Actually, Dvorak started out as a really cheesy writer who was just as bad at predictions as he is now, but had a decent line of humorous gab to help it along, and also laid on the boldface with a trowel. (His InfoWorld column in the 1980s really did read just like that.)
Honestly, he never had much of a clue. We are talking about a man who, way back around 1986, wrote that CD-I was 'the last hope of the home market'. (CD-I was Commodore's attempt to reposition the Amiga as a home entertainment component, with multimedia CDs as the default storage medium. I think they sold about six units altogether.) He seems to have honestly believed that home computers were just a silly fad of the earlier 80s, and that while Commodore (!) had a chance of keeping that market alive, nobody else had even a hope. Well, we know how that one turned out. Everybody under 30 who's ever even heard of CD-I, please raise your hand. . . .
I rest my case.
It's sad that the man is no longer even funny on purpose, and has to get his laughs by being asinine.
That only goes to prove the point. Gates didn't pay any money to AOL Time Warner to put him on the cover of Time . . . and yes, it cost him easily a hundred million bucks. Which is just what jcr said it was worth.
But the compatibility module has already been custom-built for the platform by Intel. The 945 chipset was not designed solely for Apple, you know. That reduces the question to a simple form: Did Apple go out of their way to remove the CSM from Intel's EFI code, even though they said they would do nothing to prevent users from installing Windows? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's likely.
For me, it's very simple. This September, I'm heading back to school -- some third-tier polytechnic with a bus. admin. + IT program, if you must know -- and I am required to have a laptop that will boot Windows. On the other hand, they can take away my Mac OS when they pry iLife from my cold, dead fingers. The MacBook Pro configured to dual-boot is the only computer on the market that can meet both those requirements. Hobson's choice.
The PowerPC Macs are not heavily discounted, at least not by Apple. In fact, they're not discounted at all. At this moment, you can buy an iMac G5 from the Apple Store online for exactly the same price as an iMac Core Duo. Unless you already have a significant investment in PowerPC software, you might as well just buy an Intel Mac and save yourself the worry.
In practice, a PowerPC Mac is likely to last just as long as if the Intel Macs had not been introduced. Software vendors will go on supplying universal binaries at least until Intel Macs have a significantly bigger installed base than PowerPC Macs. According to Apple's plans, the G5 towers will be the last machines replaced by Intel models. The media pros who are the biggest buyers of Power Macs are also the biggest buyers of high-priced software. I will be extremely surprised if any major vendor leaves them in the lurch before 2010.
You call a Mac user arrogant because he doesn't wear a belt, suspenders, and two coils of rope around his middle. But you see, his pants aren't falling down. Yours are. And they keep falling down no matter how many precautions you take. I think you need to have a talk with your tailor.
Appleworks is essentially a Carbonized Classic app and has undergone no significant updates for several years. If Apple has an office suite now under development, it will almost certainly be a superset of iWork.
I agree, an Apple office suite wouldn't blow MS Office out of the water . . . on features. But it would have a vastly less obfuscated UI and probably incorporate the kind of cool features that seem dead obvious in retrospect, and make people wonder why they never demanded such things in the first place. That would give MS a new set of worries that open-source suites never have. And if MS made it too difficult for Apple to market that suite, Apple could easily afford to give it away, which would utterly torpedo Microsoft's second most profitable product line.
Since the table feature in iWork '06 is not called Numbers, it clearly isn't the product for which Apple trademarked the name 'Numbers'.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that Apple has a professional-quality office suite in the box labelled 'In Case of Emergency', right next to the spot where OS X for Intel used to be. And if that's true, I would be even less surprised to learn that MS agreed to continue Office for Mac on the condition that Apple not release its office suite.
It makes a cutthroat kind of sense. After all, Apple could release its office suite for Windows and pose a direct threat to MS on their own turf, something that has never happened before. But it would take a huge effort to sell such a product, and the result might only be a price war that would destroy all profitability in office software. In other words, it's a sabre for Apple to rattle. And a sabre is usually a much more effective weapon by being rattled in the scabbard than by being drawn in combat.
I used to worry about this question myself, but I don't anymore.
Windows apps running on a Mac, even in an OS X window, are still . . . Windows apps. That means an incompatible UI, incompatible file systems, and a constant stream of annoying little problems porting data between environments. (Those who have used VirtualPC will know what I'm talking about.) It's a plug-ugly workaround at best.
Nobody is going to pay extra for Apple hardware just so they can run Windows on it. Those who care enough to buy Macs will want OS X apps whenever they can get them. If they can't get OS X apps, they will reluctantly use Windows apps on their Macs . . . just as they now reluctantly use Windows apps on the x86 boxes they are forced to buy for the purpose. If they were satisfied with this workaround, they wouldn't have bought Macs in the first place.
