacement? (IM might be a bad example as nobody wants to pay for a client on any platform, it seems.)

OS X appears to simply have more of a tradition of independently-written, beautiful software.

[gvnonor]

Well, in most cases they want a real good reason to switch and the software must market itself as a replacement. Case in point Firefox and Chrome gained a lot IE6 users by

1.Having multiple tabs which is the killer feature

2.Marketing themselves as a secure and less-crashy alternative.

This might seem like an unfair example(not everyone has Google's or Mozilla's muscle) but the basics are the same for any type of software and given sufficient effort and planning, they can compete in competitive markets with established players.