Must be a lot of crazy people around, then. I make my living supporting businesses that use or want to migrate to Macs, and in the last 18 months, business has been booming--there's not enough of me to go around.
The lack of certain applications is hardly a dealbreaker. In the PPC era, if a Mac application didn't exist to do what they needed, they bought a single el-cheapo Windows box and stuck it in the corner just for that one application. Now, they don't even need to do that-- they can run any Windows-only stuff in a VM while continuing to enjoy all the advantages of OS X the rest of the time.
...since their ads focus on everything you can do with a Mac with just its included applications: Buy it, take it home, spend five minutes hooking it up, and then make a movie. Or burn a CD. Or create a song. Or make a web site. Or write a paper. Part of the message of the ads are: If that's what you can do with just what ships on the machine, imagine what else must be out there!
As for your argument that you have Windows-only stuff, part of the reason Apple is playing up virtualization is because it lets you move to a Mac and take your Windows-only stuff with you, if you must. Parallels Desktop kicks ass, runs at nearly native speed, and the VM runs all the Windows productivity apps my clients have thrown at it like a champ. I have more people asking about it every day.
No, I didn't forget it, it doesn't apply here. It applies when the product in question is expensive and meant to last a relatively long time. If Apple were talking up their next generation computer that was going to kick ass over everything they are currently shipping, a dropoff in sales would be the Osbourne effect at work.
Instead they were talking up their new OS, which will work perfectly with everything they are currently shipping and sells for a very reasonable cost.
Apple experienced the Osbourne effect already: In years past, when people would hold off Mac purchases if Apple trade shows were near, in case Apple would announce something new. They also went through it in the last 13 months since they announced the Intel switch, as many people waited in anticipation of the PowerPC-based machine they originally wanted being replaced in the product lineup with an Intel-based Mac. And each product introduction was followed by a flood of sales. The difference between Apple and Osbourne is that Apple had alternate income sources to sustain it through the sales dropoffs.
Now that the Intel transition is complete, the Osbourne effect is the last thing Apple needs to worry about-- they will probably be updating their machines much more frequently than in the past, to keep pace with what the other Intel-base computer makers offer-- not just announcing new stuff at their trade shows and developer conferences.
FTFA: Another of the primary reasons Apple isn't being forthcoming about Leopard is the fear that if people get too excited about a product coming early in 2007 they will stop buying in 2006"
Uh, yeah, that might apply when you're talking about an expensive product. Mac OS X costs $129, and Leopard will run on any Mac sold in 2006 (and probably several years previous). Anyone who is paying attention to what's coming out of WWDC knows that and can likely afford $129 to upgrade. Everyone else who's interested in a Mac now will happily buy a Tiger system and probably not even notice when Leopard ships.
Furthermore, Microsoft has been talking up Vista for five years. You didn't see Dell or HP go out of business for lack of sales because people are waiting for Vista, did you?
FTFA: "However, Steve Jobs is the master of being your best buddy while planning to stab you in the back. His biographies are filled with stories that do more than suggest that if he wants what you have, you'd better grab it and run for the hills."
Please. History is littered with the corpses of companies with which Microsoft formed a "strategic partnership"-- The MS people stick around and play nice for a while, then one day the other company gets notified that Microsoft wants to go in another direction so the partnership is over. Then a couple months later Microsoft unveils a competing product and kills the company with which they partnered.
The best historical example I can think of is Go Corp in the late 80s/early 90s-- Microsoft partnered with them, stole their stuff and created Pen Windows to crush them. You can get accounts of it from both sides if you read these twobooks. However, Microsoft is doing the exact same thing right now: They are desperate to take marketshare from iPod/iTunes. To that end, their partnerships to make portable players and sell music under the "PlaysForSure" moniker have been miserable failures-- so now, they are screwing their partners and rolling their own solution in-house, Zune, which is stated incompatible with all the PlaysForSure stuff.
What's on January 21, 2008? If you're referring to the day Bush is scheduled to leave office*, that would be January 20, 2009.
