Boy, you said it Chewie. Was this Vista and Exchange bit written by the King of VARs, Ben Dover?
Can't talk much about the other products but - sheesh - putting Vista and Exchange on ANY list as a "Best Of.." makes me want to puke. Worse, whoever reads that e-rag will have it stuck in their head "...it says right here that Vista is the best of the best of the best.."... I just puked again; sorry.
They advertise a Podcast on there! I'm surprised they know what that is. Methinks they have their heads in the sand.
Congrats to Kim Brand for FileEngine making the list. At least some writers at the e-rag are doing their job.
You are an exception. 99.3% of all Windows users have no concept of "little windows strewn about" (verified by Netcraft). They think there's something wrong when more than one window is showing, so I'll modify my pronouncement and say it's a "Typical Windows User's Thing", even though Windows itself insists on maximizing EVERYTHING. It's hilarious to see a new Mac user with his new 20" iMac saying "how can I fill the screen with this?" - and it's only an email compose window or a browser window where most of it turns into white space anyway.
Yeah... what HE said. Even car makers work to make controls dissimilar on the dashboard so you don't get them mixed up. If everyone is a creature of habit (and clearly everyone here is based on all the bitching on how a UI should be arranged to suit themselves) you really WANT buttons to move around between apps or you'll just blindly click something unintended.
Maximizing windows is, well, a Windows thing. That's probably the first habit to break for new Mac users coming from Windows. If Windows didn't maximize everything, new Mac users would "get" drag and drop faster.
Yes, widgets can be put on the desktop but it's not that graceful.
Invoke the "manage widgets" bar.
drag one (calculator?) into the widgets field.
Keep holding the mouse button and hit F-12.
Let go.
All the widgets disappear except for the one stuck to the end of your mouse pointer. Just be ready to have the widget float on top of everything and let it be swept away next time you look at all your other widgets. It's good for temporary use but I agree with the premise of using widgets as apps.
Yes, there was a massive spike last Xmas that hasn't been exceeded during the 11.5 months that followed. Indeed, if you draw a line from that peak to the present, iTunes queries are down from a year ago. It's proof positive - especially if you don't know a fucking thing about statistics!!
I can't find my ass with both hands around statistics and even I can see what's wrong with Forrester's report. So, Forrester my ass.
Yeah, well I'm an elitist Apple user and I take offence/offense to your sig. Get those damned potatoes out of my soup and put in some carrots and celery instead.
"I actually don't think Microsoft is really all that great at marketing..."
One word answer - "Ballmer". Makes me cringe but when he shoots his mouth off about something, even if it's total bullshit, people listen and react like it's true. That's marketing power for you.
Frankly, I think Microsoft is a marketing company first, a combative litigous bully second and a technical innovator as a distant third. They've had great success marketing crap software to the point where most people believe Microsoft software to be as good as it can possibly get. "Where Do You Want To Go Today?" Now, there's a feel good slogan that should read "Who Do We Want To Enslave Today?". Those Microsoft TV ads showing kids playing around and the white sketchy outlines expanding their world just make we want to jump into the TV and save them all.
Clearly, all the innovations available on the planet are built into Windows. Just ask any office drone. The Internet is the Big Blue "E" and email is Outlook and you have to use Window Media Player to see video, don't you? Ask them to use Firefox or Thunderbird and they think you've got a screw loose. AOL achieved the same thing for millions of poor schmucks who still have no idea there's life outside of AOL. Even computer "professionals" (like the I.T. department at Discovery Channel) are constantly trying to ban QuickTime from anything involving digital media in their workflow in favor of Windows Media. OMFG! QuickTime is the crown jewel of media and they can't or won't see it.
Microsoft uses buzzwords with great effect. Businesses and consumers just eat it up. "Introducing the 2007 Microsoft Office System: Amplify the Impact of Your People" and "Optimize Your Core Infrastructure: Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility, Protect Information and Control Access" (all from Microsoft literature and seminars). People who don't know they've just been hoodwinked swallow this stuff whole. Even after saying "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" to someone, you have to explain that the "Advantage" is all in Microsoft's favor - and they think you're lying to them!
