Isn't Sideshow pretty much exactly what ON was supposed to do except it's attached to the main screen?
Actually Sideshow is designed to work with a small secondary screen. As for why it never generated interest for the mobile user/traveler: Imagine having a device that you could use to just browse the web and use email, turned on almost instantly and was very portable! Better still, imagine making calls through it!
I'm wondering when I can dispense with the laptop completely and just use some sort of flexible/unfolding display attached to the mobile phone, along with a travel keyboard and mouse, at least for basic business needs.
24 cents on Amazon! Which seller came up with that price? Why not 25 cents? 10 cents? Of course there is the $4 S&H charge. I'll add it to the book list.
My point is that if Apple were a computer company, they'd be making the crappy margins that Dell and the other PC makers are making.
Just to confirm your point, check out this graph of Tiffany (jewelry store) and Apple stock prices since 1988. Apple is part technology and part fashion company. Sure, Jobs has done a great work with technology, but he has done a better job with marketing. Just not as good as Tiffany, though. Of course TIF has a much lower market cap, and it's more difficult to grow a large cap company than a small cap one. But TIF has been by far the better investment for the individual.
And we got cheap personal computing because IBM took the decision to set up a skunkworks to design an open architecture PC - disruptive technology.
You might want to read the history of the IBM PC. IBM made the model 5150 with an open architecture because they did not want to invest too much money in the project. The published BIOS specs allowed other companies to reverse engineer the BIOS and make clones. This was certainly not the intent of IBM, as represented by the fact that they came up with the proprietary micro-channel design (be sure to read the "market share" section) as an attempt to recapture the market.
The IBM PC was a Black Swan. Gate's brilliance was in the way he structured his DOS license agreement with IBM. IBM had a royalty free right to distribute it with every PC they built. Gates retained the right to sell it to any other vendor, none of which existed at the time. The IBM people thought the idea of clones was far fetched, evidently. The clone market turned out to be enormous, which was great for Microsoft, but also recognize Gates couldn't be certain that it would be. IBM doesn't do anything disruptive intentionally. Their customers don't like disruptive things, and they don't like disruptive things. Like most companies, they try to stay in Mediocristan. Desktop linux is from Mediocristan, as is Vista. Embedded and server hosted linux is from Extremistan, as is Windows NT and Mac OS on the iPhone.
If you think my view has some merit, you might want to reconsider this statement:
The other is of course its decision to support Linux.
The magic pricepoint is $50-$100. They would be wiser to make the Kindle as cheap as possible, then charge a bit extra for the download if necessary. The bandwidth to transmit a compressed book can't be that much. But $360 for the Kindle? No way.
have the DOJ gone after IBM (the IT powerhouse of the 80s)?
Because last time i checked you had to do something illegal before they could sue your ass.
Anyone, or any legal entity such as a corporation can be sued at any time for any reason. I am not accusing Google of doing anything more than gaining predominant market share, like Intel, for example, and getting sued for it.
As for the utility of antitrust suits, here's an interesting view.
After I saw an NT beta at COMDEX in the 90s, I speculated that Microsoft would be sued for antitrust by the end of the decade. I thought NT would be successful enough to get the competitors bent out of shape, and sure enough, that is what happened. Don't forget how much Unix cost back then. A low cost 32 bit OS was a disaster for Unix vendors. The huge mistake Microsoft made was to not settle with the DoJ.
Google is not likely to make the same mistake, but ultimately it will come down to which competitors or other interests have better lobbyists than Google, and how politically popular it will be to sue them. On that score, Google is more vulnerable, since they are doing so much tracking of what might be considered personal information. <tinfoilhat>Now imagine there is a future Nixonian US president, one who decides that forcing Google to give up some personal information might be very useful. That would be a good to time for that president to tell his or her AG to threaten Google. The "plumbers" will think: "it got us inside Microsoft, right?</tinfoilhat>
Given that Google is has the same trajectory Microsoft did in the 90s, Google will one day face the DoJ. Note that the DoJ has is revisiting Intel's practices as well.
Those who think the DoJ action against Microsoft was a good thing will get to consider what happens when the DoJ tells Google how to manage its business. What is on a computer is one thing, how someone uses it online is probably much more interesting, at least if you like to wear a foil hat. The OS you are using will not matter.
