Developers are certainly paying attention to the Apple market now. "There are about 3,500 native applications available for the Mac OS X today," said Ken Bereskin, Apple's director of Mac OS X. "This includes popular Mac applications and many other applications ported over to run on the [operating system]." Nearly every type of application is represented, ranging from office productivity products to high-end computer-aided design programs.

If there are first-class applications for a certain area, people are at least willing to consider switching to a Mac. Perhaps even a group of people would be willing to switch. But this also could happen in the other direction. If there is a first-class application users can not live without, they will choose Windows, even though the general usability would be poorer.

What about, e.g., bioinformatics? Are there such applications on the Mac? Or on Windows?