To your point that Microsoft isn't very good at marketing, I'd say that it isn't sticking as well as it used to. That's somewhere in the middle of our positions and rings true for me. The greater public is sick of problems, exploits, spyware etc and would switch from Windows if there was a viable alternative. EXCUSE ME? The ghost of Microsoft Marketing lives on. "Go visit your local Apple Store" is my advice. There's one literally across the street from where I work. The newbies that I've taken over there have their jaw on the floor within 15 minutes of showing them around. I've probably sold about 60 Macs that way. They had no idea and, to a person, they've come back multiple times to thank me for releasing them from the grip of Windows. The first question asked is a sales point long driven home by Microsoft subliminal marketing that strikes fear into every PC user - "is it compatible with PCs?" ohhh puleeeez. As the lone Mac user in the company about 4 years ago, I was constantly opening and resaving documents for PC users that were created by other PC users. PCs aren't even compatible with PCs... but I digress.
The point... the point... uhhh... The point is that Microsoft did a lot of lobbying and marketing to the voting body of SMPTE to get VC-1 ratified and did the same to the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps to get accepted there. I believe the HD-DVD camp saw Microsoft as the only savior for an otherwise anemic offering and the Blu-Ray camp is probably just hedging their bets. They know that Microsoft wedges themselves into relationships which may eventually dictate something silly, like all of Hollywood using VC-1 exclusively for all released movies. If Blu-Ray didn't have VC-1 and that happened, they'd be out in the cold. Fear probably kept Blu-Ray in line.
I'm hoping above all hope that Hollywood recognizes Microsoft as plotting to erect toll booths between them and consumers if there's an
There was lots of paper thrown across the table between the different camps on whether the VC-1 codec would be a required inclusion in the Blu-Ray standard as opposed to optional. I stopped looking at the SMPTE discussions out of disgust right around the time VC-1 was ratified (railroad job to be sure), so I don't know which way it landed. Reading your link confirmed my worst fears.
Consumers are still stupid cows, herd mentality and all. They will kick and scream over having choices in the market place but whenever two competing formats meet head to head, they will wait until one of them dies, even root for it - leaving no choices, stagnant competition and price gouging. The winner is usually the better marketeer (pronounced 'liar') with the crudely inferior product (see Betamax vs VHS, Macintosh vs Windows etc etc). They'll buy whatever Wal-Mart sells. Adding Microsoft to the mix, as the best 'marketeers' on the planet, makes it far more treacherous for the future of the winning format. Just put a little lipstick on the pig and the herd will buy it.
Before I get flamed on my above choices of superior technology, I'll say the degrees of superiority may be thin but still present. In the case of Betamax vs VHS, that was herd mentality all the way. The reason VHS initially gained so much ground is not the movie length problem, it was blank tapes which cost $24.00 U.S. each. Of course you want to get as much recording time as possible at that price, even at the expense of a viewable picture. Movie length was solved quickly with Beta-II, still a better picture than VHS. Video recorders were bought because Billy-Bob had one and that's good enough reason.
The VHS camp almost lost the show when Betamax sprouted Hi-Fi channels. Consumers did notice and VHS couldn't technically match that stunt for a year. The technology to do [inferior] Hi-Fi on VHS increased manufacturing costs with more complex video heads and leveled the pricing playing field. A year after that, SuperBeta Hi-Fi offered a noticable 20% image sharpness advantage and all the VHS camp could do is trot out VHS-HQ with (marketing speak) '20% higher quality'. In fact it wasn't anywhere close to what Betamax could was doing (it was just relaxing the white video clipping) but it was enough for the herd to buy into the lie.. er.. marketing and believe they made the right choice.
Just a note, the last consumer Betamax was made in 2002, so it was a good ride anyway.
This is great. Everyone is arguing about physical media. That has the least to do with anything. It's what is encoded on it and who gets paid for it
Microsoft watched helplessly from the sideline as the world walked right past Windows Media Player as the next distribution "standard". The format wars are here because of the delays of H.264/MPEG4 tweeking and a little of getting AVCHD to work. They took way too long turd polishing those codecs and opened a window for a competitor.
