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Microsoft vs. Apple's "Thunder"
jaymzter writes "Cnet has an interesting article on Microsoft's attempt to steal the thunder from the upcoming Macworld show, and also to slap Apple down for not showing enough gratitude. What's really interesting, is that Microsoft supposedly helped Apple 'fix' Mac OS X, and that Microsoft doesn't think Apple is pushing Mac OS X hard enough. Oh, the tangled webs we weave." Strange story. Basically its a battle of PR.
What a joke, not only are they pushing it, they have annoying ads. I think that THIS comic sums it up really well.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Besides, when it came out, Office v.X was the most complex Carbon program to date. I'm sure Microsoft's Mac programmers found lots of bugs in the APIs and reported them back to Apple. Office v.X came out shortly after 10.1, and required 10.1 because it fixed a ton of bugs overall, but particularly with the Carbon API.
I think that is probably what Microsoft's contribution to OS X was.
Anyway, if Office v.X is not selling well, it is probably due to the OUTRAGEOUS price. $500? I bought it at the educational discount and that was still $200. I only paid $1500 for my iBook, I'm certainly not going to pay 1/3 of that again for Office.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
It's funny that you mention standards, and then deride the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer, which is a far more W3C-standards-compliant (here's a breakdown of CSS capabilities for most modern browsers) than IE 5, 5.x, and 6 for Windows. Netscape 6/Mozilla's even better.
I thought I'd take some time to address the claim of Windows Internet Explorer dominance (even if off-topic), since I see it often.
It's been my experience that Microsoft's Macintosh projects are far better than their Windows counterparts.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Especially considering MS poured the money in for purely (mostly, whatever) selfish reasons - we can assume the DOJ trial would look much different today had MS not participated in the 'wonton act of goodwill
It wasn't really about the trial either. It was part of an out-of-court settlement of a patent dispute. In fact the publicly announced $150 million was rumored to be just the public tip of a larger behind the scenes patent cross licensing agreement that let MS off the hook for patent infringment in Windows95 (that rumor was confirmed by Steve Jobs' soto voice comments on some business shows hinting that there was a lot more money coming Apple's way than just the $150 Million - though that might have been spin)
FUD? Is that anything like the Apple switch commercials?
No, FUD is when they lie. The people in the switch commercials actually switched... I hated macs until MacOSX. MacOS9 is an ugly, unstable conglomeration of patches, but I was convinced by MacOSX to finally buy one, and I haven't gone back.
On the other hand, the article said stuff like:
Before Microsoft released this amazing new update to IE that turns on font smoothing, you could get it already by tweaking a system property. MS did *nothing* other than change a configuration file.
The article is full of things that MS is trying to take credit for. Yes, I'm sure porting Office to OSX found bugs and they reported them to Apple, but that doesn't make MS some kind of partner in OSX development like the article suggests.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Apples market share is about %20.
The "%5" figure comes form "computers sold this year" and does not include computers sold thru the Apple store, small local apple dealers and apple retail stores. That %5 is the percentage that Ingram and tech data sell that are Macintoshes, ignoring the huge numbers of machines sold thru apple's online stores and other retail locations.
Or, put another way, Apple has %5 of the NEW IBM PC market, not %5 of the PERSONAL COMPUTER market.
Also, since Macintoshes last a lot longer in use than PCs- at least twice as long- at any point in time, the number of Macs out there to sell into are going to be a lot more than the percentage of machines recently sold.
This is a serious problem because marketing dweebs everywhere are underestimating the installed Mac base by %75.
Just like there are far more Linux boxes than there are computers sold with linux pre-installed in the market.
Note that this under reporting of Linux and MacOS both helps Windows, and of course the companise doing this under reporint- IDC and Dataquest are doing so under contract from microsoft to do "market research".
The funny thing is that when Jobs talks about getting the "other 95 percent" he's being ironic, but nobody seems to realize it.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
PARC
It's an abbreviation for Palo Alto Research Center, and thus should be in all caps.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
As MS helped Apple 5 years ago, it was nothing but truly egoistic move from oth sides. MS had to have back covered in antitrust judgement... Apple had no money to compete with the others.
And now after five years they meet at another crossroad, but Apple this time has finances and MS doesn't relly need Apple so bad.
Five years agreement was nothing but five years of growing tension between both companys. Apple has nothing to loose (at least as long MS is stealing desktops from him, and the only way to grow is to steal some desktops from MS), MS has nothing to loose (Apple Mac OS X is not their OS, "sheeesh it's Unix"). And here now is the battle of the giants. One polished and user friendly with a complete solution and the other, well it has majority of desktops. Now this battle is continuously growing from smaller disputes and smaller blows to higher and higher. It's just a matter of time when it will blow into the world.
Apple has already started battle with stoping Shake production and pushing Unix, and Unix is a long time non acomplished MS grail. Just when it seemed they will succed to diminish Unix, Linux and MacOSX crossed their path. This was the silent start of war. Pushing Office and IE or Mac OS X is just the last try to control what you don't own.
Prediction is: Both companys will throw away huge amounts of money just trying to slowly diminish the opponent. In here Apple has advantage in their own hardware, which is pushing their second line of proffit : Software, while MS has advantage in almost unlimited supply of money and lack of fair play (Apple's not much better though). This war will continue to grow with every atempt to crush opponent.
Points of survival and advantages for Apple:
1. Their own hardware running their own System where MS can barely compete. (MS could hardly start to push their own computers without loosing their best customers such as Dell..., hey would have to announce another kind of war to stat that, a hardware war)
2. Professional line of software for high end users
3. Open office could help them ditch MS, and it's free
4. Almost fanatic users, which realy believe in their computers, and will probably stay with Apple no matter what
5. Partialy cheating with Open source sympathy
Points of survival and advantages for MS:
1. Majority of desktops
2. Most used office suite
3. Terrifying amount of money
4. Corrupted officials
I'm not saying anybody is better, they both suck big time. In case my prediction would be correct, at least Linux will have more peace and options just because it's strangely somehow neutral (money basis at least). But it's definite that both competitors will dry out their money supply if they would start this battle.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Just an FYI - you're confusing Quartz with Carbon. Quartz is entirely new for OS X (with nothing to do with OS 9, more to do with NeXTStep/OpenStep). The Carbon APIs are the throw-back to OS 9 and earlier. The new "bit" is to enable Carbon apps to take advantage of the anti-aliasing (as you mentioned), which Cocoa apps were already able to do.
Cheers.
actually, most of european advertising standards forbids one company from trying to *steal* customers from another company by saying the other companies products are crap...
one of my first adverts in the US that caught my eye was a Coke advert with a guy asking for a Coke in a store, where the reply was "we only have Pepsi". The customer said something obnoxious and walked out the store. For me, that was bloody funny, as those company-bashing adverts are down-right disallowed in Europe.
Hence the lack of 'switch' ads over here...
jobe_br: Yes. But he's not confusing anything. His point is that MS did not bother to implement "Quartz" style smoothing (via a Carbon api such as ATSUI/DrawThemeTextBox) until apple made it rediculously simple via a single bit-flip call, SwapQDTextFlags.
MS would not have bothered if it wasn't so easy to do.