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Apple, the New Microsoft?
VE3OGG writes "Apple, the ultimate source of cool. The marketers of slick. The next 'evil empire'? While it might sound goofy at first, Rolling Stone magazine is running an article that summarizes some very interesting points that detail how Apple could become the next technology bad guy. Among the reasons given: Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes); Apple's perceived arrogance when they warned consumers not to upgrade to Vista, while not rushing to fix the problem themselves; and Apple's seemingly unstoppable market dominance in the form of the iPod. The iPhone featured heavily as well, a product that is months from release but steals the press from more competitive products. What do you think, could Apple eventually take the place of Microsoft?"
But competition is good... since Lord knows, MS needs it.
-M
Just like IBM.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
AT&T used to be the big evil empire. Then it was IBM. Microsoft took over for IBM. Sure why not have Apple take over for Microsoft as most hated company? So who came before AT&T? Standard Oil?
Vocabulary is obviously not your strong suit.
You said "Apple products" and "dont suck" in the same sentence.
If it weren't for Microsoft, Apple would be Microsoft.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Um...any company that gains an overwhelmingly dominant market position can be Microsoft in that area. Once a company has totally squashed the competition, there's nothing left to do but play defense against potential rivals. That is a disincentive for innovation, good customer service, good value for money, etc.
Competition is good, all else being equal.
...NOT a freakin non-profit agency. (although a few of those suck too)
;-)
Apple's sole purpose, if you boiled everything down, is to make money. Never forget that. And to address the question at hand, sure, apple can be the next M$. Google can be the next M$. M$ can be deregulated, broken-up, then reformed into the NEW M$ and be the "next M$."
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's only a matter of time (and regulation).
(although apple's stuff is purdy, i suppose
Some examples off the top of my head - legal action against bloggers, iPhone trade mark, stock options, treatment of Woz.
If anything, they are able to get away with actions which would be considered unforgivable were they committed by Microsoft. The only reason they are not considered as evil is due to their size - except in the case of music downloads, they are not in a monopoly position.
Apple are a very big company (albeit smaller than Microsoft) and have been for many years. To pretend they are otherwise is naive to say the least.
If Apple is the penultimate source of cool, who is the ultimate?
Miles Davis?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Google already is the next Microsoft. We just don't all know it yet.
I'm not sure how the statement "Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes)..." fits in with this theme. Sure, the motives for Steve suddenly deciding that DRM is bad may be suspect, but at least Apple is moving in the right direction. Right now, they couldn't drop DRM if they wanted to for the vast majority of their catalog - they are bound by their contracts with the record labels. It would be nice to see them drop DRM from bands who would like to release DRM free music (e.g. BNL).
/K
So, Apple is bad because they continue to use DRM on the iTunes store. Brilliant. It can't be because, oh, I don't know, that the media companies would absolutely freak out if Apple unilaterally dropped DRM. They can't -- they would end up in court I suspect.
Warning their customers that their software doesn't run on Vista is a nice thing to do for their customers. As we've seen in other stories, lots of other software won't run on Vista either. Heck, some of Micosoft's own software won't run on Vista from what I've heard.
And, from the last point in the summary, it is entirely possible that people like the iPod because it's a good product, and the iTunes software makes it easy to use. The iTunes music store is also nice, because it was quite literally, the first legal place to buy digital music. DRM or not.
It is possible that at some point in the future Apple could become a big evil company. But, none of the things to suggest that in the article summary are anything more than FUD and sensationalism.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My understanding is that they are still using it because their deal with the record companies, who actually own the rights to the music, won't let them sell it without DRM. If some of the labels don't require DRM, then Apple should definitely not require it either, though.
/. article yesterday, there are an assload of indie artists who would love to sell their music DRM-less on iTunes right now. Apple could allow this right now, and have it be completely transparent. Right now it's Apple that requires DRM on everything in iTunes, they just turn around and blame it on the media companies.
As DVD Jon pointed out in a
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If Microsoft never made anything people wanted to buy, well... no one would have bought it.
What was the last boxed retail Microsoft software you bought? For me I think it was MS-DOS 6.22. Everything since has come pre-installed on a new computer when I purchased it. It's not so much that I chose to buy it, as I didn't choose not to buy it.
Not a bad distribution channel to have, if you can get it.