Using that time, Microsoft had two years to work very hard and FINALLY allowed their proprietary codec to be separated from Windows Media to get published as a SMPTE standard called VC-1. Now that VC-1 was a viable, published standard, manufacturers would consider using it. After testing, everyone who had seen H.264 rejected VC-1 as being measurably worse at the same data rate. However, Microsoft talked the floundering HD-DVD consortium into requiring it on their disks. The Blu-Ray people told them to bugger off - nobody trusted Microsoft on that side of the isle, especially after a very high level meeting between Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft yelled at Sony for ignoring the obvious next standard, Windows Media. Sony [puzzled by the assumption] replied that it wasn't a standard so stop yelling at me, and they walked out. That went back and forth but that's the reason Microsoft supports HD-DVD and the ONLY reason it's even on the radar screen today. Otherwise, HD-DVD would have already slipped away quietly.
Now, Microsoft has a foothold in a future physical media market and can exert control over it to some degree, eventually turning HD-DVD into an anti-consumer profit engine for Microsoft and everyone who supported them. In exchange, HD-DVD, if it succeeds, will migrate toward the most restrictive iron fisted format that Hollywood could hope for - just like Microsoft promised them.
Physical media is all moot anyway with downloadable movies happening now. Pay per play will be the future because the people who profit from it are writing the laws we will be living under without opposition. Proof that consumers are stupid cows.
A cop friend told me the poorest people in the worst part of town always had the biggest TV they could get. It wasn't about picture quality or prestige - they were just harder to steal.
For the same reason that so many people use Macs instead of Windows. If everything was so complete and wonderful on the Windows side, Macs and Linux (and Irix and Solaris etc) wouldn't be necessary at all. So, yes, there is a void to be filled on any platform. This particular void comes from the specific Windows-only applications which Mac owners wish to run. With virtualization, the end result quite often (for those who try it) is Windows users choose to own a Mac and run whatever the hell they want on a single machine. I've seen that repeated many times where I work. New people come in puzzled over our mixed platform environment, ask out loud why we have Macs at all and wind up buying one themselves before the year is out. Eventually, Windows itself could become irrelevant as long as the apps keep running. That's called very subtle but brilliant marketing, a fact that isn't lost on Microsoft who is very busily sealing off those avenues of attrition.
Example: my father in law is a contractor and had a four year old XP machine. My mother in law is a Mac OS X user. In the last year, my father in law started noticing the contrast between the Mac and Windows experience. Two months ago, he drop kicked his XP machine and bought an Intel Core2 Duo iMac. Now, he uses Crossover to load all the bullshit CD-ROMs he picks up at Home Depot. He's got all his Windows based framing calculators and load calculators running on his iMac under virtualization - no Windows required. Sure, all that stuff can be had as Mac native apps or even Java apps online, but that's not what's on those CD-ROMs. Not everything works under Crossover, so I find an app that works natively and load that. Point being it isn't a handicap that he doesn't use Windows and he's much happier with his Mac.
Code writers bother, alright. So far, every function I've wanted to do on a Mac has bunches of software available. Some commercial, some open source, some shareware and some just plain free. Now, there aren't 2,000 different pieces of software that do that same thing like in the Windows world but there's certainly no shortage of native Mac apps and all it takes is a few good choices. No worries there. If it's a worthy function, someone is going to make it Mac native.
"my last computer purchase was a mac. the retarded one button mouse makes it unusable as a laptop in class. its slow. its hot. its fragile. it needs to constantly be plugged into the wall. its breaking after under 2 years of usage"
We stopped using the G3 Wallstreets a long time ago
Seriously, our experience is quite the opposite. I don't know what you do with your machines but I've deployed Dell Inspirons, ThinkPads, HP somethings, iBooks and PowerBooks over the last few years. The sample size is in the dozens of laptops. Before two years was up, all the Dells were on the junk pile and the ThinkPads (which mostly still worked) were rejected in favor of the Apple machines. None of the Dells survived a drink spill but several spills into PowerBooks did not damage the machine. Just let it dry overnight and get back to work. The ThinkPads were too clunky and nobody liked them. After 3 years of deployment, only a single HP laptop is still being used and the rest are all the original iBooks and PowerBooks. The HP can't be left in a car in the winter because it won't boot until it's room temperature. Even then, you may have to bend the chassis a little to get it to start. Now, our oldest Mac laptops are 4 years old and we still haven't lost any to failures.
