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“Unfortunately, there is not much that Apple can do about it beyond enabling Windows to run on Macs. ActiveX will not be supported on Mac OS X and Safari. ‘

Completely and totally untrue. There is a very important use of the web that Wall Street types need. It used to work under IE5 and WMP9.

With the changes in IE, WMP, ActiveX, these websites got harder and harder to use on a Mac and are now pretty much inaccessible. I have the “fortune” to work on Wall Street and have contacts at these people’s customers and some reputation on the Street such that I got the people that run these websites to be open to talk to AAPL such that they could get the websites compatible. However I worked AAPL from the top down and bottom up to get them to pay attention and they just do not care. I came at it from IR, AAPL IT (where I have a boat load of friends still), marketing (more friends), and ADC leadership.

They see AAPL as a consumer device and if it does not work in business they really do not care at this stage.

There are plenty of things AAPL could do to, at the margin, improve website compatibility for business users.

But MY MAIN POINT is that if you are thinking about switching to Mac and you use your Windows machine for business you need to not only make sure the applications you need have a Mac version but you also need to check the websites. This is not too hard. Just bookmark or jot down the critical places you use and go to an AAPL store and check them out.

The other choice is run windows. I have one Mac user that spends 90% of their computing time sitting in front of Windows under Parallels.

And never forget the basic concept of Mac is that you do not need to be a guru to run it and for the prime target market for Mac the emulation packages are tricky. I got them working but I was in IT for 20 years before wall street and even today I follow tech.

I’ll tell you one more thing professional users will learn to loath about Macs in the coming future. MS-Office incompatability, Here is what is happening: the latest version of MS-Office does not support macros. Anyone that gets professional powerpoints or spreadsheets (at least wall street types) have macros. The old versions of office apps have the macro capability (VB) but cannot open the new MSFT format. Is this an evil design by MSFT to screw with Mac users? I think so. Is AAPL the cause of this? No. Could AAPL do something? Yeah I think so.

Impact of MS-Office incompatibility - one more reason Macs are tough for business people and BTW students.

Don’t get me wrong I love my Mac. I have been a Mac user way back decades ago even before I was coicindentally hired by AAPL’s IT department to do some database applications.

But the growing incompatibility is a real challenge and AAPL needs to address it with education, marketing, support and technology.

If you think this is not the case you have your head in the sand.

If you think this is not the case you have your head in the sand.

I can see it now - some employee in Apple's marketing dept. suggests to Steve Jobs that the company could boost their market share by incorporating ActiveX and VBScript into Mac OS X. The guy would be frog-marched into the parking lot and told to pick up his box of belongings next week.

It's unfortunate for Microsoft's customers that they decided to discontinue VBScript support in their Mac products, but it's their proprietary technology and their decision to make. Apple has provided an adequate solution for most Mac users by enabling Windows to run on their systems.

For those of us who work with Apple's products at a technical level, we view things like ActiveX as an unwarranted security risk with little benefit for most users. The fact that Mac OS X is not contaminated with crap like ActiveX is a good thing.

Apple has a different strategy for getting into the enterprise. It is a long-term, cautious strategy that is unfolding over time. It certainly involve some factors you mentioned - education, marketing, support and technology - and it is driven by acceptance in the consumer space. But instead of adopting ActiveX, Apple will promote interoperability based on open standards.