* I'd really like to believe he will depart as scheduled, but considering that he's such a power-mad SOB who has no qualms about ignoring the Constitution when it suits him, anything's possible. He's still got almost two and a half years to run this country into the ground.
And, yes, Jobs' presentations are rather dishonest... starting from the day in 1984 when he pulled a Mac out of a bag and demonstrated things like MacinTalk, never bothering to mention that he was using a prototype Mac with 512K of RAM and that of his demos would run on the shipping Mac (which had 128K).
Some stuff is being kept under wraps for now, lest it be "innovated" by Microsoft and appear in Vista.
Remember years back when Aqua was demoed, and not long after that XP suddenly had that ugly Fisher-Price GUI in response?
I honestly think that at this point feature-theft by Microsoft isn't that big of a threat. They've proven too inept to even get Vista out with the feature set they've got currently, much less suddenly bolt on something else to it to better compete with Leopard.
I just wish they would have demoed some of the new stuff in Leopard Server. I've been begging them for years to put together something that can replace Exchange (at least for the SMB market), and it seems like the iCal server fits the bill quite nicely, in concert with improvements to the other services that already exist in Tiger Server.
How about that little grey tube thingie that Dell made for a while, a little after Compaq ditched that blue model? I think it was called, like, Web Jr., or something. Came and went in a matter of months.
Ah, yes, the Dell WebPC, I remember laughing about that one. What a half-assed, me-too product. You are correct in your recollection that it didn't last very long. A quick Googling reveals it was announced on November 30, 1999 and quietly discontinued in June of 2000.
My company uses it. It works okay, connects with Exchange for scheduling if you want. You can access it with Windows IE (the thing totally relies on ActiveX) from virtually anywhere to do timesheets, set up work orders, etc. www.connectwise.com
Users may have custom software that does not work on new versions of Windows... could present IT challenges as Microsoft retires old products...
That's why Microsoft has such a hard-on for virtualization-- they want businesses to buy shiny new Windows 2003 servers and run, for example, their business-critical NT 4.0 legacy app that hasn't been updated, in a virtual machine on that server.
That's exactly why they bought Virtual PC from Connectix.
1) Any service they roll out will fail, because it won't work with iPods. 2) Any iPod competitor they roll out will fail, because it isn't an iPod. 3) Every attempt they make to kill the iPod or iTMS does absolutely nothing to harm Apple. All it does it further dilute the small chunk of non-iTMS marketshare over which the preexisting iPod/iTMS competitors are already killing each other. They are simply rearranging and adding deck chairs on the Titanic.
Obviously, Microsoft thinks that this market is just like the others they've taken over-- that if they keep trying and throw enough money at it, they'll eventually come out on top regardless of the quality of their product. What they don't seem to realize is that they have been hoisted on their own petard. They thought they could take over with their own DRM, but Apple got there first with FairPlay in the iPod/iTMS, got off to a big head start, and people who have already invested in that 'system' will be highly reluctant to switch to something else. Without DRM-induced market inertia, Microsoft's old method might have worked. Instead, they're really going to have to come up with a kick-ass music player and online store. And even if they do, there's still a high likelihood that people won't switch because they're too invested in iTunes.
...and to my knowledge they still don't know it ever happened.
I left there about 5 years ago, but one of my close friends who remained there worked in finance and a year after I left she uncovered a scam run by the CIO, one of his underlings, and a vendor on the outside. It was pretty simple and had apparently been going on for some time even before I left. Basically, it was just a matter of phony invoices coming in from the vendor, for equipment that was not needed nor delivered. The CIO and his underling signed off on the invoices and they were paid, and presumably some of the money that went to the vendor found its way back to the CIO and his underling. My friend quietly followed the paper trail and was able to determine that the scheme netted somewhere in the mid six figures, over just how long a period I don't remember.
I would like to mention that the CIO's underling was an empire-building, micromanaging bitch that was hated by everyone who was under her, which unfortunately included me. She would cover her own ass and happily throw anyone else under the bus she could to solidify her own position. I ended up having to report to her for a period when my boss left the company, until a replacement was found. Having to deal directly with her was a major reason why I left the company.