If Vista actually existed as a commercial product, that argument might be valid.
In any case, Microsoft evidently disagrees with you: XP is already available for PPC Macs via VirtualPC. I expect to see VPC for Intel Macs months before Vista is actually released . . . and that's IF Vista ships on time.
2. Satan began playing in the National Hockey League. (For the Edmonton Oilers, no less, which shows just how cold Hell was that year.)
3. The Beatles reunited, even including the late John Lennon.
What happened today is quite different. According to reliable news sources, a new species of winged pigs has been sighted in the skies all round the world.
In 1974, Dave Ahl was working for DEC, flogging PDP-8s to high-school and college computer labs. He had a team put together a PDP-8 box on a stack of horseshoe-shaped PC boards, which could fit round the back of a CRT. Presto! Desktop minicomputer. The DEC board rejected the product by one vote -- Kenneth Olsen's. 'I can't imagine why anyone would want a home computer,' he allegedly said. 'Now g'way, kid, I'm busy hand-knitting core memory.'
IBM tried to crack the desktop market about 1975 with the 5100 series. Very screwy machine: programmable only in BASIC or APL, with a custom weird 'controller' (as IBM insisted on calling the CPU) with 16-bit registers but only an 8-bit ALU. Price started at about $9000 and topped out at more than double that. As $9000 was a mere pittance for any hobbyist or small-business owner to spend on a machine with virtually no useful software and an intrinsically user-hostile architecture scaled down from the IBM 360, I'm really rather surprised that it never quite caught on.
And if HP and Atari hadn't turned down similar ideas, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wouldn't have walked out with their noses in the air and created that weird little company with the fruity name.
That's pretty much right. The really nonstandard thing was that the disk sleeves had two pairs of openings for the drive heads, 180 degrees apart, and the drives had two single-sided heads -- one on the left pointing down, the other on the right pointing up. (Or vice versa; I forget which.)
Like many of Apple's little inventions, this had pros and cons.
Pro: Slightly reduced wear on both the disk surface and the heads, because the two heads weren't jammed together with the disk sandwiched between.
Con: Nobody else in history ever used such a design, and the disks were expensive as hell if you could find them at all. I forget the exact price, but I think it involved underwriting the national debt of a dodgy Third World country. But hey, for that price you got a floppy that lasted 5 percent longer than standard ones. Sweet deal!
Failing to see? Yeah, it's dead easy to compete directly with Microsoft in the OS business. That's why NextStep put MS out of business, which is why Steve Jobs never went back to Apple, and now owns 40% of the world's wealth.
(The other 60% belonging mostly to IBM, because if a pipsqueak startup like NeXT can dethrone MS, obviously the biggest, baddest corporation in IT can do even better with OS/2.)
Actually, Wal-Mart has made a deal directly with Apple to carry the iPod, so HP's departure makes no difference there.
Ditto RadioShack, if AppleInsider can be believed.
That eliminates the two most significant retailers that carried HP but not Apple. The only big holdouts now are the office-supply chains, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see Staples or Office Depot make a deal with Apple next.
The article you link to is a list of slang used at Microsoft, not invented there. Some terms from the list that are not peculiar to MS, most of which were invented at other sites, in other industries, or before MS became important:
Admin, alias, app, bandwidth (yes, in the slang usage too), bitstorm, bleeding edge, bloatware, bitstorm, broken, bug, build, buttoned down, buzzword bingo (from Dilbert, I believe), campus, code warrior, config, content providers, cookie, cool, core competence, core product, crisp, cycles, delta, disconnect, doc, doorstop, drill down, drive, EOM, exposure, extensible, eye candy, eyeballs . . . & in fact most of the rest of the list. The author even has the nerve to claim that MS invented the self-referential term 'TLA'.
The term 'vaporware' was in industry-wide usage as early as 1984. At that date it was most notoriously used to refer to the Gavilan, a laptop so far ahead of its time that it was impossible to build. Gavilan Corp. went down the tubes, taking $12m in venture cap with it. Legend has it that when the creditors' attorneys tried to call them to foreclose, nobody was at the reception desk to answer them; everybody was in a corporate culture meeting, deciding what colour of carpet to buy.
Not even MS is arrogant enough to claim that it invented hacker jargon or business-speak.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Dvorak started out as a really cheesy writer who was just as bad at predictions as he is now, but had a decent line of humorous gab to help it along, and also laid on the boldface with a trowel. (His InfoWorld column in the 1980s really did read just like that.)
