-- "The internet in your pocket." -- "The most advanced mobile OS. Now even more advanced." -- "This changes everything. Again." -- "There's an app for that. That's the iPhone. Solving life's dilemma one app at a time." -- "If you don't have an iPhone, well, you don't have an iPhone." .
From the iphone. I could hit you with slogans from almost 30 years ago like:
"It takes minutes of practice to make Macintosh do this." "-the computer for the rest of us."
and if you are old enough you'll remember them. That costs a lot of money.
To put that in perspective Coke's US ad budget is in the $2.5b range.
There is a lot of truth to that (and I say that as someone whose been a solid Apple guy since 10.1).
High quality men's clothing stores are about: a) excellent service all the way through the process and included aftercare. b) clothes that look better especially after first wash c) better than average durability d) high price, not for what you get but compared to the low end alternatives
Let me just point out, its been almost 400 days since a Mini release. You are catching the mini at the absolutely worst point in the cycle for this comparison. Far better would have been to compare it to last year's Dells.
There are a couple major things that are Tim Cook. In terms of products I'd say the rMBP. Extremely complex manufacturing, more so than any other PC class computer ever. And all this for a lower volume device. In terms of positioning I'd say moving downmarket to the regional carriers and Asia with the 3G for $0. That's something Jobs wouldn't have done. In terms of strategy the 1b phones initiative.
On Verizon a good Android is $15 / mo, while a standard iPhone (same price roughly) is $17 / mo. Verizon makes it back easily in iPhone customers greater willingness to buy accessories (huge margins). Then on top of that more minutes, more texting, lower default rates on plans... Verizon is thrilled with their iPhone customers, they hate Apple because they are a threat to Verizon's long term relationship with those customers.
That's a really good point. And you are right about all those things. Particularly the updates. People are really on both sides of that one.
I'm very happy about the memory changes. Firefox's memory usage was insane its what got me to switch browsers. But I can imagine other people can disagree.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Apple allowed other browsers/rendering engines, but it's unlikely they'll ever do that.
Microsoft is discussing a port of trident. Which will make 3 engines. But nothing much will happen whether trident comes or not. Apple doesn't care about browser marketshare. Apple is rather restrictive about all interpreters on iPhone. They don't want viruses. And Firefox is too complex to get a security audit.
Combinations of known features are not patentable unless the combination represent technical innovation.
The word "innovation" gets used here to mean something that almost never happens in human history. Unique insight is the criteria for the law.
Apple keeps patenting the equivalent "a radio built out of transistors", a concept that was obvious and that was the whole point of developing transistors
It was obvious then why didn't other people do it before Apple? I look at Android and I see far too many things that coming from Apple. The F700 which Samsung keeps trying to introduce IMHO does a great job in proving Apple's case. The UI for the F700, Croix, is really really different than the Android UI's it does things Android / iPhone don't it puts calendaring at the center of the interface (like outlook or a PIM) not web browsing nor email music can be free floating and attached to anything
That is what an independent UI would look like. Some advantages, some disadvantages but different. Apple's patents are for things it did first and did different than anyone before them.
Sorry I was thinking N9. I don't know the Nokia product lines at all. Anyway I don't bother even trying to post from my iPhone. So that says something about the keyboard.
OK I looked up the data. Nokia got €800m from Apple and is to receive further royalties of €8 per iPhone sold. Apple is currently doing about 35m phones per quarter so something is definitely wrong since Apple alone is paying more than.5b. Though not the $1.5-2b I had heard either, sort of down the middle.
Most of my customers have stuck with 2K3 and are testing or taking a look at LO, because if they are gonna have to start all over again, why stick with MSFT?
Because Office is, if they want advanced functionality, far and away the best. What Microsoft has spent the last decade doing for Office are things like integrating the pieces of Dynamics so that Excel can be a full fledged ERP interface. A good chunk of the functionality from Oracle Financials or Peoplesoft for under 10% of the cost and far easier to use. That does Suzie the checkout girl 0. Its rather useful for the guy in the back whose stocking the warehouse. Its rather useful for the manager. But where it really triumphs over LO is for the regional manager who can rollup or roll down this functionality even if not looking at the individual sheets because of Sharepoint's integration summary giving him a good chunk of Documentum's functionality for under 10% of the cost.
And BTW Apple doesn't have anything remotely like this. IBM does, Oracle does, SAP does. Apple no.
Come Oct people will vote with their wallets and it'll be a big "fuck you!" to MSFT.
