On August 23rd, I posted a short survey asking customers to give us some idea if other platforms would be valuable to 3ds Max users. For many years, we've been hearing about increased requests for the Mac OS X and we felt it was a good time to poll as many people as possible to hear what everyone we could reach is thinking. A week later we've already received  about 1,000 responses so I think we've reached a point where we can speak to the results.

Obviously, with a survey targeted to 3ds Max users who can only work on Windows, there is somewhat of a bias builto-in towards Windows. We did try to post the survey in places where non-max users might encounter it just to hear some other perspectives. I think we were semi-successful as roughly 10% of respondents were non-3ds Max users.

I think the results are pretty surprising given the built-in bias towards Windows. When we asked you to spend your hard-earned Autodesk research dollars, you spent 23K on Windows but you also spent 21K on OS X. Linux was rather lower at 14K. You were all pretty clear that virtualization wasn't going to be a strong option. Maybe a short-term one, but not a long-term one.

Another surprise is when we asked the platform question another way, the majority of you want an OS X version (35%) versus sticking with Windows (27%) or moving to Linux (19%).

Finally, I was definitely surprised to see how many of the non-3ds Max users would switch to 3ds Max if we had an OS X version. Over 60% of non-users said they would switch! That's 47 people, so while a small number, it has some statistical value. Perhaps this is just an anomoly because only people interested in 3ds Max took the survey, but it suggests that there are some new users who would come over if we had an OS X version.

And for those of you doubters out there that think it could never happen, hell has recently frozen over because AutoCAD just announced a full OS X port. If 3ds Max were to ever even consider a port, key internal technology would have to make the leap ahead of us. That just happened...

For those of you interested in seeing the details, check out this report of some of the survey results.

Again, don't read too much into this. I don't want everyone thinking that we are working on a port. The fact is that key technology has been moving to a more platform-neutral stance for many releases now. Creating an OS X port would be a huge effort and something we wouldn't take on lightly. On the positive side, we're now closer to it than we have ever been.