I have mixed views of Vista. I have it on my laptop and desktop (both running Ultimate, Ballmer should get rid of Basic and Home Premium), and another machine running Business. It's a decent OS, and some things about it are certainly better then they are under XP. A number of people complain about how slow it is, but I have running on an old machine with less than a gig of RAM, and it's usable. I have found it to be quite stable as well.
But why did so many things have to move around and be renamed? Why don't Microsoft's own development tools run very well on it without turning off UAC and applying a special Vista patch in the case of Visual Studio? As you suggest, moving from ME to XP was an easy decision. I find Vista to be rather irritating when it did not have to be. I hope they do a much better job with Windows 7.
It will be interesting to see if Yang is still CEO after the next shareholder meeting. Icahn will certainly be on the rampage after seeing his profit potential evaporate, as well as those (T. Boone Pickens) who followed his trade. No doubt there are plenty of institutional shareholders who are unhappy about Yahoo! not taking the $40 offer, and now the $33 offer.
It's very hard to imagine that the Google deal will cause Yahoo stock to run back to $33 / share anytime soon. Google can't get too involved with Yahoo, or the DOJ will become interested. Yang's zealotry has cost shareholders billions of dollars. (I don't own any YHOO.) His arrogance is just stunning. My guess is the current Yahoo board will be removed and Yahoo will be sold for parts anyway.
Actually I doubt Ballmer threw any chairs for this one. I'm no fan of him as Microsoft CEO; I have a hard time understanding how he has managed to stay there this long given the lackluster (with the exception of the enterprise platform) product performance. That said, he is supposed to be a good poker player, and this offer, then rejection of the Yahoo counter-offer has something of a poker feel to it.
Think of what happens now: The shareholders of Yahoo are going to go ballistic. Yahoo management just left $47.5 billion on the table! (The total at $33 / share for Yahoo.) This has to be the dumbest corporate move since Time Warner buying AOL. My guess is that the Yahoo board is going to have to fend off a shareholder insurrection the likes of which we have not seen for a while, which will serve as a huge distraction for Yahoo. I don't think Google can get too close to Yahoo, because the DOJ (let alone the EU) will not like the concentration of search advertising in the hands of one company.
Microsoft let out that they allocated $1.5 billion for employee retention. If you are a good performer at Yahoo, you now have three choices:
Stay at Yahoo
Go to Google
Go to Microsoft
If you stay at Yahoo, you get to work for a company were top management is going to have a major distraction on their hands. The people who were going to jump ship to Google if there was a takeover are going to leave, and a few people who might not have thought of it at all are now going to explore going to Microsoft.
In the end, Yahoo fizzles, and is less competition to Microsoft. Not a bad result from Ballmer's point of view. Watch the stocks on Monday. Yahoo will likely plunge, Microsoft will more than likely be up a few dollars. Over time, Microsoft and Google will pick apart Yahoo. Then Ballmer will have positioned Microsoft to be #2 in the business, which is good enough for Jack Welch (Former CEO of GE), who I believe Ballmer admires. This is probably the smartest thing Ballmer has done during his tenure as CEO.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Apple stores do lose money. But the hands on experience is worth a fortune in advertising. While each store might lose money or make only a minimal profit, the experience and familiarity they provide to a potential Apple customer is well worth it, since it will help convince him or her to buy something. Ultimately Apple sells more product, which is the goal, whether in a store or online, or through other retailers.
I own an iMac and PCs running XP and Vista. I bought the iMac for iLife. (I'm running iLife06.) Mossberg ranted and raved about how great the new iMac is, and iLife08, of course. The problem is that he just takes a cursory look at the software. iMovie08 has far fewer features than iMovie06, which means I would have to buy Final Cut Express to get the features I use in iLife06. That's another $300. If the editing software in the Dell is better than iMovie08 (wouldn't take much), I would buy the Dell. Who knows what else Mossberg has glossed over. The built in TV tuner is a huge deal, too.
The Web Browser is no longer the star. Your location is
This idea is not new. Look at the patents in this arena. One could use your argument to claim that Qualcomm, not Google will be the next monopoly, since they have a substantial patent portfolio covering mobile, location based services.
Interesting. I was running Vista Business on a 7 year old motherboard (1.5Ghz P4, 768Mb RAM) for some time. You are right about drivers, I did have to buy a new NIC and sound card. The hw upgrade cost $70. I got Vista as part of a developer subscription, so the cost of it was minimal. Eventually I decided to upgrade my system, since while not slow, I thought it would be nice to have something faster. I upgraded to Q6600 w/2Gb RAM. For some problematic legacy apps, I installed Virtual PC and set up an XP image. I can tell you the XP VM is very fast, and while in use I notice no hit to the host OS performance, which is also very fast.