I don't think so but OK assume so. And maybe come November and the whole Christmas season and then the spring. And lets say the summer after that. Lets assume that in the entire US not a single computer sells. Then what? Ballmer is going to have to show the kinds of spine that Steve Jobs had to show at multiple points in turning Apple around and make it clear to people this is the direction that the x86 platform is going in. And they can go use Linux or they get onboard, but Windows 7 is a legacy product they don't sell anymore.
And then they look over and see a world of powerfully exciting hardware doing things that were inconceivable in 2011 costing $1k and they see used windows machines and Linux boxes doing the same stuff they've always used their systems for costing $400 and they vote with their wallets.
When Apple shifted Final Cut Pro away from its OS9 roots to match with iMovie (essentially iMovie Pro) to make Final Cut Pro X people screamed bloody murder. Some of them switched to Adobe Premiere. Some of them are still on Final Cut Pro and used copies go for quite \a bit. But no one had doubt Apple meant it, they had the credibility. If Balmer wants to be Apple he's going to need to show spine. He's going to send a message to his customers that this is the direction the Microsoft train goes in: they can jump off, run ahead or ride in the bus to the world they presented. But the train ain't changing direction.
And their products aren't crapping all over the place. I just saw the data on SQL server (from IBM BTW) for data warehousing. They have over 1/2 of the largest databases most companies have. That is huge progress. If your database needs under 12 CPUs I'm having a hard time seeing why you wouldn't go with them. They are continuing to disrupt Oracle, having driven them out of most OLTP they are now going after DW and BI and may end up with almost the entire corporate database market inside of 20 years. Dynamics is amazing. A place Microsoft wasn't even a player a decade ago. Outlook.com is a huge success out of the gate just this week.
They are sucking in consumer. And Windows 8 may change that. Or they lose and leave the consumer market to someone else. But at least they don't rot slowly anymore.
Ultimately if you think the OEMs, Intel and Microsoft are going to collude to keep Linux off... game over they win. Intel makes the CPU, the memory controls, quite often the graphic subsystem... They could burn Microsoft's key right into a motherboard chip, forget the easy to defeat BIOS security what if verifying the windows kernel were something the CPU checked every second?
But. Intel was involved in Unix for x86 for decades, before there even was a Linux. They have always worked well with the Linux community. They are thrilled that Linux helped them beat Sparc. If you are concerned about Linux, Intel is a friend not an enemy.
If you are concerned about AMD... well then Microsoft is a friend.
start iTunes on your Mac and hold home- and on/off-button on the iphone. connect mac and iphone and keep holding the buttons on the iphone. the iphone boots in restore-mode, itunes opens up the restore dialog. release the two buttos on the iphone. hold option-key on the mac and then press "restore" in iTunes. Dialog pops up asking for the firmware to use then point to the new file and you are set.
_________
And of course Apple lets you install apps on iOS without their approval. They don't let you distribute them widely without their approval. But you can install anything you want using iTunes.
And therein lies the problem. Instead of the user learning one interface, he has to learn a dozen different ones, and quickly adapt between them.
I think its an advantage not a problem. But regardless my argument with GP was that it is a huge shift from static menus. The reason I think it is an advantage is because it allows them to add so many context specific menu items that you'll never see unless you work in those contexts.
For example there are all sorts of complexities of handling hindi or arabic glyphs (the symbol that represents a character) that don't exist in English. If you are entering text in those languages they need those menu items, I don't. Mixing right to left alphabets like hebrew or arabic with left to right create complexities, that deserves menu items. Complex bibliography handling deserves menu items when you are doing a formal bibliography. Etc....
(The most irritating thing is how much screen real estate is wasted, making the most important thing - the actual e-mails or meeting requests - get only a fraction of the space on a laptop with limited resolution
Well that's kinda central to the design of Outlook. If you don't like the task plane approach why use Outlook as your mail client? Google just bought a company that makes a minimal mail client (so I'm assuming they are going to bring this out). Tell me if this is more like what you would want?
I agree the operating systems wren't 32-bit. That didn't stop applications from being 32-bit. The 32-bit app through itself into a 32 bit mode and then passed control back to DOS in real mode to handle OS functionality. That in fact was how Windows worked. You didn't need 32 bit OSes to run 32 bit apps because everything was single tasking. DOS / Microsoft released a special always on app for printing, so the print spooler could operate in real mode while the rest of the system was in 32 bit mode.
