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IE For Mac OS X == MS Apps For UNIX?
A nameless mouse slipped this one under the door a bit ago: "Just a quick question ... If Mac OS X is based on Unix, and Microsoft creates applications eg IE for Mac OS X, how much work is involved in getting those applications working in *nix??" Y'know, I hadn't thought about it this way before, but I bet you Microsoft has. What do you think?
They didn't port Win32 - far be it from Microsoft to do something truly challenging and innovative. Rather; they bought a competing API called MainWin IIRC to do the trick.
On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms? I don't. I'd love to see StarOffice become a viable competitor (or KOffice - don't want to start any more GUI jihads here) to Office, considering it is responsible for a disproportionately large part of their bottom line...
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Microsoft is porting Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to Carbon, the updated version of the Mac OS API. Carbon is Apple proprietary code and I doubt that you will ever see it on a non-Apple Unix box.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well, you're mostly right. Carbon is the Mac Toolbox with all the stupid code gone (like munge, I hope). I do believe that Apple will be phasing Carbon out, but not after a looong time.
Carbon is there so Developers don't have to do a complete rewrite to get well-performing apps in OS X. I don't see them getting rid of it for years, simply because it's *that* much easier to make real OS X apps.
As for the CarbonLib for OS 9 and 8.5, that's just so developers who don't have a developer preview can still build Carbon apps... and it also allows Carbon apps that would normally only be able to be run on OS X to be run on OS 9. It's not stripped down at all (any more than is due to the limitations of OS 9 anyway, but on OS X, it rockets on like it should), just an abstraction layer.
As for Microsoft, I don't see them doing any pure Unix stuff anytime soon (aside from what they have done). OS X isn't exactly the stepping stone its BSD layer makes it out to be.
... just in case anyone cared.
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The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
Yes, completely.
The story circling on sites like Macintouch is that, despite press releases suggesting otherwise, there is no Mac IE team at Microsoft anymore, as they've been reorged into a WebTV group.
I can only guess that the fact that OS X is shaping up to compete with Windows with Unix-like features is one of the data points Microsoft used to axe the Mac IE project.
Oh, and for the record, Microsoft has been making Unix software for years. They worked on XENIX with SCO (which is why you see a MS copyright notice on OpenServer). They've even made versions of IE for Solaris and HP/UX, in a very half-assed, security-ignorant, binary-only way, since 4.0.