Vista has it eccentricities, but the more I use it, the better it becomes. I also own an iMac. I have no plans to upgrade to Leopard, since OSX is good enough for now. (The bad reviews Leopard is receiving also leading to believe Apple may have had a worse launch than Microsoft did with Vista.) I think Vista is a lot better than people would like to think. The Mac has iMovie, which is the main reason I bought it. (Apple wrecked it with iLife 08, though. I'm running iLife 06.) My experience now is that Apple had a more secure OS with OSX compared to XP, but Vista is arguably as good now. Given that Apple has had a bad release of Leopard, and screwed up iLife, I'm beginning to believe that Apple may have peaked. That would be too bad, because the competition is good for the consumer.
I have 13K+ music tracks on a backup disk. If I try to copy them with the Explorer UI, it does nothing - No error message or anything. I reverted to Robocopy, which works fine. You must be doing the same thing. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have a big music collection to copy, or do they just use their Macs and iPods for that?;-)
What the hell do you call all of the RICO violations that Microsoft has been guilty
RICO violations? Do you have links to prove that Microsoft violated RICO laws? Here's a link about RICO.
I'm repopulating an old case with new hardware. I intend to run Linux and Windows. No one is forcing me to by Windows for the new hardware. No one ever has forced me to buy Windows when I didn't want it. No one hindered my purchase of an iMac. Microsoft is not, and never was an effective monopoly in my experience. "Oh but the court said so!" The Supreme Court also decided this at one time. Here is another court decision to consider. Generally court rulings are correct, but they are far from flawless. If Microsoft is a monopoly by virtue of its market share, why isn't Intel?
Like the other companies involved in the MS antitrust case, they simply want the court to help them compete
If Google is going to litigate its way to success, the company is in sorry shape. Maybe they should replace Schmidt with a tobacco company exec, because that is where the litigation strategy is leading.
Interesting thought... Maybe search engine companies will be looked on with as much suspicion as tobacco companies in the future. "For those who choose to search..." It's possible that all you will have to do is replace "health" with "privacy" where you find tobacco related literature if you want to get a glimpse of the future.
When you owe the bank a hundred million, the bank should be worried
Exactly. Also note when China buys our bonds, they buy them with dollars. As the value of the dollar decreases v. the yuan, China is effectively giving money back to the US, since the bonds are worth less in yuan. That's why the Chinese are diversifying their foreign reserves.
Instead of paying $1200 for a decent office computer that can run Vista smoothly, I can pay $600 for a computer with Linux compatible hardware
I had to get a new sound card and NIC to run Vista on my six year old PC. Total cost: $50. I have run Linux on it as well. Total cost: Time to download an ISO. It's amazing how many people think Vista requires an expensive hardware upgrade. It doesn't. I'm not sure why you would have spend so much to upgrade your hardware to run Linux or Vista.
Actually Vista is not that bad. I've been using it for while now on my six year old MB. (Newer video, sound and NIC, though.) Vista has useful features, and the UAC is not that bad, certainly no worse than the security checks on my Mac, and better than running XP as Admin. The problem with Vista, as many have noted, is that it does not appear to be a huge improvement over XP. The other problem is the lack of driver support.
I think the buzz is: "Wait until the first service pack", or "wait for a year until there are more drivers." Dell no doubt has tested Vista with all sorts of peripherals, and found many don't work with Vista. I seriously doubt Dell wanted people to find out that if they buy a new Dell, there is serious risk of the machine not working with some of their old devices.
My guess is the iPod killer will be a phone of some sort.
But the _real_ iPod killer is a used iPod loaded up with another person's music collection. I bought a used iPod loaded with thousands of tracks. Lots of music I never heard before, other stuff I know and like, and a few things so bad it almost amusing to listen to. I never would have bought the player if it didn't have music on it already. Once there are enough used players out there loaded with tracks, I'm guessing others will begin to realize the value proposition of a used one far exceeds that of a new one. No idea when that will become a noticeable trend, however.
Should I care that much about Leopard? It has nice features, but Tiger works pretty well.
I do wonder though, if somewhere within Microsoft there is an optimized image that will allow you to load Vista or XP on a Mac, giving the Windows user the positive experience of the consistent hardware Apple makes, and all of the Windows software they are used to using.