Honestly, he never had much of a clue. We are talking about a man who, way back around 1986, wrote that CD-I was 'the last hope of the home market'. (CD-I was Commodore's attempt to reposition the Amiga as a home entertainment component, with multimedia CDs as the default storage medium. I think they sold about six units altogether.) He seems to have honestly believed that home computers were just a silly fad of the earlier 80s, and that while Commodore (!) had a chance of keeping that market alive, nobody else had even a hope. Well, we know how that one turned out. Everybody under 30 who's ever even heard of CD-I, please raise your hand. . . .
I rest my case.
It's sad that the man is no longer even funny on purpose, and has to get his laughs by being asinine.
That only goes to prove the point. Gates didn't pay any money to AOL Time Warner to put him on the cover of Time . . . and yes, it cost him easily a hundred million bucks. Which is just what jcr said it was worth.
But the compatibility module has already been custom-built for the platform by Intel. The 945 chipset was not designed solely for Apple, you know. That reduces the question to a simple form: Did Apple go out of their way to remove the CSM from Intel's EFI code, even though they said they would do nothing to prevent users from installing Windows? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's likely.
For me, it's very simple. This September, I'm heading back to school -- some third-tier polytechnic with a bus. admin. + IT program, if you must know -- and I am required to have a laptop that will boot Windows. On the other hand, they can take away my Mac OS when they pry iLife from my cold, dead fingers. The MacBook Pro configured to dual-boot is the only computer on the market that can meet both those requirements. Hobson's choice.
The PowerPC Macs are not heavily discounted, at least not by Apple. In fact, they're not discounted at all. At this moment, you can buy an iMac G5 from the Apple Store online for exactly the same price as an iMac Core Duo. Unless you already have a significant investment in PowerPC software, you might as well just buy an Intel Mac and save yourself the worry.
In practice, a PowerPC Mac is likely to last just as long as if the Intel Macs had not been introduced. Software vendors will go on supplying universal binaries at least until Intel Macs have a significantly bigger installed base than PowerPC Macs. According to Apple's plans, the G5 towers will be the last machines replaced by Intel models. The media pros who are the biggest buyers of Power Macs are also the biggest buyers of high-priced software. I will be extremely surprised if any major vendor leaves them in the lurch before 2010.
You call a Mac user arrogant because he doesn't wear a belt, suspenders, and two coils of rope around his middle. But you see, his pants aren't falling down. Yours are. And they keep falling down no matter how many precautions you take. I think you need to have a talk with your tailor.
Appleworks is essentially a Carbonized Classic app and has undergone no significant updates for several years. If Apple has an office suite now under development, it will almost certainly be a superset of iWork.
I agree, an Apple office suite wouldn't blow MS Office out of the water . . . on features. But it would have a vastly less obfuscated UI and probably incorporate the kind of cool features that seem dead obvious in retrospect, and make people wonder why they never demanded such things in the first place. That would give MS a new set of worries that open-source suites never have. And if MS made it too difficult for Apple to market that suite, Apple could easily afford to give it away, which would utterly torpedo Microsoft's second most profitable product line.
The plural on decade is precisely accurate. I bought MS Word 1.0 for Mac in 1984, and never used the toy called MacWrite again.
Since the table feature in iWork '06 is not called Numbers, it clearly isn't the product for which Apple trademarked the name 'Numbers'.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that Apple has a professional-quality office suite in the box labelled 'In Case of Emergency', right next to the spot where OS X for Intel used to be. And if that's true, I would be even less surprised to learn that MS agreed to continue Office for Mac on the condition that Apple not release its office suite.
It makes a cutthroat kind of sense. After all, Apple could release its office suite for Windows and pose a direct threat to MS on their own turf, something that has never happened before. But it would take a huge effort to sell such a product, and the result might only be a price war that would destroy all profitability in office software. In other words, it's a sabre for Apple to rattle. And a sabre is usually a much more effective weapon by being rattled in the scabbard than by being drawn in combat.
Quite right.
Linus floats one inch above the ground.
Steve appears to float one inch above the ground, but that's an illusion caused by the RDF.
Bill stays at ground level, but the ground shrinks one inch away to avoid touching him.
Any more silly questions?
I used to worry about this question myself, but I don't anymore.
Windows apps running on a Mac, even in an OS X window, are still . . . Windows apps. That means an incompatible UI, incompatible file systems, and a constant stream of annoying little problems porting data between environments. (Those who have used VirtualPC will know what I'm talking about.) It's a plug-ugly workaround at best.
Nobody is going to pay extra for Apple hardware just so they can run Windows on it. Those who care enough to buy Macs will want OS X apps whenever they can get them. If they can't get OS X apps, they will reluctantly use Windows apps on their Macs . . . just as they now reluctantly use Windows apps on the x86 boxes they are forced to buy for the purpose. If they were satisfied with this workaround, they wouldn't have bought Macs in the first place.