Lets look at these one at a time:
Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes);
Apple is selling music players and needs a way to get music to users easily so they will buy said music players. The providers of said music are a cartel convicted of abuse multiple times. The cartel required DRM and Apple pushed back on how restrictive it is and prices. Does anyone think it would be better if Apple refused to do business with them and let Microsoft dominate the DRM market? Apple needed to be there to stop MS from using the incompatibility of DRM'd songs against their OS offering. There is nothing hypocritical about saying it would be better for everyone (except the RIAA) if DRM was no more, either voluntarily or by law. Does anyone complain that OpenOffice reads and writes .doc files, all while they talk about how bad it is people are locked in that format?
Apple's perceived arrogance when they warned consumers not to upgrade to Vista, while not rushing to fix the problem themselves;
Perceived arrogance? Some people think Apple was arrogant when they apologized for their software not working and recommended people hold off upgrades? Can you tell me the name of a software vendor that isn't cautioning customers to wait until things stabilize, because I'll happily stop doing business with the irresponsible twits.
They have about 70% which is the minimum share where some governments start investigating possible antitrust issues due to dominance. Compare this to MS's 90% and multiple convictions for abuse. Some of Apple's actions are antitrust abuse if they have enough market share, but all in markets where MS already is abusing their monopoly and the governments have declined to stop them. Two wrongs don't make a right, but two monopolies battling one another is a lot better than one screwing consumers as hard as possible.
The iPhone featured heavily as well, aproduct[sic] that is months from release but steals the press from more competitive products.
Ummm... umm... what? Apple released pictures and discussed a cool upcoming new device and people paid attention and this is somehow indicative of Apple becoming an evil empire? I like it when companies come out with cool toys. I hate it when they come out with crap that no one likes but everyone has to use anyway.
Could Apple suddenly gain a dominant position in the market and then abuse that position? Well, it is vaguely possible, but the items listed are no reason to think it might be likely. If they do that, and we all suffer as a result I'll complain my head off, but one nice thing Apple has done to date is avoided any lock-in that keeps me from migrating all my hardware and files to another platform like Linux. Until they do that, I'm not about to lose any sleep over the danger of Apple, when the danger of MS has never been stopped and shows no signs of slowing.
It irks me when people use penultimate in place of ultimate thinking it's some intelligent way of saying "super-ultimate."
I'm glad you mentioned Sony, since I believe that if anyone is poised to take over the "most hated" title, it's them.
Sony, like Microsoft, acts in such a way that it's tough to believe they even like their customers. They are quick to adopt restrictions, slow to correct their mistakes, and want to be in all markets, even when it puts the company at odds with itself.
Apple, on the other hand, is very careful not to enter new markets unless it feels it genuinely has something to contribute. More importantly, they dislike restrictions, as evidenced by their reasonable DRM in iTunes and lack of CD key for OS X. They assume that their customers are good, honest people. Sony and Microsoft like to assume that their customers are criminals.
Interestingly, where other companies try to give their customers what they ask for, Apple instead tries to give them what they really want. Some people hate this, but it's working very well for Apple.
Also, Apple has already made their huge, almost company-ending mistakes. They've bounced back better than anyone could have thought. I'd say they've earned the success and attention they're getting.
IBM is not big in the consumer market anymore. And that was even before they sold out their PC-division to Lenovo. But they are huge in the business sector. And they thrive at what they do. The fact that you don't see them doesn't make them irrelevant. It just makes you look a bit naive.
In fact this is what I hope will happen to Microsoft. I hope they fall deep, like IBM, then remove all garbage, and come out much smaller, but lean, quick, with good products, and grow on that.
Rolling Stone doesn't know music. Why do they know the technology industry?
As long as they follow their business model they've always had - tying software to hardware - they'll never achieve enough market penetration to be Microsoft.
Actually, in our current non-free market, that is the only way they can have significant growth.
For consumer level stuff, if iTunes becomes too cumbersome, people will move on. It's yet to face any serious competition, when it does, it won't seem like such an unstoppable force.
iTunes is a music jukebox application with about 1/10 the penetration of MS's Windows Media Player. Your comments don't make a lot of sense in that light.
They could have very microsoft-ish market share if they'd sell OS/X for commodity hardware.
They could go out of business if they'd sell OS X for commodity software. They already tried that once when they were ahead in the OS wars, and almost died. Several companies brought superior OS's to the market, but dies because of MS's monopoly power. Having a better OS is not enough to win in a monopolized market. It isn't even enough to survive unless you have a complete, separate chain of supply the monopoly cannot undermine.