You don't have to worry about me buying an app that only runs under virtualization. I'll just wait until one of your competitors comes out with a native Mac version. It will work better, look better, integrate better and probably kick your ass for features.
After looking at all the brain bending going on here, I'll second the motion to use a Mac with an iSight (built-in or not) and iChat. Sorry, it's not expensive, difficult or proprietary (NetMeeting, indeed) but that doesn't mean it's no good (I know how you people think!). It's so easy, I use this system with my inlaws, for chrissake.
We have two offices and I set up one of these rigs in each of the public areas with essentially an "open mic". It was sort of the "window to the other world". After a day or two of people showing off in front of the camera, it turned into a walkup window to ask questions and get work done. It's not heavily used but it has brought a good social understanding of the two offices closer together. Each of the Macs were set to auto-answer an iChat call (open the terminal on the Mac and put in the following:
Of course, put a zero at the end of the statements to undo the hack. The link seldom went down and was easy to reconnect. It's a cheap cheap cheap but fabulous solution. Bandwidth is limited to 200Kbits on purpose and plays well with our T1 connection. Just do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, you said it Chewie. Was this Vista and Exchange bit written by the King of VARs, Ben Dover?
Can't talk much about the other products but - sheesh - putting Vista and Exchange on ANY list as a "Best Of.." makes me want to puke. Worse, whoever reads that e-rag will have it stuck in their head "...it says right here that Vista is the best of the best of the best.." ... I just puked again; sorry.
They advertise a Podcast on there! I'm surprised they know what that is. Methinks they have their heads in the sand.
Congrats to Kim Brand for FileEngine making the list. At least some writers at the e-rag are doing their job.
I love Windows because it solidly keeps me in a job!
At home, I use a Mac and enjoy it quite a bit. The only thing I can't run on my Mac are all the Windows exploits and issues I fix at work every day.
You are an exception. 99.3% of all Windows users have no concept of "little windows strewn about" (verified by Netcraft). They think there's something wrong when more than one window is showing, so I'll modify my pronouncement and say it's a "Typical Windows User's Thing", even though Windows itself insists on maximizing EVERYTHING. It's hilarious to see a new Mac user with his new 20" iMac saying "how can I fill the screen with this?" - and it's only an email compose window or a browser window where most of it turns into white space anyway.
Wheeee!!! Thanks for the tip on Amnesty Singles.
Yeah... what HE said. Even car makers work to make controls dissimilar on the dashboard so you don't get them mixed up. If everyone is a creature of habit (and clearly everyone here is based on all the bitching on how a UI should be arranged to suit themselves) you really WANT buttons to move around between apps or you'll just blindly click something unintended.
Maximizing windows is, well, a Windows thing. That's probably the first habit to break for new Mac users coming from Windows. If Windows didn't maximize everything, new Mac users would "get" drag and drop faster.
oh... you said that...
Biggest problem with switchers is they try to use their Windows chops.
Highlight the file/folder and hit return.
- Invoke the "manage widgets" bar.
- drag one (calculator?) into the widgets field.
- Keep holding the mouse button and hit F-12.
- Let go.
All the widgets disappear except for the one stuck to the end of your mouse pointer. Just be ready to have the widget float on top of everything and let it be swept away next time you look at all your other widgets. It's good for temporary use but I agree with the premise of using widgets as apps."Look at the trends here"
Yes, there was a massive spike last Xmas that hasn't been exceeded during the 11.5 months that followed. Indeed, if you draw a line from that peak to the present, iTunes queries are down from a year ago. It's proof positive - especially if you don't know a fucking thing about statistics!!
I can't find my ass with both hands around statistics and even I can see what's wrong with Forrester's report. So, Forrester my ass.
He may really have meant "ingineering"
Huge problem is "default" installs - everyone knows where your sample scripts are. Delete those first thing then move/rename the active libraries.
Now, where's that Ruby book?
Yeah, well I'm an elitist Apple user and I take offence/offense to your sig. Get those damned potatoes out of my soup and put in some carrots and celery instead.