The above paragraph is just to give you a feel for the fervor with which I pleaded with my friend to assemble all the evidence of wrongdoing and present it to the CFO. She surrepetitiously made copies of everything and kept the folder around, but never did blow the whistle. I suppose she figured it might come in handy as a bargaining chip someday if they ever tried to pin anything on her. It's a real shame, because nothing would have pleased me more than for my friend to have taken that bitch down. Oh, well.
...you can't legislate it away, either. It is not the government's job to protect your from your own dumbassitude.:-)
If you don't have the sense to sniff out a phony, you shouldn't be dating at all, much less attempting long-distance hookups over the internet.
~Philly
PS - I'm glad the government won the war on terror, cleaned up the mess in Iraq, and finished rebuilding New Orleans so we can finally focus on the evil-doers who lie in online personal ads.
First of all, "AppleBerry" sounds dumb, I would have gone with "MacBerry."
But anyway, Apple is clearly interested in getting back into the enterprise market, and a major sticking point right now is the lack of official Blackberry support from RIM. And yeah, the lack of Apple groupware, too, but my company has been having success rolling out Kerio MailServer on OS X Servers-- at least to clients who don't want/have Blackberries.
I couldn't care less about running iTunes on the Blackberry, but we need a Mac version of Blackberry Enterprise Server like nobody's business.
Pontiac Grand AM 1997-2006 - I want to personally kill the engineer that designed that engine cooling system.
Heh. I had a '94 Grand Am, so let me throw my two most glaring problems out there that were major contributors to me probably never buying an American car again:
1) A too-short connector cable on the throttle position sensor. As it was explained to me when I got it fixed, engine vibrations were sufficient to gradually tug the cable part of the way out of the connector. This intermittent connection resulted in 'stuttering' while accelerating-- the car would lurch forward and then slow down almost at random while the accelerator was pressed.
2) My favorite, the antilock braking system controller chip failed. You would think that this would be designed to fail safe, i.e. you'd still have perfectly functional brakes, just not anti-skid element of the system. WRONG! There were several occasions when I depressed the brake pedal and it would SINK TO THE FLOOR while not slowing the car one bit. I'd have to quickly release and reapply the brake, and then it would work. It was pure luck that I managed to not get into a serious accident from that. The best part was that I'd get a warning light on my console if a friggin bulb burned out in my brake lights in that car, but my first indication that my ABS chip went bye-bye was the aforementioned lack of stopping power when I stepped on the pedal.
"If your a computer expert, click here for the full option setup. Otherwise, we will install what we think you need automatically."
The problem with that is too many n00bs who think they know more than they do and need to be protected from themselves will select the "expert" option.
I think the computer should not only ask you this question, but if you declare yourself to be an expert it should go Leisure Suit Larry on you to verify it-- pepper you with a few of the harder questions from the Microsoft desktop support tech exams, and if you don't get over a certain percentage right, you get the training wheels options installed, period.
Limited how? I worked in the computer department of the UPenn bookstore when Word 6 came out, and we sold a ton-- at least until the word spread about what a serious piece of shit it was. We also sold a lot of copies of Office 4.2.1, which included Word 6.
The backlash was such that Microsoft did not discontinue Word 5.1, and we sold it right alongside Word 6-- I believe the older program outsold the new one. IIRC, we also did exchanges for Word 5.1 when people who bought 6 came back a couple days later to complain about what a turd it was.
The Word 6 debacle led directly to the creation of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft, which has produced some pretty decent products in the ensuing years. So at least something positive came out of the whole thing.
Actually, the Zip drives were fantastic in the beginning. I ordered one the same day I got the first MacWarehouse catalog pimping them, in spring of 1994 or 1995, IIRC. It was still going strong when I decommissioned my last SCSI-equipped Mac, in early 2003.