I'd install it tomorrow if I could
Great. With you and all the other people that can afford to pay for a copy and who know how to install an OS, or even what an OS is, and who aren't locked into Windows for some applications or purposes that should boost Apple's market share about 3%, while completely killing the 50% of their revenue they get from hardware sales.
People don't install OS's. If Apple can't reach the pre-install market with OS X they are missing the largest chunk. If they are missing that chunk and are missing the business market who is still locked in with ActiveX, .doc, VB, exchange, etc then they are missing all but a tiny portion of the legal market, a good chunk of which Apple already has.
I'm sure some businesses love Macs and are all Apple this and Apple that, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
Apple does not target business for a number of pretty good reasons I'm not going into right now. Apple can slowly grow market share (as they have been) so long as they maintain their hardware/software chain. The minute they break that, MS can kill them.
You're right that the only way Apple will gain a large share of the market is by unbundling the two, but what you're failing to realize is that action is only possible if MS's monopoly is already broken or severely weakened. If Linux takes the business market, for example, then Apple could unbundle these two items. Or, if the government actually prosecuted MS effectively and broke them up into companies that were in competition with one another, then Apple would be forced to unbundle their products to survive as all the value of bundling would be gone, while the market would be highly competitive. Both are very unlikely in the near future.
Oh yeah? I can run DOS programs under XP under MacOS X on my MacBook, so there.
"Backward compatibility through the Apple line is less than stellar, and explains some of their past troubles with regard to market share. MS on the other hand have had some rational people in their midst who have always seen to it that backwards compatability rules. They almost never break backward compatability for any reason, and when they do it is because it is nearly technically impossible to keep. I can still run my DOS apps in XP."
9 1
/. article at some point in the past.
Take a look at this long list of applications people are running that are many (~20) years old:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=2508
Notice these people are still succesfully running programs from 1986 and 1988.
I also, some time ago, found the website of a programmer who wrote a game on his Lisa machine (or may have been SE/30, I forget) which still runs properly on his OS X machine today with absolutely no modifications, same executable file and everything. I just spent 15 minutes looking for the guy's site but I had no luck. If anyone can find this please offer a link! It may actually have been posted as a
Sony, like Microsoft, acts in such a way that it's tough to believe they even like their customers. They are quick to adopt restrictions, slow to correct their mistakes, and want to be in all markets, even when it puts the company at odds with itself.
Part of the reason for the last "negative" is the internet. They missed the early wave and if not for their "no honor, controlling the OS doesn't give us a competitive advantage" competitive advantage, IE could be a minor to non-existent player right now.
Apple, on the other hand, is very careful not to enter new markets unless it feels it genuinely has something to contribute.
Bull, unless by "contribute" you mean they have enough business sense not to get into a market that they can't A) make high margins from and B) do A by leveraging very good design ethic and brand recognition. Don't confuse market savvy with altruism.
More importantly, they dislike restrictions, as evidenced by their reasonable DRM in iTunes and lack of CD key for OS X. They assume that their customers are good, honest people. Sony and Microsoft like to assume that their customers are criminals.
Again, a load of hooey. Apple understands the significant importance of market share. They never had it with the Mac, so they HAVE to differentiate themselves there. If they were more heavy handed with how they treated their customers, then they would cease to exist (well the Mac as a platform anyway). Again, don't confuse understanding your market with superiour morals.
Interestingly, where other companies try to give their customers what they ask for, Apple instead tries to give them what they really want.
No, Jobs and Apple are good at understanding function, not necessarily "what customers want" or "really want". From the articles I've read on Jobs and Ivey on how they design, they focus on what a product should do, not what their interpretation of what customers want products to do. Huge distinction, and what truly makes Apple/Jobs special, they understand how things should function.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a big a Jobs fanboy as you're likely to run across. I own more Mac's than entire third world nations. But I'm not blind to the kind of company Apple is (and they are just that, a company, whose primary focus it is to make money). They just happen to take a tact that benefits many/most consumers.
They are the next monopoly....
To me, they did beat MS. They have a better product. Closed it was. Now it's open. What are you bitching about? Mac OS 7? When Microsoft ditches the lame NT kernel and starts producing an OS with some security against the hordes, please wake me?