As far as running 32 bit mode and Windows you used Desqview for that. You loaded DOS with QEMM. Then you ran DESQView which was your multitasker / task-switcher and could run 32 bit software. Inside of Desqview you ran Windows 3.0 or 3.1.
Anyway Windows was not 16 bit after Windows 286 (windows 2.0) There were 4 modes on the 386 / Windows-386 (Windows 2.1) real mode protected mode (16 bit) 32 bit mode (386 enhanced) virtual real mode (multiple real modes, multi tasking real mode applications). ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode ).
I understand you never ran DOS apps that used more that 640k other than windows itself. But think about how Windows itself worked. Lotus 1-2-3 could do the same thing.
I agree with you. Once companies can effectively DRM their documents the employees will immediately begin subversion. Actual end users hate security. Companies that love security are generally unpleasant to work for.
But I was mainly talking companies that are producing documents for others that they would like to secure. Media companies being the most obvious examples. Law firms would also find this useful.
I still use vi type Unix tools for most of my programming. I agree with you on Visual Basic it was brilliant. It was a massive failure on Microsoft's part not to transition Visual Basic to Visual Basic.NET more smoothly. C# is brilliant far better than the Java it is designed to replace. The.NET compiler is the most sophisticated compiler I know of. F# is a fascinating project in bring Objective Camel to.NET and allowing it to use a standard IDE. LINQ is mainstreaming a huge innovation. I really wish that Microsoft still saw themselves as a languages company they were huge innovators. They should be out in front in offering exciting languages and IDEs for mobile and tablets. So no argument on any of your assessment of Microsoft's tools.
That being said I think "I architect and develop applications for both the MS and the Linux platforms and if the MS developers adhere to some basic coding standards, design patterns, and beat practices it beats Linux hands down." I don't think that's true at all. Microsoft has nice tools for developers. Unix is an operating system whose architecture from top to bottom is to make development comfortable. An OS written by developers for developers. Just thinking about power of the/proc filesystem for doing status monitoring. Hands down it is easier to develop for Unixes than for Windows, it isn't remotely close. It can't be Windows is organized for end user computing not for developers.
I'll give you a simple example that bit me hard. Try and get Windows to send a specific set of bits out of the ethernet cable. In other-words a program that generates a binary objects and sends it to the ethernet card unmodified. Mind you I'm not saying write a program that will create an TCP packet with an arbitrary data blob, I'm saying I want control of the entire packet. To do that in Windows you actually have to write your own driver and you can't do it with the standard driver for that card in place. To do it in Unix if the data was in file X "cat X >/dev/en0". Every single time I've tried to write software for Windows I get bit by developer hostile it really is. So no, I don't think it is accurate to say that Windows is a developer platform. It is rather hard to program for Windows, but Microsoft provides excellent tools to support you in writing productivity software. If you rewrote your comments above to "productivity software" sure I'd agree. But software in general, no.
-----
Now I agree that OS shifts are a disastrous money sink for most companies. But Windows 7 does offer a virtualized Windows XP. This is not a hard transition if they manage things well. This is doable and they certainly should not be allowing things to get to the point where desktop transitions are this traumatic. That is a failure of corporate America and corporate IT.
Well first off supporting gimp and supporting "apt install debian" are two totally totally different things in terms of complexity. Linux source package management does multiple locations for gimp. Linux binary package management can't do it because where files are located needs to be known at link time. That's an issue with how Linux, and for that matter Unixes in general, link files. Something like app for Windows, where you can have more complex link structures wouldn't have that problem. Linux package managers don't support this because Unix style kernels don't support it.
But mainly they don't support it, because if you want multiple versions of gimp you want a degree of control beyond what the distribution has any intention of supporting.
The purpose of a package manager is to maintain a consistent set of binaries easily. The purpose of a distribution is to produce a consist set of binaries.
What package manager for what operating system does what you are asking for?
Slashdot Mirror
Let me just give you some examples:
-- "The internet in your pocket."
-- "The most advanced mobile OS. Now even more advanced."
-- "This changes everything. Again."
-- "There's an app for that. That's the iPhone. Solving life's dilemma one app at a time."
-- "If you don't have an iPhone, well, you don't have an iPhone." .
From the iphone. I could hit you with slogans from almost 30 years ago like:
"It takes minutes of practice to make Macintosh do this."
"-the computer for the rest of us."
and if you are old enough you'll remember them. That costs a lot of money.
