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A Six-Step Plan for Apple
An anonymous reader writes "Open letter from Alex Salkever to Jobs. One thing in particular strikes me: 'The latest round of attacks on Microsoft software is terrifying. If using a Mac means servers in Russia are less likely to harvest my passwords and offer my identity to the highest bidder, I think that's an offer I'd like to hear more about.' I think he's got something there."
Is that why about 50% of the laptops at the USENIX Advanced Technical Conference last week were Macs?
Seems like lots of geeks, at least the ones that go to USENIX (people like, er, Rob Pike, who might know something about innovative software) use Macs.
That's not going to happen, and it's not going to work either. Just think about it....
OS X is a very nice OS, and has some very nice software running on it, and it's got a great API and IDE. As a niche player, it's working great.
Now you make it instalable on any old PC. You're a PC developer and you've got the choice of developing for windows on PC or OS X on PC. Are you going to change your development practises to something new and untested, or are you going to go the safe route with the devil you know and keep on developing for windows PC?
Now, just imaging Apple put something like WINE in with OS X on PC, so that you can run your PC apps as is, but under the new GUI. Now there's no incentive to write specifically for OS X on windows, but without the ability to run existing PC apps, there'd be no sales of OS X for PC.
It would be a disaster for Apple and anyone who bought it, and would only strengthen the Microsoft monopoly. Jobs has more sense than that.
BTW, Macs are not 3x the price. Price up a new G5 and a comparable PC from a decent manufacturer and you'll see that the G5 is really a bargain in the computing world.
What Apple really needs is an affordable entry level machine with no monitor, but can be bought bundled with a lovely flat screen. Fill the hard drive with lots of easy to follow video tutorials and apple will cash in big - especially if they do a "test drive an iMac today" type program.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
I talked to the marketing head of Apple in Norway about why they did not use the awful track record of Microsoft as an advertisment opportunity. He stated that it is not that easy, and if a similar problem was to surface in MacOS X, they'd lose any credibility they had harvested from the PC community.
The parent of this post was modded up "funny" but it it actually makes an interesting point. The most interesting comment on Mac v. Windows security issues, or just mac security more generally, was at
s
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_window
Addressing the common line about mac's being more secure only because no one uses them He had the following to say:
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The reason this argument is so popular with Windows apologists is that it's a convenient bit of rhetoric. They say it's so, we say it's not. You can't get past this argument, because it can't be disproven without the Mac OS actually attaining a Windows-like market share.
So, let's concede the point, just for the sake of argument: OK, fine, if the Mac had the same market share as Windows, the tables would be turned and there'd be just as many Mac security exploits as there are Windows exploits today.
Now what? Given that the Mac is never going to attain a monopoly share of the operating systems market -- that merely expanding its share to, say, 10 percent would be universally hailed as an almost-too-good-to-be-true success -- isn't it thus only logical to conclude that the Mac is forever "doomed" to be significantly more secure than Windows?
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Of course you would be hard pressed to find someone to grant in reality the points he grants for argument's sake, but it is an interesting comment on the argument itself.