Posted on 04/25/2005 8:18:50 AM PDT by r5boston
It's Steve Jobs's plan to make this the Week of the Tiger. But Bill Gates and his minions at Microsoft are crying bull—specifically, a Longhorn steer. Despite the zoological bent, this dust-up is not about animals, but operating systems; Apple and Microsoft just happen to have named each of their major system upgrades after beasts of the realm. This Monday, Bill shows off the future of Windows, a.k.a. Longhorn, at a developers' conference. The oohs and aahs may be tempered by the fact that the hundreds of millions of Windows users won't get their hands on it until holiday season, 2006. (Unless it's even later.) On Friday, Jobs proudly presents the latest Macintosh OS X upgrade, named after that big striped cat that he always seems to have by the tail. When can the 25 million Mac users get their hands on Tiger? This year. This month. That day. Growwwl.
That's a big point for Apple in the latest matchup in high tech's equivalent to the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Both companies seem to understand what's really necessary and really cool for the next stop in desktop computing: support for the powerful new generation of 64-bit chips that are coming online; search capabilities built in, so you can mine your own documents as smoothly as Google scans the Web; a suite of persistent, constantly updated tiny applications that keep track of stuff like weather and stock quotes. A way to take advantage of the hot RSS technology that lets you "subscribe" to Web sites instead of visiting them every day or two. And a sleek appearance that relegates the traditional file-and-folder metaphor to the antique shop. Both new systems go a long ways toward making that big step.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Mac Ping
TIGER bump!
mac ping...
Next week, hundreds of thousands of Mac Users will show off the future of Windows.
Ooh, this promises to be important to something like 4% of us. ;O)
The synchronized mobile directories are going to be out of this world. Spotlight is going to rock. I don;t know about Dashboard.
Woo hoo!
-ccm
Apparently it's also important to those who have to make weak attempts to undermine it with sarcasm.
Dashboard is just gonna be flat-out fun.
A pretty balanced article, but it missed a key concept. Microsoft is, at this point, willing to be just "good enough" on the desktop, because they believe strategically that the next round of battles will not be fought there. Instead the next round of battles will be about what the Internet is really good for.
People talk about how the Internet has "changed everything", and they're right. But they have no idea how much change in still in store. When we have easy ways of writing software that runs in an asynchronous, highly distributed fashion, it will kickstart another round of dramatic change.
Microsoft is focused on that, and I think they are in the lead with their Indigo project. It's to be delivered in the same time frame as Longhorn, and it's where Microsoft is investing their big brains. Apple hasn't even entered that game yet, as far as I know. The only other company that has such efforts even on its radar screen is IBM.
So Apple could have the nicest desktop in the world for a while, but (1) Microsoft will just copy the stuff that works better than Windows, and (2) if they can't tie those Apples into this new wave of distributed systems, that imposes some real limits on who will want them, especially in the business world.
Oh puh-lease, like you Mac users don't do that? Actually, it's good that this thread came up today ... it's been almost 3 whole days since the last anti-Microsoft ping and the Mac users and Linux users were probably going berserk with no place to vent themselves.
Dashboard, dashboard ---- wait a minute, I know that setting. Yes, that is that display part of ATGuard that helps protect my Win98SE main machine. Dashboard is upgraded???? :<<))
bump for later
Hardy, har, har, har.
FYI, I was a devoted 'Mac evangelist' from '87 to '95. So, yeah, it's "important" to me because, in a way, I'm part of the 4%.
Being "just good enough" is another way of saying it sucks. It's that kind of thinking that brought down the big three auto makers.
Ooof. So true!
There's a big difference between "just good enough" and "sucks". To put in terms of cars, since you like that territory, most car companies make their handling "just good enough" rather than make it excellent. Only BMW and a few others put such a premium on handling that they make it excellent. As BMW introduces handling features that seem to catch on, and as the cost of developing those things drops, they are then adopted by other manufacturers, and become part of the "just good enough". But would you say that the handling of an Intrepid "sucks" because it doesn't match a BMW M3?
The major auto manufacturers believe the battles for their customers are fought on different territory. Safety, ease of getting children in and out, gas mileage, perhaps reliability, and definitely lower-cost production are where they choose to put their money.
Likewise, Microsoft is trying to figure out where the customers need to be in the future, and investing money in a radical new area. They are not content to just chase Apple with an evolving desktop system, but are instead trying to innovate around the concept of highly connected systems. That doesn't sound much like the auto manufacturers, does it?
I've been trying to get Mac users to calm down too. I'd like to see Mac and PC threads that don't get hijacked by arguments every time.
Oh puhleeeeeeeeze.
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