"Control Freaks", or end to end development? You be the judge. Second thought, please don't!
If you want a good example of "control freak"edness, try and buy a Linux desktop or laptop from Dell, Gateway, Lenovowhatever, Acer... you can with some, but the choices a FEW and they are not on the front page, and you can't get any system with something OTHER THAN MICROSOFT VISTA. Period. Tell me about these "control freaks" as you say? Tell me of this earth thing they call kissing? Oops, had Star Trek on too loud.
Thanks for playing, please get a clue.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Apple always had the same potential to become just as bad or worse than M$, they just were
never as good at creating their monopoly.
More seriously, unless/until they embrace third-party applications on the iPhone, only the Paris Hiltons (and other stupid spoiled whores) of the world will be using them. That and some PHBs. But they can't replace smartphones that let you run, you know, any software you like. I'm looking forward to the proliferation of cheap linux phones. My ideal phone would be a RAZR with a higher-res display (at least QVGA) running Linux... I could even live without touch.
So... the guy that's drooling over a Linux phone is qualified to report on what the rest of the world is or is not interested in? Slashdot also predicted that the iPod would be a miserable failure. You're free to have your own interests, but please don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone else thinks the same way.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
While I agree that they are not 'irrelevant' in the bull sense, both IBM and Nintendo wield a pale shadow of the power they once had.
Both utterly dominated thier respective industries during there high point in ways that Microsoft still doesn't.
In a way, both companies have gone from Dictator to Council Member. They play in the industry, but they no longer control it. And in that way they have have become kinda irrelevent.
Talk about spin:
Forgetting that Steve Jobs explained the decision to announce now rather than later. His explanation was that Apple was about to file applications with the FCC. Jobs wanted to quell any rumors and address everything up front once Apple did that.
I guess this is compared to Cairo and Longhorn where some features promised have not been released in Vista even though they were promised 10 years ago. These announcements by MS had the effect of stifling adoption of other OS like OS/2, NextOS, etc. Maybe Apple will do the same thing, but I would wait til summer before I would accuse Apple of MS tricks.
Did he happen to read the rest of the article where Jobs explains that Apple has to include DRM or the content providers would not license the content to Apple. Also Apple is not alone in this situation. Sony, MS, Best Buy, hmmm. It seems that most online music distributors use DRM.
I don't know where this information comes from, but Apple's statement is thus:
Considering that some MS applications don't work with Vista, most companies are waiting until SP1 to install Vista, and other third party vendors like McAfee, Intuit, etc, are also having issues with Vista, I don't see how Apple's stance is unique.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You can significantly grow year after year, and never achieve 10% market penetration, let alone dominance. They can grow, and their competition will outgrow them, as it always has been.
Over the last few years, Apple has been growing faster than the market, although not by a huge amount. But it is true they probably will not dominate the market unless MS's monopoly is destroyed or weakened by some other mechanism.
I was referring to iTunes, the online store/service, or if you will, iTunes, who would like to be the gateway to any and all online media.
The official name is "The iTunes Music Store." If you want people to know what you're talking about you should be a little more precise.
Not the shitty bloated app that my kid installed on my PC after he wasted his hard earned money on an iPod (all the other kids have them, gotta be cool, i remember how it is).
Wow, you're bitter. I actually like the application. It is a lot nicer than Mplayer, WinAmp, BB, or WMP. I usually have it open on my media server and no one at my parties that I've seen has had any problems using it. I might mention, that is a seven year old machine, and it seems to run it just fine while also recording my TV shows and serving up Web pages, so it can't be too bloated.
No, they'd be playing the same game as MS. The Dells and eMachines would offer OS/X on their boxes, just like they offer Windows and are starting to offer linux.
DEll and eMachines would agree to offer OS X, so long as their contracts with MS don't forbid it and they'd start to sell a few at first, slowly scaling up, and then a few months later when they had to re-negotiate their OEM license for Windows MS would kill them on the price, making their Windows machines 10-20% more expensive than comparable models from other companies. They would then have to choose between killing their Windows selling business, or dropping OS X (which would probably be 5% of their business, if that). At the same time, they'd be trying to get driver support for the OS X boxes, which would mean poor stability, delays, possible limitation on which vendors they could buy components from, etc. and likely make OS X gain a reputation for crashing. Finally, while no business likes being pushed around by another, they'd also realize that if they become primarily an OS X company, then they would be competing with and be at the mercy of Apple, instead of just being at the mercy of MS. Apple already did this once, then stopped licensing their OS driving companies out of business. No one wants to be there.