Zip drives only got shitty once they got really popular and Iomega started selling them by the boatload. They cut corners to pump them out faster and cheaper, and product quality suffered as a result. I didn't encounter my first Click of Death-afflicted drive until probably 1997 or 1998, and I saw a lot of Zip drives because I worked in the creative industry in the mid and late 90s-- Zips supplanted 44/88MB SyQuest drives there with amazing speed and became a defacto standard for shuttling files back and forth from service bureaus.
This is a hopeful first step, and it seems that politicians might have an eye for the value of the Internet after all.
<cynical>The only thing the politicians have an eye for is keeping their jobs come November.</cynical>
The voters are pissed off enough to really shake things up this year, and the politicians know it. Net neutrality had ridiculously broad support from an absurdly large number of organizations that frankly, I never thought I'd see on the same side of any argument. It made sense to approve this and not make a large number of angry people even angrier.
I tried BootCamp and it works well, but I honestly prefer using Parallels Desktop. I loaded my MacBook up with 2GB of RAM, and XP boots and runs amazingly fast (though that's coming from someone who was used to running XP in Virtual PC on a G4, which could be painful), I can still access my OS X apps without having to reboot, and the MacBook's trackpad can emulate a right-click if you click the button with two fingers resting on the trackpad*, so I don't even need to attach a multibutton mouse to use Windows effectively.
BootCamp is probably the way to go if you want to play Windows games on the machine, but for Office and other apps like that, Parallels Desktop will suffice.
~Philly
* This feature is off by default and currently only available when booted into OS X, not when booted directly into Windows via BootCamp. I would expect a later version of BootCamp to have a trackpad driver for Windows that supports that feature.
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You'd be nuts to use a Mac in a biz setting.
Must be a lot of crazy people around, then. I make my living supporting businesses that use or want to migrate to Macs, and in the last 18 months, business has been booming--there's not enough of me to go around.
The lack of certain applications is hardly a dealbreaker. In the PPC era, if a Mac application didn't exist to do what they needed, they bought a single el-cheapo Windows box and stuck it in the corner just for that one application. Now, they don't even need to do that-- they can run any Windows-only stuff in a VM while continuing to enjoy all the advantages of OS X the rest of the time.
~Philly
...since their ads focus on everything you can do with a Mac with just its included applications: Buy it, take it home, spend five minutes hooking it up, and then make a movie. Or burn a CD. Or create a song. Or make a web site. Or write a paper. Part of the message of the ads are: If that's what you can do with just what ships on the machine, imagine what else must be out there!
As for your argument that you have Windows-only stuff, part of the reason Apple is playing up virtualization is because it lets you move to a Mac and take your Windows-only stuff with you, if you must. Parallels Desktop kicks ass, runs at nearly native speed, and the VM runs all the Windows productivity apps my clients have thrown at it like a champ. I have more people asking about it every day.
~Philly
No, I didn't forget it, it doesn't apply here. It applies when the product in question is expensive and meant to last a relatively long time. If Apple were talking up their next generation computer that was going to kick ass over everything they are currently shipping, a dropoff in sales would be the Osbourne effect at work.
Instead they were talking up their new OS, which will work perfectly with everything they are currently shipping and sells for a very reasonable cost.
Apple experienced the Osbourne effect already: In years past, when people would hold off Mac purchases if Apple trade shows were near, in case Apple would announce something new. They also went through it in the last 13 months since they announced the Intel switch, as many people waited in anticipation of the PowerPC-based machine they originally wanted being replaced in the product lineup with an Intel-based Mac. And each product introduction was followed by a flood of sales. The difference between Apple and Osbourne is that Apple had alternate income sources to sustain it through the sales dropoffs.
Now that the Intel transition is complete, the Osbourne effect is the last thing Apple needs to worry about-- they will probably be updating their machines much more frequently than in the past, to keep pace with what the other Intel-base computer makers offer-- not just announcing new stuff at their trade shows and developer conferences.
~Philly
Because Apple is a hardware company first and foremost, and many of Mac OS X's strengths stem from limited hardware diversity.
Read more about it.
