Rendezvous, Microsoft And Apple

serendigital writes "MacCentral reports that a BusinessWeek article entitled: 'A Rendezvous with Redmond?' has -- with Rendezvous -- created an actual threat to Microsoft. As reported by MacCentral, it's interesting to note that BusinesWeek's 'Byte of the Apple' columnist Charles Haddad is on temporary leave and this article was written by a substitute columnist."

Comments

One more reason I am considering getting a Mac

[leerpm]

They come out with the coolest technologies and they just work great!

Rendevous A Redmond Killer Does Not Make

[visionsofmcskill]

Rendevous is certainly a humungoesly great piece of software... however... i do NOT see it as a redmond killer even mixed with it's many abilities and supporters.

why?

because its open source...

Ironicly this is in redmond favor.... since if they ever see it as a threat to themselves due to their lack of such a feature, they'll simply incorporate it... And with that the advantage apple had over MS is gone.

With the major printers on board amongst others begining to support it.... I highly doubt it will take Bill long to make sure MS also supports it AND adds their own special "windows enhanced" features to it.

This whole situation is anologous to when apple made the USB only imac.... in a time when USB was common, but USB products weren't.... Apple suddenly created a greatly under-supported market.... which suddenly rushed to fill the whole with plethras of USB devices.... that didn't even take a year to become predominatly PC.

--Enter The Sig --

Re:On leave? Good

[SoftwareJanitor]

the unfortunate truth that it is still hard to do anything meaningful with a Mac.

I'm not a big Mac apologist, but may I ask what meaningful things are harder to do on a Mac than on Windows? It can't be using Microsoft Office documents, because there is an official Microsoft Office for MacOS, even OSX. That is the thing most people seem to complain about with other non-Windows OSes. So what are you talking about "anything meaningful" is awfully open ended.

Apple will not grow market share with a PC version

[Offwhite98]

If Apple creates a Rendezvous implementation for Windows I fail to see how Apple's market share will grow. It will enable PC users to get the benefits of Rendezvous without owning a Mac. It will also allow existing Mac users connect with their PC using co-workers and friends. And since it is a completely open technology the PC users will not even need a Mac involved at all. So that begs the questions, how will this benefit Apple?

Apple does not make money by packaging software and making it available for everyone to use freely. Sure they get to innovate and make their customers happy, but it does not win them more customers. This article seems to imply that creating cool technology and implementing it on a PC will help Apple. There needs to be some proprietary software in place for this to be true.

Now if they created a Rendezvous implementation for corporate environments and a Software Development Kit to be used by companies like IBM. At work I use Lotus Notes which has a messenger client. I would like to automatically find co-workers without all of the initial setup that I had to do when I started using it. I would also like to be able to monitor the servers on the network and use the printers more easily. If Apple could sell software to do all of that, and perhaps sell XServe systems with it I bet that would benefit Apple.

I really hope Apple does break into the corporate workplace. It would really simplify much of extra work that I do so I can get back to my real work.