To put that in perspective Coke's US ad budget is in the $2.5b range.
There is a lot of truth to that (and I say that as someone whose been a solid Apple guy since 10.1).
High quality men's clothing stores are about:
a) excellent service all the way through the process and included aftercare.
b) clothes that look better especially after first wash
c) better than average durability
d) high price, not for what you get but compared to the low end alternatives
Let me just point out, its been almost 400 days since a Mini release. You are catching the mini at the absolutely worst point in the cycle for this comparison. Far better would have been to compare it to last year's Dells.
Tim Cook has been instrumental for years.
There are a couple major things that are Tim Cook.
In terms of products I'd say the rMBP. Extremely complex manufacturing, more so than any other PC class computer ever. And all this for a lower volume device.
In terms of positioning I'd say moving downmarket to the regional carriers and Asia with the 3G for $0. That's something Jobs wouldn't have done.
In terms of strategy the 1b phones initiative.
On Verizon a good Android is $15 / mo, while a standard iPhone (same price roughly) is $17 / mo. Verizon makes it back easily in iPhone customers greater willingness to buy accessories (huge margins). Then on top of that more minutes, more texting, lower default rates on plans... Verizon is thrilled with their iPhone customers, they hate Apple because they are a threat to Verizon's long term relationship with those customers.
There already is a browser which is crushing in terms of standards support, technology, flexibility... http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
Excellent for web testing, not so great for day to day use.
That's a really good point. And you are right about all those things. Particularly the updates. People are really on both sides of that one.
I'm very happy about the memory changes. Firefox's memory usage was insane its what got me to switch browsers. But I can imagine other people can disagree.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Apple allowed other browsers/rendering engines, but it's unlikely they'll ever do that.
Microsoft is discussing a port of trident. Which will make 3 engines. But nothing much will happen whether trident comes or not. Apple doesn't care about browser marketshare. Apple is rather restrictive about all interpreters on iPhone. They don't want viruses. And Firefox is too complex to get a security audit.
Combinations of known features are not patentable unless the combination represent technical innovation.
The word "innovation" gets used here to mean something that almost never happens in human history. Unique insight is the criteria for the law.
Apple keeps patenting the equivalent "a radio built out of transistors", a concept that was obvious and that was the whole point of developing transistors
It was obvious then why didn't other people do it before Apple? I look at Android and I see far too many things that coming from Apple. The F700 which Samsung keeps trying to introduce IMHO does a great job in proving Apple's case. The UI for the F700, Croix, is really really different than the Android UI's
it does things Android / iPhone don't
it puts calendaring at the center of the interface (like outlook or a PIM) not web browsing nor email
music can be free floating and attached to anything
That is what an independent UI would look like. Some advantages, some disadvantages but different. Apple's patents are for things it did first and did different than anyone before them.
Sorry I was thinking N9. I don't know the Nokia product lines at all. Anyway I don't bother even trying to post from my iPhone. So that says something about the keyboard.
OK I looked up the data. Nokia got €800m from Apple and is to receive further royalties of €8 per iPhone sold. Apple is currently doing about 35m phones per quarter so something is definitely wrong since Apple alone is paying more than .5b. Though not the $1.5-2b I had heard either, sort of down the middle.
From what I understand Apple is currently paying them $1.5b - 2b in patent revenue alone. Where is the .5G coming from?
Most of my customers have stuck with 2K3 and are testing or taking a look at LO, because if they are gonna have to start all over again, why stick with MSFT?
Because Office is, if they want advanced functionality, far and away the best. What Microsoft has spent the last decade doing for Office are things like integrating the pieces of Dynamics so that Excel can be a full fledged ERP interface. A good chunk of the functionality from Oracle Financials or Peoplesoft for under 10% of the cost and far easier to use. That does Suzie the checkout girl 0. Its rather useful for the guy in the back whose stocking the warehouse. Its rather useful for the manager. But where it really triumphs over LO is for the regional manager who can rollup or roll down this functionality even if not looking at the individual sheets because of Sharepoint's integration summary giving him a good chunk of Documentum's functionality for under 10% of the cost.
And BTW Apple doesn't have anything remotely like this. IBM does, Oracle does, SAP does. Apple no.
Come Oct people will vote with their wallets and it'll be a big "fuck you!" to MSFT.
