MacPing!
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Apple could have 40 percent of the desktops out there, all it has to do is give up the hardware game. Until then - it’ll be as it always has been, poised to take over, but never quite reaching it.
So, when can I install Mac/OS onto my PC?
It sounds neat. In a corporate environment, it means you’ve just doubled the cost and maintenance on your desktop OS’s.
Well the problem for MSFT is that they quit (or never had) a culture of writing good software. They used market muscle and “inevitability” (think of the second place dem candidate for president) to get market share and revenue. Now this is all coming home to roost. Buying Yahoo looks like crying uncle on software completely. I can imagine all the internal politics in re-focusing the company on software.
MSFT is its own worse enemy.
Win7 will be a joke. They should buy RHT, put AERO on top of it, fire 90% of the product managers and marketing MBA types, open source some infrastructure components (exchange?, Share point? SOA?), and acquire a few leading software companies (adobe, SAP, others). And put all the energy into writing really great, consumer and business software.
They are trying to become Google, but if you look at the valuations and 10ks of both even that would be a disaster.
And iPhone owners who are Windows users may also think, “Hmmm, this iPhone uses OSX and I really love my iPhone. I wonder how OSX is in a desktop computer like one of those iMacs.”
I’ve been in the industry for a long time, professionally since Win95 was in Beta, hobby and school for plenty of time before then. One of the constants of the industry is there’s always something out there which people are predicting is going to eat Microsoft’s lunch, frequently that something is Apple. And yet MS keeps having their lunch. The last web traffic stats I saw showed Vista having a larger install base than Mac, while everybody keeps talking about how poorly Vista is doing in the market and how great Mac is doing Vista is apparently actually selling pretty well.
Now I’m not saying that MS’s lunch will never be eaten by somebody else, all giants can be toppled. I’m just saying it’s going to take a lot more than what are basically the same stories I’ve been reading for 20 years for me to believe that their lunch is going to be eaten SOON. If you’re an old fart like me you’ve read probably thousands of “Mac is so much better than Windows, MS is doomed” stories, almost as many as you read about how solar power is about to really take off.
Now that Apple finally came out with the (iPphone-like) LED backlighting on its 1920 X 1200 pixel 17" display, I'm writing this on my new 17", 2.5GHz, 4GB Macbook Pro -- over my home wireless network -- while Time Machine backs up my MBP wirelessly to my 1TB Time Capsule. On the left side of my display is the Mac Desktop (with the dock hiding along the left side) and on the right is Windows XP. (Vista? NO WAY!!!)
Unfortunately, the super screen resolution is so high that FR text is tiny and difficult for these old eyes to read. Fortunately, since Apple (who controls the hardware and software) has thoughtfully added the "iPhone touch" to my laptop, all I have to do is put two fingers on my touchpad, spread them apart, and ZOOM -- nice big, readable text! (BTW, it is also nice to have the screen real estate to have the FR forum on the left and the FR "slave screen" [zoomed] on the right.)
I also have a Dell Laptop here running XP and ArcGIS. What a kludge! That won't last long, because ArcGIS will soon be running on the MacBook Pro, and the Dell will go to the grandkids as a toy for playing games...
Macs are great machines but their initial high price can be a bit of a turnoff. Also, I’m surprised that Apple didn’t use some of that seed money from Microsoft offered in the late 1990’s to come up with better keyboards such as Microsoft’s excellent split-key ergonomic keyboards.
And they also encourage me to learn more about what my Mac will do. Do you know, today is the first day I ever even looked at my Widgets??? And finally installed Parallels? And got a program that will delete all the dupe photos in iPhoto (that program's biggest failing is it's inability to delete dupes!). And learned how to make a slide show, set it to music, and burn it to DVD (total project time: 4hrs...3 were spent just finding the darn photos-takes awhile to go thru 6,000- of which I now see there are 978 dupes).
If I didn't read your articles, chances are I wouldn't explore, so thanks for the boot in the Apple!
I can’t decide if it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, or just a Windows workstation with a Mac added to it’s already impressive collection of bloatware.