~Philly
FTFA:
Another of the primary reasons Apple isn't being forthcoming about Leopard is the fear that if people get too excited about a product coming early in 2007 they will stop buying in 2006"
Uh, yeah, that might apply when you're talking about an expensive product. Mac OS X costs $129, and Leopard will run on any Mac sold in 2006 (and probably several years previous). Anyone who is paying attention to what's coming out of WWDC knows that and can likely afford $129 to upgrade. Everyone else who's interested in a Mac now will happily buy a Tiger system and probably not even notice when Leopard ships.
Furthermore, Microsoft has been talking up Vista for five years. You didn't see Dell or HP go out of business for lack of sales because people are waiting for Vista, did you?
~Philly
FTFA:
"However, Steve Jobs is the master of being your best buddy while planning to stab you in the back. His biographies are filled with stories that do more than suggest that if he wants what you have, you'd better grab it and run for the hills."
Please. History is littered with the corpses of companies with which Microsoft formed a "strategic partnership"-- The MS people stick around and play nice for a while, then one day the other company gets notified that Microsoft wants to go in another direction so the partnership is over. Then a couple months later Microsoft unveils a competing product and kills the company with which they partnered.
The best historical example I can think of is Go Corp in the late 80s/early 90s-- Microsoft partnered with them, stole their stuff and created Pen Windows to crush them. You can get accounts of it from both sides if you read these two books. However, Microsoft is doing the exact same thing right now: They are desperate to take marketshare from iPod/iTunes. To that end, their partnerships to make portable players and sell music under the "PlaysForSure" moniker have been miserable failures-- so now, they are screwing their partners and rolling their own solution in-house, Zune, which is stated incompatible with all the PlaysForSure stuff.
~Philly
What's on January 21, 2008? If you're referring to the day Bush is scheduled to leave office*, that would be January 20, 2009.
* I'd really like to believe he will depart as scheduled, but considering that he's such a power-mad SOB who has no qualms about ignoring the Constitution when it suits him, anything's possible. He's still got almost two and a half years to run this country into the ground.
And, yes, Jobs' presentations are rather dishonest... starting from the day in 1984 when he pulled a Mac out of a bag and demonstrated things like MacinTalk, never bothering to mention that he was using a prototype Mac with 512K of RAM and that of his demos would run on the shipping Mac (which had 128K).
Yes, you're right. Microsoft never lies in their demos-- they even show you all the glitches and crashes you can expect to experience yourself!
~Philly
Some stuff is being kept under wraps for now, lest it be "innovated" by Microsoft and appear in Vista.
Remember years back when Aqua was demoed, and not long after that XP suddenly had that ugly Fisher-Price GUI in response?
I honestly think that at this point feature-theft by Microsoft isn't that big of a threat. They've proven too inept to even get Vista out with the feature set they've got currently, much less suddenly bolt on something else to it to better compete with Leopard.
I just wish they would have demoed some of the new stuff in Leopard Server. I've been begging them for years to put together something that can replace Exchange (at least for the SMB market), and it seems like the iCal server fits the bill quite nicely, in concert with improvements to the other services that already exist in Tiger Server.
~Philly
I predict they will team up with Nike to produce an iShoePhone
Oh, the commercials we would have seen! Don Adams, you left this world too soon!
~Philly
How about that little grey tube thingie that Dell made for a while, a little after Compaq ditched that blue model? I think it was called, like, Web Jr., or something. Came and went in a matter of months.
Ah, yes, the Dell WebPC, I remember laughing about that one. What a half-assed, me-too product. You are correct in your recollection that it didn't last very long. A quick Googling reveals it was announced on November 30, 1999 and quietly discontinued in June of 2000.
~Philly
My company uses it. It works okay, connects with Exchange for scheduling if you want. You can access it with Windows IE (the thing totally relies on ActiveX) from virtually anywhere to do timesheets, set up work orders, etc. www.connectwise.com
Users may have custom software that does not work on new versions of Windows... could present IT challenges as Microsoft retires old products...
That's why Microsoft has such a hard-on for virtualization-- they want businesses to buy shiny new Windows 2003 servers and run, for example, their business-critical NT 4.0 legacy app that hasn't been updated, in a virtual machine on that server.