Sure, they could use Bootcamp or Parallels, but what if they don't care to for various reasons? It's also possible that if they are using Bootcamp or Parallels, they are buying Vista or XP as well to run on the Mac. If so, the percentage of Mac OS sales will inevitably decrease. I think time will tell how this plays out. As far as I know, Microsoft has always been happy to have Windows run on as many hardware platforms as possible.
Once it's there, you will have it in your command history. Much faster then clicking the menus and tabs you mention. This is an example of a feature in Vista that is a big improvement over XP.
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Isn't Sideshow pretty much exactly what ON was supposed to do except it's attached to the main screen?
Actually Sideshow is designed to work with a small secondary screen. As for why it never generated interest for the mobile user/traveler: Imagine having a device that you could use to just browse the web and use email, turned on almost instantly and was very portable! Better still, imagine making calls through it!
I'm wondering when I can dispense with the laptop completely and just use some sort of flexible/unfolding display attached to the mobile phone, along with a travel keyboard and mouse, at least for basic business needs.
24 cents on Amazon! Which seller came up with that price? Why not 25 cents? 10 cents? Of course there is the $4 S&H charge. I'll add it to the book list.
My point is that if Apple were a computer company, they'd be making the crappy margins that Dell and the other PC makers are making.
Just to confirm your point, check out this graph of Tiffany (jewelry store) and Apple stock prices since 1988. Apple is part technology and part fashion company. Sure, Jobs has done a great work with technology, but he has done a better job with marketing. Just not as good as Tiffany, though. Of course TIF has a much lower market cap, and it's more difficult to grow a large cap company than a small cap one. But TIF has been by far the better investment for the individual.
And we got cheap personal computing because IBM took the decision to set up a skunkworks to design an open architecture PC - disruptive technology.
You might want to read the history of the IBM PC. IBM made the model 5150 with an open architecture because they did not want to invest too much money in the project. The published BIOS specs allowed other companies to reverse engineer the BIOS and make clones. This was certainly not the intent of IBM, as represented by the fact that they came up with the proprietary micro-channel design (be sure to read the "market share" section) as an attempt to recapture the market.
The IBM PC was a Black Swan. Gate's brilliance was in the way he structured his DOS license agreement with IBM. IBM had a royalty free right to distribute it with every PC they built. Gates retained the right to sell it to any other vendor, none of which existed at the time. The IBM people thought the idea of clones was far fetched, evidently. The clone market turned out to be enormous, which was great for Microsoft, but also recognize Gates couldn't be certain that it would be. IBM doesn't do anything disruptive intentionally. Their customers don't like disruptive things, and they don't like disruptive things. Like most companies, they try to stay in Mediocristan. Desktop linux is from Mediocristan, as is Vista. Embedded and server hosted linux is from Extremistan, as is Windows NT and Mac OS on the iPhone.
If you think my view has some merit, you might want to reconsider this statement:
The other is of course its decision to support Linux.
The magic pricepoint is $50-$100. They would be wiser to make the Kindle as cheap as possible, then charge a bit extra for the download if necessary. The bandwidth to transmit a compressed book can't be that much. But $360 for the Kindle? No way.
have the DOJ gone after IBM (the IT powerhouse of the 80s)? Because last time i checked you had to do something illegal before they could sue your ass.
Not true at all
Anyone, or any legal entity such as a corporation can be sued at any time for any reason. I am not accusing Google of doing anything more than gaining predominant market share, like Intel, for example, and getting sued for it.
As for the utility of antitrust suits, here's an interesting view.
After I saw an NT beta at COMDEX in the 90s, I speculated that Microsoft would be sued for antitrust by the end of the decade. I thought NT would be successful enough to get the competitors bent out of shape, and sure enough, that is what happened. Don't forget how much Unix cost back then. A low cost 32 bit OS was a disaster for Unix vendors. The huge mistake Microsoft made was to not settle with the DoJ.
Google is not likely to make the same mistake, but ultimately it will come down to which competitors or other interests have better lobbyists than Google, and how politically popular it will be to sue them. On that score, Google is more vulnerable, since they are doing so much tracking of what might be considered personal information. <tinfoilhat>Now imagine there is a future Nixonian US president, one who decides that forcing Google to give up some personal information might be very useful. That would be a good to time for that president to tell his or her AG to threaten Google. The "plumbers" will think: "it got us inside Microsoft, right?</tinfoilhat>
Those who think the DoJ action against Microsoft was a good thing will get to consider what happens when the DoJ tells Google how to manage its business. What is on a computer is one thing, how someone uses it online is probably much more interesting, at least if you like to wear a foil hat. The OS you are using will not matter.
