Exactly, and that is most likely the reason why Baron and others had issues with their Windows OS. Worms, viruses, do not lay eggs into their basket overnight. They are attached and hidden in all the illegal copies and pirated software they most likely installed on their machines over years. Viruses are not part of any professional and paid-up software license (please name an example if there is disagreement). Its like a drug addict complaining that he has skin rashes and fouling teeth post drug abuse. "Hey guys, I changed to Ecstasy, that fucking Meth is really getting tough on me"
The point I was trying to make is that Windows was so frustrating over the past decade that people welcomed a competitor. Apple's stock has gone up 2000% in that period while Microsoft has flatlined. If Apple didn't make great products that people want to buy, I can assure you that the stock would reflect that. In regards to the original question as to why many trading platforms are not available for a Mac, the answer is simple. A lot of the current platforms were developed many years ago... some are over a decade old... and this was a period of time that Microsoft had a first mover advantage with rapid adoption. But the real question is this: Would a new startup company looking to develop a trading platform or application of some type put all their resources into building it for Windows like companies did 10 years ago? I think pretty much everybody would agree the answer is definitely NO.
Man, this is brutal and harsh. You are biased, it seems. It would make a great ntpd server for Peet's sake!
Lol, Apple's stock only went up by that much because of where is has come from, the base says it all: Apple was right before going bankrupt, they were literally weeks away from insolvency. And guess why: Macs sold horribly bad. I think you are on the wrong side claiming new startups use mostly Linux. Ironically most of the new API additions to broker, exchange, data vendor connectivity are targeting .Net languages, hence Windows OS. And YES , a lot new company would and do nowadays target Windows because it is still the most widely used platform on earth (aside mobile, which I exclude here because we are talking about platforms to perform work not leisure).
I'd like to change your mind about the reason for Apple's success. Consider that I've not mentioned a single thing about design or stability throughout this thread - I don't believe those are real advantages offered by Apple although that's what their marketing team would lead most to believe. Instead, I'd say Apple's acquisition of NeXT was the true turning point. It has nothing much to do with Steve Jobs but rather NeXT's backend technology - the NeXT frameworks and programming environments have been critical to Apple's software advantage over MSFT/GOOG even up to today. And I mean everything that grew out of NeXT: It takes significantly less time to develop a performant application with an elegant GUI using the Cocoa API toolset than the Win32 API or C# .NET/WPF. The Cocoa Touch API extends from that and is much cleaner and easier to develop against than anything that's available on Android SDK. The best developers that I've worked, even those that focus on the low-level networking stack and distributed computing, see Apple's iOS/Cocoa API documentation as a golden standard to aspire to for all the APIs that they write (yes, this includes feed handler APIs). As a result of the clean API, anyone who has done mobile app development can attest that it's easier to get a working app with the same specs on iOS as compared to Android. While C# .NET is a strictly high-level language, Objective-C (again, another NeXT child) incorporates many of the low-level features of C without trading off abstraction. A beautiful illustration of this is that in Objective-C, the description for each argument is not a named parameter but a semantic part of the method signature itself. This makes the source code very intuitive and easy to communicate. Visual Studio's refactoring, profiling and debugging tools are pathetic in contrast to what's available on OS X (which grew out of NeXT's Project Builder IDE). To get comparable functionality on Visual Studio, you need to integrate third party tools (Intel, ReSharper). Try for instance to integrate Python with C# .NET on a Windows machine using the Visual Studio toolset: huge PITA. In contrast, OS X and its software development tools make it almost seamless. Every iteration of Visual Studio is a new Swiss army knife; you have no idea what half of the tools are really for, and their positions keep moving around. Lastly, I go back to UNIX. It's much easier to pick up bash + Python + Tcl/Tk and write up something productive than PowerShell. volpunter has obviously never ssh'ed into a router, so he doesn't know what UNIX utilities do.
The guys are arguing about merits of one repackager of old wares vs another. Let's veer off even further, lets' talk about advantages of QNX, Plan 9 or Be OS - the latter really had a soul and was truly robust. Dumping of Jean-Louis Gassée in favor of technologically clueless but marketing savvy Steve Jobs served one and only purpose for Jobs: save his NeXT from bankruptcy. It was not a good deal for consumers. For Apple it was: the religion was resurrected, the religion got its Living God back. It worked very well for the corporation and shareholders. Thanks to iPod and iPhone, not due to computers. Jobs was losing money big on his NeXT venture, had to subsidize it with his Pixar winnings. I still have a Mac LC II running NetBSD hosting quite a few web sites for my small biz. How old is UNIX now?
You are a dinosaur, look around for your own good, the World has changed, Really! The trend is cross-platform lightweight frameworks and standards in programming not owned by any commercial giant. .Net is slowly becoming a liability for Windows because it is too big and cannot be used across devices.
Before you step on Visual Studio you may want to present an alternative IDE that is equally powerful. And yes of course do I include tools and add-ons for VS, because they make VS all that more powerful, in the same way that you insist on arguing that Linux makes sense also for non-programmers ONLY in light of the fact that you download and install a bunch of add-ons and applications. Sorry but I have no issues running IronPython within VS nor did I have issues installing a clean Windows install of Python. You may want to start learning to use a mouse if you have such apparent problems to grasp basic gui and IDE concepts. Lastly go to Stackoverflow.com, and check out what are the most popular languages, cannot be that all those guys are wrong about .Net, VS, C#, and other Windows children, and only you are right...