That's exactly why they bought Virtual PC from Connectix.
~Philly
...the last time we let two machines develop their own language that we couldn't understand,things didn't turn out so well.
Just sayin', is all.
~Philly
1) Any service they roll out will fail, because it won't work with iPods.
2) Any iPod competitor they roll out will fail, because it isn't an iPod.
3) Every attempt they make to kill the iPod or iTMS does absolutely nothing to harm Apple. All it does it further dilute the small chunk of non-iTMS marketshare over which the preexisting iPod/iTMS competitors are already killing each other. They are simply rearranging and adding deck chairs on the Titanic.
Obviously, Microsoft thinks that this market is just like the others they've taken over-- that if they keep trying and throw enough money at it, they'll eventually come out on top regardless of the quality of their product. What they don't seem to realize is that they have been hoisted on their own petard. They thought they could take over with their own DRM, but Apple got there first with FairPlay in the iPod/iTMS, got off to a big head start, and people who have already invested in that 'system' will be highly reluctant to switch to something else. Without DRM-induced market inertia, Microsoft's old method might have worked. Instead, they're really going to have to come up with a kick-ass music player and online store. And even if they do, there's still a high likelihood that people won't switch because they're too invested in iTunes.
~Philly
...and to my knowledge they still don't know it ever happened.
I left there about 5 years ago, but one of my close friends who remained there worked in finance and a year after I left she uncovered a scam run by the CIO, one of his underlings, and a vendor on the outside. It was pretty simple and had apparently been going on for some time even before I left. Basically, it was just a matter of phony invoices coming in from the vendor, for equipment that was not needed nor delivered. The CIO and his underling signed off on the invoices and they were paid, and presumably some of the money that went to the vendor found its way back to the CIO and his underling. My friend quietly followed the paper trail and was able to determine that the scheme netted somewhere in the mid six figures, over just how long a period I don't remember.
I would like to mention that the CIO's underling was an empire-building, micromanaging bitch that was hated by everyone who was under her, which unfortunately included me. She would cover her own ass and happily throw anyone else under the bus she could to solidify her own position. I ended up having to report to her for a period when my boss left the company, until a replacement was found. Having to deal directly with her was a major reason why I left the company.
The above paragraph is just to give you a feel for the fervor with which I pleaded with my friend to assemble all the evidence of wrongdoing and present it to the CFO. She surrepetitiously made copies of everything and kept the folder around, but never did blow the whistle. I suppose she figured it might come in handy as a bargaining chip someday if they ever tried to pin anything on her. It's a real shame, because nothing would have pleased me more than for my friend to have taken that bitch down. Oh, well.
~Philly
...you can't legislate it away, either. It is not the government's job to protect your from your own dumbassitude. :-)
If you don't have the sense to sniff out a phony, you shouldn't be dating at all, much less attempting long-distance hookups over the internet.
~Philly
PS - I'm glad the government won the war on terror, cleaned up the mess in Iraq, and finished rebuilding New Orleans so we can finally focus on the evil-doers who lie in online personal ads.
I'm not so sure. I mean, if they are, nobody told marketing. Have you seen the ? It's all consumer-oriented. Look at the rest of their website.
I did look at the rest of their website-- I was referring to their 18 month-old IT Pro site and the "Mac@Work" site they just added last week.
~Philly
First of all, "AppleBerry" sounds dumb, I would have gone with "MacBerry."
But anyway, Apple is clearly interested in getting back into the enterprise market, and a major sticking point right now is the lack of official Blackberry support from RIM. And yeah, the lack of Apple groupware, too, but my company has been having success rolling out Kerio MailServer on OS X Servers-- at least to clients who don't want/have Blackberries.
I couldn't care less about running iTunes on the Blackberry, but we need a Mac version of Blackberry Enterprise Server like nobody's business.
Pontiac Grand AM 1997-2006 - I want to personally kill the engineer that designed that engine cooling system.