MS effectively controls access to the generic pre-installed market. If you think otherwise, you don't understand the way the market works at all.
They can grow, only because the market continues to grow.
This is untrue. Apple has been growing faster than the market on average, which means they are winning people over from vendors that sell Windows boxes. If you go to any scientific conferences, especially computer security, you'll notice about half the machines are now Apple laptops. That is a drastic change from a few years ago. Their market share is up and their install share is up even higher.
The market for computers in business and government will dwarf the market for computers at home.
Actually those two markets are moving closer and closer to the same size, but what makes you think OS X machines aren't used in government? I know the CIA, regular army, and Navy have some and I met a security guy from the pentagon (DoD) who was carrying a powerbook.
They will simply never have the amount of clout that microsoft has. It's ridiculous on it's premise.
Until MS's monopoly is broken, obviously no one will. That is not a good argument for Apple taking some given action that will almost certainly result in their market share decreasing instead of increasing.
I don't have to use a Mac, and my unfamiliarity with Macs has never affected my career in
I really hate to break it to you, but the number of people like Paris Hilton (mentally, if not financially) vastly outnumbers the number of people like you, who demand the ability to install any random piece of third party software on their phone. The only limitation I see to the iPhone being a runaway success is the price - and I'm not even sure that will slow it down by much.
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
By irrelevance, I mean public visibility. And that means "household name". If they don't have that, they don't mean a thing to the average person. They used to have that, so they've never really recovered. The fact that they do backend stuff that no one sees, doesn't mean they are relevant to the consumer. That's my point exactly.
You seem to mistakingly think that only average persons are consumers. Businesses are consumers. The government is a consumer. And a company can do very well catering to just those two types of consumers.
Remember, mindshare among the general public means nothing if your customers are Fortune 500 companies only. All that matters is that the decision makers at those companies know who you are.
OS X already doesn't require a key to activate. You put it in and go.
Steve never says that we should do away with intellectual property; his essay boils down to saying DRM is counter-productive and doesn't actually do anything other than piss people off. You can buy unDRMed music if you want, but for online distribution, we're needlessly hindered, and he's right.
That a big leap to implying that he's a hypocrite because he won't give away the company.
Also, I rather think that whoever writes this sort of thing should use the products, or research the company at least a little. I've NEVER used a key to activate OS X, all the way back to 10.0. Don't criticize the company for things they already do right.
What do they mean, Apple being the "new" evil empire? Since when wasn't Apple either evil OR an empire (meaning monopoly)? Just because they were an irrelevant, marginalized monopoly doesn't mean they weren't one, the same way it's possible for more than one empire to exist.
And as far as I can tell, Apple has pretty much always been evil. Look at the way they have always treated third-party hardware and software. Look at how they have always treated companies selling Apple products. Look at how they have always treated retail outlets selling Apple products.
Apple today is closer to having the complete and brutal monopoly over all things Apple they have ALWAYS BEEN SEEKING. Nobody except Apple is allowed to make any money from anything Apple related: you can only buy Apple stuff at the Apple Store or at Apple.com, businesses can only purchase hardware or software for Apples through Apple, and Apple makes sure it's stuff only works with Apple stuff: iTunes purchased music will not work on non-Apple MP3 players, and they made DAMN sure iTunes wouldn't work on Vista (despite having over two years to prepare for it, not including the fact that Vista has been out for around six months).
There is nothing "new" about the evil Apple empire. The only thing new is people removing their blinders.
Apple makes most of its money from hardware. That is the biggest insurance of all, do they really care if someone has a pirated copy of OS X as long as they buy a mac to run it on? Obviously not.
As for cdkeys, the server version of OSX needs a cdkey. Now consider something as small as Quicktime. To get all the features you do indeed need to buy a license which gives you an authorization key. I have not installed Final Cut Pro or any of their major applications they they sell, but I assume you need to have some sort of authorization key to run those as well.
OS X is not all what Apple makes.And making a blanket statement such saying they don't need CDKeys is blatantly false. I pointed 2 applications which require such keys.
If apple were to release OS X for all intel based machines tomorrow, you can be damned sure they will have a similar mechanism such as Microsoft's to make sure noone 'pirates' their software.