If Vista actually existed as a commercial product, that argument might be valid. In any case, Microsoft evidently disagrees with you: XP is already available for PPC Macs via VirtualPC. I expect to see VPC for Intel Macs months before Vista is actually released . . . and that's IF Vista ships on time.
Actually, Hell froze over in 1995. Proof:
1. The Devilswon the Stanley Cup.
2. Satan began playing in the National Hockey League. (For the Edmonton Oilers, no less, which shows just how cold Hell was that year.)
3. The Beatles reunited, even including the late John Lennon.
What happened today is quite different. According to reliable news sources, a new species of winged pigs has been sighted in the skies all round the world.
Do please keep your cliche calendar up to date!
Hey, that just puts Xerox on a very long list.
In 1974, Dave Ahl was working for DEC, flogging PDP-8s to high-school and college computer labs. He had a team put together a PDP-8 box on a stack of horseshoe-shaped PC boards, which could fit round the back of a CRT. Presto! Desktop minicomputer. The DEC board rejected the product by one vote -- Kenneth Olsen's. 'I can't imagine why anyone would want a home computer,' he allegedly said. 'Now g'way, kid, I'm busy hand-knitting core memory.'
IBM tried to crack the desktop market about 1975 with the 5100 series. Very screwy machine: programmable only in BASIC or APL, with a custom weird 'controller' (as IBM insisted on calling the CPU) with 16-bit registers but only an 8-bit ALU. Price started at about $9000 and topped out at more than double that. As $9000 was a mere pittance for any hobbyist or small-business owner to spend on a machine with virtually no useful software and an intrinsically user-hostile architecture scaled down from the IBM 360, I'm really rather surprised that it never quite caught on.
And if HP and Atari hadn't turned down similar ideas, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wouldn't have walked out with their noses in the air and created that weird little company with the fruity name.
That's pretty much right. The really nonstandard thing was that the disk sleeves had two pairs of openings for the drive heads, 180 degrees apart, and the drives had two single-sided heads -- one on the left pointing down, the other on the right pointing up. (Or vice versa; I forget which.)
Like many of Apple's little inventions, this had pros and cons.
Pro: Slightly reduced wear on both the disk surface and the heads, because the two heads weren't jammed together with the disk sandwiched between.
Con: Nobody else in history ever used such a design, and the disks were expensive as hell if you could find them at all. I forget the exact price, but I think it involved underwriting the national debt of a dodgy Third World country. But hey, for that price you got a floppy that lasted 5 percent longer than standard ones. Sweet deal!
Failing to see? Yeah, it's dead easy to compete directly with Microsoft in the OS business. That's why NextStep put MS out of business, which is why Steve Jobs never went back to Apple, and now owns 40% of the world's wealth.
(The other 60% belonging mostly to IBM, because if a pipsqueak startup like NeXT can dethrone MS, obviously the biggest, baddest corporation in IT can do even better with OS/2.)
Actually, Wal-Mart has made a deal directly with Apple to carry the iPod, so HP's departure makes no difference there. Ditto RadioShack, if AppleInsider can be believed. That eliminates the two most significant retailers that carried HP but not Apple. The only big holdouts now are the office-supply chains, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see Staples or Office Depot make a deal with Apple next.
Nice way to disprove your own point. After 60 years of TV, how many houses still have radios?
'X will not knock Y out of the market' != 'There is no market for X'. Write that on the board 50 times, and get back to me when you feel better.
The article you link to is a list of slang used at Microsoft, not invented there. Some terms from the list that are not peculiar to MS, most of which were invented at other sites, in other industries, or before MS became important:
Admin, alias, app, bandwidth (yes, in the slang usage too), bitstorm, bleeding edge, bloatware, bitstorm, broken, bug, build, buttoned down, buzzword bingo (from Dilbert, I believe), campus, code warrior, config, content providers, cookie, cool, core competence, core product, crisp, cycles, delta, disconnect, doc, doorstop, drill down, drive, EOM, exposure, extensible, eye candy, eyeballs . . . & in fact most of the rest of the list. The author even has the nerve to claim that MS invented the self-referential term 'TLA'.
The term 'vaporware' was in industry-wide usage as early as 1984. At that date it was most notoriously used to refer to the Gavilan, a laptop so far ahead of its time that it was impossible to build. Gavilan Corp. went down the tubes, taking $12m in venture cap with it. Legend has it that when the creditors' attorneys tried to call them to foreclose, nobody was at the reception desk to answer them; everybody was in a corporate culture meeting, deciding what colour of carpet to buy.
Not even MS is arrogant enough to claim that it invented hacker jargon or business-speak.