But why did so many things have to move around and be renamed? Why don't Microsoft's own development tools run very well on it without turning off UAC and applying a special Vista patch in the case of Visual Studio? As you suggest, moving from ME to XP was an easy decision. I find Vista to be rather irritating when it did not have to be. I hope they do a much better job with Windows 7.
It's very hard to imagine that the Google deal will cause Yahoo stock to run back to $33 / share anytime soon. Google can't get too involved with Yahoo, or the DOJ will become interested. Yang's zealotry has cost shareholders billions of dollars. (I don't own any YHOO.) His arrogance is just stunning. My guess is the current Yahoo board will be removed and Yahoo will be sold for parts anyway.
Think of what happens now: The shareholders of Yahoo are going to go ballistic. Yahoo management just left $47.5 billion on the table! (The total at $33 / share for Yahoo.) This has to be the dumbest corporate move since Time Warner buying AOL. My guess is that the Yahoo board is going to have to fend off a shareholder insurrection the likes of which we have not seen for a while, which will serve as a huge distraction for Yahoo. I don't think Google can get too close to Yahoo, because the DOJ (let alone the EU) will not like the concentration of search advertising in the hands of one company.
Microsoft let out that they allocated $1.5 billion for employee retention. If you are a good performer at Yahoo, you now have three choices:
If you stay at Yahoo, you get to work for a company were top management is going to have a major distraction on their hands. The people who were going to jump ship to Google if there was a takeover are going to leave, and a few people who might not have thought of it at all are now going to explore going to Microsoft.
In the end, Yahoo fizzles, and is less competition to Microsoft. Not a bad result from Ballmer's point of view. Watch the stocks on Monday. Yahoo will likely plunge, Microsoft will more than likely be up a few dollars. Over time, Microsoft and Google will pick apart Yahoo. Then Ballmer will have positioned Microsoft to be #2 in the business, which is good enough for Jack Welch (Former CEO of GE), who I believe Ballmer admires. This is probably the smartest thing Ballmer has done during his tenure as CEO.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Apple stores do lose money. But the hands on experience is worth a fortune in advertising. While each store might lose money or make only a minimal profit, the experience and familiarity they provide to a potential Apple customer is well worth it, since it will help convince him or her to buy something. Ultimately Apple sells more product, which is the goal, whether in a store or online, or through other retailers.
Apple bad, record industry good?
Whooaaa, it's not even the new year yet!
I own an iMac and PCs running XP and Vista. I bought the iMac for iLife. (I'm running iLife06.) Mossberg ranted and raved about how great the new iMac is, and iLife08, of course. The problem is that he just takes a cursory look at the software. iMovie08 has far fewer features than iMovie06, which means I would have to buy Final Cut Express to get the features I use in iLife06. That's another $300. If the editing software in the Dell is better than iMovie08 (wouldn't take much), I would buy the Dell. Who knows what else Mossberg has glossed over. The built in TV tuner is a huge deal, too.
This idea is not new. Look at the patents in this arena. One could use your argument to claim that Qualcomm, not Google will be the next monopoly, since they have a substantial patent portfolio covering mobile, location based services.
Interesting. I was running Vista Business on a 7 year old motherboard (1.5Ghz P4, 768Mb RAM) for some time. You are right about drivers, I did have to buy a new NIC and sound card. The hw upgrade cost $70. I got Vista as part of a developer subscription, so the cost of it was minimal. Eventually I decided to upgrade my system, since while not slow, I thought it would be nice to have something faster. I upgraded to Q6600 w/2Gb RAM. For some problematic legacy apps, I installed Virtual PC and set up an XP image. I can tell you the XP VM is very fast, and while in use I notice no hit to the host OS performance, which is also very fast.
Vista has it eccentricities, but the more I use it, the better it becomes. I also own an iMac. I have no plans to upgrade to Leopard, since OSX is good enough for now. (The bad reviews Leopard is receiving also leading to believe Apple may have had a worse launch than Microsoft did with Vista.) I think Vista is a lot better than people would like to think. The Mac has iMovie, which is the main reason I bought it. (Apple wrecked it with iLife 08, though. I'm running iLife 06.) My experience now is that Apple had a more secure OS with OSX compared to XP, but Vista is arguably as good now. Given that Apple has had a bad release of Leopard, and screwed up iLife, I'm beginning to believe that Apple may have peaked. That would be too bad, because the competition is good for the consumer.