Maybe Rolling Stone is defending their turf. After all, far too many techie websites seem to have lost their focus and are more interested in postings about iPods and music than about "News for Nerds" or "Stuff That Matters".
I hate being told by my computer what I need to do, especially when I know its advice is wrong so I prefer not to use a system that does that.
You must be using the Strawman OS. Windows is the only OS that comes close to telling the user what they need to do "Your desktop is cluttered...plug your device in to a faster USB port...turn on a firewall")
The Mac gets out of your way. It doesn't pop up balloons every time a peripheral is connected, like it's shocked that it worked. It's also not a cut rate UNIX with a GUI mimicking a cut rate Windows...spend some money and get a mature OS.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I personally prefer Ubuntu Linux, however, I have been a professional programmer for MS Windows for more than a decade now, I have two PC systems. One with Ubuntu Linux and one with MS Windows XP pro. I also have an Intel Macbook and an Intel iMac. I triple boot my Intel iMac with Linux, Mac OS X and MS WinXP. I cannot do that with the other PC hardware.
I have found no restrictions on my two Intel Macs that even comes _close_ to the "activation" crap from MS. My WinXP system wants me to "authorize" with MS when I change my hardware. Apple doesnt'. The core of OS X is open source. The core of MS Windows _is not_. OS X uses a shite load of open source software. MS windows does not. In fact, MS windows goes out of its way to pervert standards to lock me in to an MS-Only system. OS X does not.
Stop being a shill for MS. When it comes to lock-down and restrictions, no OS software compares to MS Windows.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
This doesn't sound that bad to me:
3. Don't pirate our software.
You can permanently sell it to or transfer it to someone else if you want. (record companies have already come out against this)
If someone gave you a "Not for resale" copy (which are free), don't give it or sell it to someone.
1. Don't copy our boot ROM, or our documentation as they are not yours.
2. This is a 1 seat license (we offer family licenses at a steep discount)... don't install it on more than 1 machine (although we really would never know as it doesn't have some draconian activation scheme built in). Feel free to make a backup -- just make sure you keep the license and copyright notices on the disc.
Since we designed this software to be used by our customers on Apple computers, and we give you a "free" copy with said Apple computer, and we obviously spent a lot of resources in developing it, - we don't give you permission run it on your TigerDirect POS.
Compared to the other paid OS'es out there, I again don't really think that their license is especially restrictive. But that's just my opinion.. I could be wrong.
Since the early days.
Its only Apple Fanboi's and the over-the-top Apple marketing that have painted Apple as a nice, friendly company.
What? Are you trying to refer to Linux? I'm a HUGE Mac fan, I own four of them, but I'm also very familiar with linux as I admin a bunch of servers with custom software and your characterization is more than a little unfair. Linux as an OS is no more "cut rate" than the Mac's underpinnings; as for the GUI, personally, I hate the fact that linux doesn't have a standard graphics layer that developers can count on, and its got some inherent security problems (like not being able to set a dir to forbid execution without making it a NOEXEC partition) but aside from the issue of many sources and licenses, what it has works pretty darned well. It's just not the same as OSX's underpinnings. And you can't overlook the free nature of linux, either; Apple simply does not address the cost-conscious market. Many people get one heck of a lot more bang for their buck by going with linux, and Apple offers them nothing so it isn't fair at all to say "get a mature OS."
Now windows... application lock-in is the only reason I can think of to stay with that (and even then, you can run parallels if you're not live graphics-intensive.) Now that Vista is out, breaking this and that, maybe more people will move on that basis. OSX and Vista are really attacking the same space, financially speaking. IMHO.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Jobs calls for an end to DRM, and instead of APPLAUDING him for being first "Captain of Industry" to point out the 2 Megaton, Flaming Flourescent Elephant in the Room (that DRM doesn't do ANYTHING but HURT the industry, and that MOST music is ALREADY distributed SANS DRM), and instead of REALIZING that, if DRM ends, ***AS JOBS HAS CALLED FOR*** Apple's so-called "lock-in" er, evaporates, some people are hell-bent on mischaracterizing this as some sort of "tactic". The only possible "tactic" being employed here is Jobs making the "big 4" put up or shut up regarding DRM.
How can that possibly be cast as "Evil"???
And in who's court is the ball in now?