I don't think so but OK assume so. And maybe come November and the whole Christmas season and then the spring. And lets say the summer after that. Lets assume that in the entire US not a single computer sells. Then what? Ballmer is going to have to show the kinds of spine that Steve Jobs had to show at multiple points in turning Apple around and make it clear to people this is the direction that the x86 platform is going in. And they can go use Linux or they get onboard, but Windows 7 is a legacy product they don't sell anymore.
And then they look over and see a world of powerfully exciting hardware doing things that were inconceivable in 2011 costing $1k and they see used windows machines and Linux boxes doing the same stuff they've always used their systems for costing $400 and they vote with their wallets.
When Apple shifted Final Cut Pro away from its OS9 roots to match with iMovie (essentially iMovie Pro) to make Final Cut Pro X people screamed bloody murder. Some of them switched to Adobe Premiere. Some of them are still on Final Cut Pro and used copies go for quite \a bit. But no one had doubt Apple meant it, they had the credibility. If Balmer wants to be Apple he's going to need to show spine. He's going to send a message to his customers that this is the direction the Microsoft train goes in: they can jump off, run ahead or ride in the bus to the world they presented. But the train ain't changing direction.
And their products aren't crapping all over the place. I just saw the data on SQL server (from IBM BTW) for data warehousing. They have over 1/2 of the largest databases most companies have. That is huge progress. If your database needs under 12 CPUs I'm having a hard time seeing why you wouldn't go with them. They are continuing to disrupt Oracle, having driven them out of most OLTP they are now going after DW and BI and may end up with almost the entire corporate database market inside of 20 years. Dynamics is amazing. A place Microsoft wasn't even a player a decade ago. Outlook.com is a huge success out of the gate just this week.
They are sucking in consumer. And Windows 8 may change that. Or they lose and leave the consumer market to someone else. But at least they don't rot slowly anymore.
And you put it on her system. And you do know what a BIOS is and you are the one supporting her. So what's the problem?
The previous poster was asking about distribution kernels aimed at thousands of users.
For an advanced user compiling up their kernels you would set yourself up as a signing authority in the BIOS and then sign your own kernels.
Oh I see. That's cool. I hope the N900 does well. I saw the video though couldn't get the demo to run properly.
OK for a PBX I'd assume you would be getting the advantages of Unixes. It is really difficult to use non IP communication protocols on Windows.
I agree people can easily use Linux who are not experts. OTOH those people aren't the people that choose to install Linux for themselves.
And you have me beat. My first Linux was a 2.0 in 1995, though Unix since '88.
Ultimately if you think the OEMs, Intel and Microsoft are going to collude to keep Linux off... game over they win. Intel makes the CPU, the memory controls, quite often the graphic subsystem... They could burn Microsoft's key right into a motherboard chip, forget the easy to defeat BIOS security what if verifying the windows kernel were something the CPU checked every second?
But. Intel was involved in Unix for x86 for decades, before there even was a Linux. They have always worked well with the Linux community. They are thrilled that Linux helped them beat Sparc. If you are concerned about Linux, Intel is a friend not an enemy.
If you are concerned about AMD... well then Microsoft is a friend.
First off, learn manners.
Now for lurkers:
start iTunes on your Mac and hold home- and on/off-button on the iphone. connect mac and iphone and keep holding the buttons on the iphone.
the iphone boots in restore-mode, itunes opens up the restore dialog. release the two buttos on the iphone.
hold option-key on the mac and then press "restore" in iTunes. Dialog pops up asking for the firmware to use then point to the new file and you are set.
_________
And of course Apple lets you install apps on iOS without their approval. They don't let you distribute them widely without their approval. But you can install anything you want using iTunes.
And therein lies the problem. Instead of the user learning one interface, he has to learn a dozen different ones, and quickly adapt between them.
I think its an advantage not a problem. But regardless my argument with GP was that it is a huge shift from static menus. The reason I think it is an advantage is because it allows them to add so many context specific menu items that you'll never see unless you work in those contexts.
For example there are all sorts of complexities of handling hindi or arabic glyphs (the symbol that represents a character) that don't exist in English. If you are entering text in those languages they need those menu items, I don't. Mixing right to left alphabets like hebrew or arabic with left to right create complexities, that deserves menu items. Complex bibliography handling deserves menu items when you are doing a formal bibliography. Etc....