I have 13K+ music tracks on a backup disk. If I try to copy them with the Explorer UI, it does nothing - No error message or anything. I reverted to Robocopy, which works fine. You must be doing the same thing. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have a big music collection to copy, or do they just use their Macs and iPods for that?
RICO violations? Do you have links to prove that Microsoft violated RICO laws? Here's a link about RICO.
I'm repopulating an old case with new hardware. I intend to run Linux and Windows. No one is forcing me to by Windows for the new hardware. No one ever has forced me to buy Windows when I didn't want it. No one hindered my purchase of an iMac. Microsoft is not, and never was an effective monopoly in my experience. "Oh but the court said so!" The Supreme Court also decided this at one time. Here is another court decision to consider. Generally court rulings are correct, but they are far from flawless. If Microsoft is a monopoly by virtue of its market share, why isn't Intel?
Like the other companies involved in the MS antitrust case, they simply want the court to help them compete
If Google is going to litigate its way to success, the company is in sorry shape. Maybe they should replace Schmidt with a tobacco company exec, because that is where the litigation strategy is leading.
Interesting thought... Maybe search engine companies will be looked on with as much suspicion as tobacco companies in the future. "For those who choose to search..." It's possible that all you will have to do is replace "health" with "privacy" where you find tobacco related literature if you want to get a glimpse of the future.
Exactly. Also note when China buys our bonds, they buy them with dollars. As the value of the dollar decreases v. the yuan, China is effectively giving money back to the US, since the bonds are worth less in yuan. That's why the Chinese are diversifying their foreign reserves.
I had to get a new sound card and NIC to run Vista on my six year old PC. Total cost: $50. I have run Linux on it as well. Total cost: Time to download an ISO. It's amazing how many people think Vista requires an expensive hardware upgrade. It doesn't. I'm not sure why you would have spend so much to upgrade your hardware to run Linux or Vista.
Actually Vista is not that bad. I've been using it for while now on my six year old MB. (Newer video, sound and NIC, though.) Vista has useful features, and the UAC is not that bad, certainly no worse than the security checks on my Mac, and better than running XP as Admin. The problem with Vista, as many have noted, is that it does not appear to be a huge improvement over XP. The other problem is the lack of driver support.
I think the buzz is: "Wait until the first service pack", or "wait for a year until there are more drivers." Dell no doubt has tested Vista with all sorts of peripherals, and found many don't work with Vista. I seriously doubt Dell wanted people to find out that if they buy a new Dell, there is serious risk of the machine not working with some of their old devices.
My guess is the iPod killer will be a phone of some sort.
But the _real_ iPod killer is a used iPod loaded up with another person's music collection. I bought a used iPod loaded with thousands of tracks. Lots of music I never heard before, other stuff I know and like, and a few things so bad it almost amusing to listen to. I never would have bought the player if it didn't have music on it already. Once there are enough used players out there loaded with tracks, I'm guessing others will begin to realize the value proposition of a used one far exceeds that of a new one. No idea when that will become a noticeable trend, however.
Should I care that much about Leopard? It has nice features, but Tiger works pretty well.
I do wonder though, if somewhere within Microsoft there is an optimized image that will allow you to load Vista or XP on a Mac, giving the Windows user the positive experience of the consistent hardware Apple makes, and all of the Windows software they are used to using.
Sure, they could use Bootcamp or Parallels, but what if they don't care to for various reasons? It's also possible that if they are using Bootcamp or Parallels, they are buying Vista or XP as well to run on the Mac. If so, the percentage of Mac OS sales will inevitably decrease. I think time will tell how this plays out. As far as I know, Microsoft has always been happy to have Windows run on as many hardware platforms as possible.
FYI
Type this in the search box from the Vista menu:
cmd /k ipconfig
Once it's there, you will have it in your command history. Much faster then clicking the menus and tabs you mention. This is an example of a feature in Vista that is a big improvement over XP.
rather than the far superior Lotus Improv
Crikey! Another Improv fan! We can start a users group. Since there will be two members, we might as well get the pizza toppings figured out now...
Improv was very cool. Too bad the macros were broken, though.