Only in the same sense that being part of a solution to a problem is less relevant than being the actual problem.
Almost,
But now you have the option to forgo the land line and choose from several cell phone providers (available from several providers other than AT&T).
Or maybe even VOIP through your cable modem. (though in some places, you could be stuck with AT&T for cable too)
Still, the trend of re-combining is not good.
This was also before I learned how Apple ganked it from Xerox
Apple didn't steal the GUI from Xerox PARC. In return for an investment in Apple Xerox invited Steve Jobs to Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in 1979. There he saw some of the technology Xerox was working on there. Seeing the gui Xerox came up with he took the idea back to Apple where the Woz, Steve Wozniak, had a team work on the Lisa which became the Macintosh.
Now here I am 12 years later, typing on an AMD based computer running Windows XP, with my semi-new Mac Book Pro getting more and more use each day; I'm trying to "switch"(back). Much of this desire to switch is fueled by Microsoft's political moves, and not their technology. 2 examples...
For the past 10 years I've used Windows PCs 99%+ of the tyme however I too am switching because of Microsoft. Because of MS's policy of requiring Activation as well as WGA/WPA a few months ago I got a desktop PC with Linux preinstalled and hopefully rsn I'll be getting a Macbook Pro as my laptop.
In my perfect world, Microsoft, Apple, and a major Linux distribution each get 1/3 of the market share, with plenty of room for new up-and-coming OS's.
I'd add interoperability.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I've never seen the documentation that came with any version of OS X.
I've spent many a nights burning the candle with my friend while we hunted all over Google for fuckin' Linux documentation.
When we found some it was either inapplicable or hopelessly out of date.
OS X just works, and THAT'S worth $130.
(I buy the 'five install' family pack and I share the install CDs with another friend who's also got 2 Macs.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I for one welcome our new cool computers making, great software providing, ipod selling evil overlords.
To be honest, I really am anti-microsoft-kind-of-linux-zealot, but the biggest issue with microsoft is the crappy software they make. If they were selling secure unixish OS I just might buy one. Having huge market share alone is not so bad, but having huge market share selling crap is plain wrong.
I see it going both ways
A lot of us already know MS has been trying to be more like Apple for quite a while (as eveidenced by articles stating them trying to match Mac/iPod feature by feature.)
But Apple has taken a thing or two from MS's strategies
We use Macs at work and compared to Windows they are a breeze to work with, nary a problem, and I would not want to switch to Windows. But as much as I like them I've seen Apple streching themselves out sacrificing a bit of the business computer market for the consumer electronics market.
The only group that is serious about business needs now seems to be Linux (and those that have adopted it Oracle, Novell, etc.).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=25089 1
Notice these people are still succesfully running programs from 1986 and 1988.
It should have been pretty freakin' obvious that the GP was not just talking about running old programs that required 50MHz CPUs under emulation.The GP was also talking about how some Apple operating systems (and new hardware platforms) make expensive pro apps (like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro) run as slow as molasses and require us to purchase (or pay large transition fees for) new versions of these apps. OS X "broke" Photoshop 6 (made for OS 8/9) by running it unaccepatably slow. Windows 95 didn't break Office 6 and Vista didn't break Office XP.
Some mod kid not being able to move his .mp3 files to a new player doesn't stack up against Fortune 500 companies being completely tied to 3rd party crap software written in VB. Or to tens of thousands of government documents tied up in a proprietary format that only Microsoft can properly support. Or legions of people who know nothing but IE and Outlook. Or all of the businesses that run themselves off of highly customized crap Access databases. The list goes on. Reality whould have to turn inside out and doughnuts would have to rain from the sky before Apple even got in the same ballpark as Microsoft.
Apple products don't usually suck.
Something folks might forget these days is, that Apple needed to have some sort of DRM built into the iTunes store at the time in order to get the record labels on board. Otherwise, they wouldn't have supported it. Fairplay is much less restrictive than other DRM systems. E.g. You can burn your songs onto a CD and the copy protection is gone.
Apple's dominance of the iPod isn't nearly as threatening as MS's dominance over the desktop. There isn't as interesting a set of apps that someone could build on top of an iPod-like device as there are on the desktop. The iPhone is being rolled out into an existing market with very strong competitors. In Apple's wildest dreams they might end up with a similar share in phones to the one they have in computers. That'd be good for competition, not a threat to it.