Heh. I had a '94 Grand Am, so let me throw my two most glaring problems out there that were major contributors to me probably never buying an American car again:
1) A too-short connector cable on the throttle position sensor. As it was explained to me when I got it fixed, engine vibrations were sufficient to gradually tug the cable part of the way out of the connector. This intermittent connection resulted in 'stuttering' while accelerating-- the car would lurch forward and then slow down almost at random while the accelerator was pressed.
2) My favorite, the antilock braking system controller chip failed. You would think that this would be designed to fail safe, i.e. you'd still have perfectly functional brakes, just not anti-skid element of the system. WRONG! There were several occasions when I depressed the brake pedal and it would SINK TO THE FLOOR while not slowing the car one bit. I'd have to quickly release and reapply the brake, and then it would work. It was pure luck that I managed to not get into a serious accident from that. The best part was that I'd get a warning light on my console if a friggin bulb burned out in my brake lights in that car, but my first indication that my ABS chip went bye-bye was the aforementioned lack of stopping power when I stepped on the pedal.
~Philly
"If your a computer expert, click here for the full option setup. Otherwise, we will install what we think you need automatically."
The problem with that is too many n00bs who think they know more than they do and need to be protected from themselves will select the "expert" option.
I think the computer should not only ask you this question, but if you declare yourself to be an expert it should go Leisure Suit Larry on you to verify it-- pepper you with a few of the harder questions from the Microsoft desktop support tech exams, and if you don't get over a certain percentage right, you get the training wheels options installed, period.
~Philly
Yes, I know its distribution was limited
Limited how? I worked in the computer department of the UPenn bookstore when Word 6 came out, and we sold a ton-- at least until the word spread about what a serious piece of shit it was. We also sold a lot of copies of Office 4.2.1, which included Word 6.
The backlash was such that Microsoft did not discontinue Word 5.1, and we sold it right alongside Word 6-- I believe the older program outsold the new one. IIRC, we also did exchanges for Word 5.1 when people who bought 6 came back a couple days later to complain about what a turd it was.
The Word 6 debacle led directly to the creation of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft, which has produced some pretty decent products in the ensuing years. So at least something positive came out of the whole thing.
~Philly
Actually, the Zip drives were fantastic in the beginning. I ordered one the same day I got the first MacWarehouse catalog pimping them, in spring of 1994 or 1995, IIRC. It was still going strong when I decommissioned my last SCSI-equipped Mac, in early 2003.
Zip drives only got shitty once they got really popular and Iomega started selling them by the boatload. They cut corners to pump them out faster and cheaper, and product quality suffered as a result. I didn't encounter my first Click of Death-afflicted drive until probably 1997 or 1998, and I saw a lot of Zip drives because I worked in the creative industry in the mid and late 90s-- Zips supplanted 44/88MB SyQuest drives there with amazing speed and became a defacto standard for shuttling files back and forth from service bureaus.
~Philly
This is a hopeful first step, and it seems that politicians might have an eye for the value of the Internet after all.
<cynical>The only thing the politicians have an eye for is keeping their jobs come November.</cynical>
The voters are pissed off enough to really shake things up this year, and the politicians know it. Net neutrality had ridiculously broad support from an absurdly large number of organizations that frankly, I never thought I'd see on the same side of any argument. It made sense to approve this and not make a large number of angry people even angrier.
~Philly
I tried BootCamp and it works well, but I honestly prefer using Parallels Desktop. I loaded my MacBook up with 2GB of RAM, and XP boots and runs amazingly fast (though that's coming from someone who was used to running XP in Virtual PC on a G4, which could be painful), I can still access my OS X apps without having to reboot, and the MacBook's trackpad can emulate a right-click if you click the button with two fingers resting on the trackpad*, so I don't even need to attach a multibutton mouse to use Windows effectively.
BootCamp is probably the way to go if you want to play Windows games on the machine, but for Office and other apps like that, Parallels Desktop will suffice.
~Philly
* This feature is off by default and currently only available when booted into OS X, not when booted directly into Windows via BootCamp. I would expect a later version of BootCamp to have a trackpad driver for Windows that supports that feature.