(The most irritating thing is how much screen real estate is wasted, making the most important thing - the actual e-mails or meeting requests - get only a fraction of the space on a laptop with limited resolution
Well that's kinda central to the design of Outlook. If you don't like the task plane approach why use Outlook as your mail client? Google just bought a company that makes a minimal mail client (so I'm assuming they are going to bring this out). Tell me if this is more like what you would want?
http://vimeo.com/32852176
I agree the operating systems wren't 32-bit. That didn't stop applications from being 32-bit. The 32-bit app through itself into a 32 bit mode and then passed control back to DOS in real mode to handle OS functionality. That in fact was how Windows worked. You didn't need 32 bit OSes to run 32 bit apps because everything was single tasking. DOS / Microsoft released a special always on app for printing, so the print spooler could operate in real mode while the rest of the system was in 32 bit mode.
As far as running 32 bit mode and Windows you used Desqview for that. You loaded DOS with QEMM. Then you ran DESQView which was your multitasker / task-switcher and could run 32 bit software. Inside of Desqview you ran Windows 3.0 or 3.1.
Anyway Windows was not 16 bit after Windows 286 (windows 2.0) There were 4 modes on the 386 / Windows-386 (Windows 2.1)
real mode
protected mode (16 bit)
32 bit mode (386 enhanced)
virtual real mode (multiple real modes, multi tasking real mode applications). ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode ).
I understand you never ran DOS apps that used more that 640k other than windows itself. But think about how Windows itself worked. Lotus 1-2-3 could do the same thing.
I agree with you. Once companies can effectively DRM their documents the employees will immediately begin subversion. Actual end users hate security. Companies that love security are generally unpleasant to work for.
But I was mainly talking companies that are producing documents for others that they would like to secure. Media companies being the most obvious examples. Law firms would also find this useful.
I still use vi type Unix tools for most of my programming. I agree with you on Visual Basic it was brilliant. It was a massive failure on Microsoft's part not to transition Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET more smoothly. C# is brilliant far better than the Java it is designed to replace. The .NET compiler is the most sophisticated compiler I know of. F# is a fascinating project in bring Objective Camel to .NET and allowing it to use a standard IDE. LINQ is mainstreaming a huge innovation. I really wish that Microsoft still saw themselves as a languages company they were huge innovators. They should be out in front in offering exciting languages and IDEs for mobile and tablets. So no argument on any of your assessment of Microsoft's tools.
That being said I think "I architect and develop applications for both the MS and the Linux platforms and if the MS developers adhere to some basic coding standards, design patterns, and beat practices it beats Linux hands down." I don't think that's true at all. Microsoft has nice tools for developers. Unix is an operating system whose architecture from top to bottom is to make development comfortable. An OS written by developers for developers. Just thinking about power of the /proc filesystem for doing status monitoring. Hands down it is easier to develop for Unixes than for Windows, it isn't remotely close. It can't be Windows is organized for end user computing not for developers.
I'll give you a simple example that bit me hard. Try and get Windows to send a specific set of bits out of the ethernet cable. In other-words a program that generates a binary objects and sends it to the ethernet card unmodified. Mind you I'm not saying write a program that will create an TCP packet with an arbitrary data blob, I'm saying I want control of the entire packet. To do that in Windows you actually have to write your own driver and you can't do it with the standard driver for that card in place. To do it in Unix if the data was in file X "cat X > /dev/en0". Every single time I've tried to write software for Windows I get bit by developer hostile it really is. So no, I don't think it is accurate to say that Windows is a developer platform. It is rather hard to program for Windows, but Microsoft provides excellent tools to support you in writing productivity software. If you rewrote your comments above to "productivity software" sure I'd agree. But software in general, no.
-----
Now I agree that OS shifts are a disastrous money sink for most companies. But Windows 7 does offer a virtualized Windows XP. This is not a hard transition if they manage things well. This is doable and they certainly should not be allowing things to get to the point where desktop transitions are this traumatic. That is a failure of corporate America and corporate IT.
Well first off supporting gimp and supporting "apt install debian" are two totally totally different things in terms of complexity.
Linux source package management does multiple locations for gimp. Linux binary package management can't do it because where files are located needs to be known at link time. That's an issue with how Linux, and for that matter Unixes in general, link files. Something like app for Windows, where you can have more complex link structures wouldn't have that problem. Linux package managers don't support this because Unix style kernels don't support it.
But mainly they don't support it, because if you want multiple versions of gimp you want a degree of control beyond what the distribution has any intention of supporting.
The purpose of a package manager is to maintain a consistent set of binaries easily. The purpose of a distribution is to produce a consist set of binaries.
What package manager for what operating system does what you are asking for?