"I actually don't think Microsoft is really all that great at marketing..."
One word answer - "Ballmer". Makes me cringe but when he shoots his mouth off about something, even if it's total bullshit, people listen and react like it's true. That's marketing power for you.
Frankly, I think Microsoft is a marketing company first, a combative litigous bully second and a technical innovator as a distant third. They've had great success marketing crap software to the point where most people believe Microsoft software to be as good as it can possibly get. "Where Do You Want To Go Today?" Now, there's a feel good slogan that should read "Who Do We Want To Enslave Today?". Those Microsoft TV ads showing kids playing around and the white sketchy outlines expanding their world just make we want to jump into the TV and save them all.
Clearly, all the innovations available on the planet are built into Windows. Just ask any office drone. The Internet is the Big Blue "E" and email is Outlook and you have to use Window Media Player to see video, don't you? Ask them to use Firefox or Thunderbird and they think you've got a screw loose. AOL achieved the same thing for millions of poor schmucks who still have no idea there's life outside of AOL. Even computer "professionals" (like the I.T. department at Discovery Channel) are constantly trying to ban QuickTime from anything involving digital media in their workflow in favor of Windows Media. OMFG! QuickTime is the crown jewel of media and they can't or won't see it.
Microsoft uses buzzwords with great effect. Businesses and consumers just eat it up. "Introducing the 2007 Microsoft Office System: Amplify the Impact of Your People" and "Optimize Your Core Infrastructure: Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility, Protect Information and Control Access" (all from Microsoft literature and seminars). People who don't know they've just been hoodwinked swallow this stuff whole. Even after saying "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" to someone, you have to explain that the "Advantage" is all in Microsoft's favor - and they think you're lying to them!
To your point that Microsoft isn't very good at marketing, I'd say that it isn't sticking as well as it used to. That's somewhere in the middle of our positions and rings true for me. The greater public is sick of problems, exploits, spyware etc and would switch from Windows if there was a viable alternative. EXCUSE ME? The ghost of Microsoft Marketing lives on. "Go visit your local Apple Store" is my advice. There's one literally across the street from where I work. The newbies that I've taken over there have their jaw on the floor within 15 minutes of showing them around. I've probably sold about 60 Macs that way. They had no idea and, to a person, they've come back multiple times to thank me for releasing them from the grip of Windows. The first question asked is a sales point long driven home by Microsoft subliminal marketing that strikes fear into every PC user - "is it compatible with PCs?" ohhh puleeeez. As the lone Mac user in the company about 4 years ago, I was constantly opening and resaving documents for PC users that were created by other PC users. PCs aren't even compatible with PCs... but I digress.
The point... the point... uhhh... The point is that Microsoft did a lot of lobbying and marketing to the voting body of SMPTE to get VC-1 ratified and did the same to the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps to get accepted there. I believe the HD-DVD camp saw Microsoft as the only savior for an otherwise anemic offering and the Blu-Ray camp is probably just hedging their bets. They know that Microsoft wedges themselves into relationships which may eventually dictate something silly, like all of Hollywood using VC-1 exclusively for all released movies. If Blu-Ray didn't have VC-1 and that happened, they'd be out in the cold. Fear probably kept Blu-Ray in line.
I'm hoping above all hope that Hollywood recognizes Microsoft as plotting to erect toll booths between them and consumers if there's an
There was lots of paper thrown across the table between the different camps on whether the VC-1 codec would be a required inclusion in the Blu-Ray standard as opposed to optional. I stopped looking at the SMPTE discussions out of disgust right around the time VC-1 was ratified (railroad job to be sure), so I don't know which way it landed. Reading your link confirmed my worst fears.
Consumers are still stupid cows, herd mentality and all. They will kick and scream over having choices in the market place but whenever two competing formats meet head to head, they will wait until one of them dies, even root for it - leaving no choices, stagnant competition and price gouging. The winner is usually the better marketeer (pronounced 'liar') with the crudely inferior product (see Betamax vs VHS, Macintosh vs Windows etc etc). They'll buy whatever Wal-Mart sells. Adding Microsoft to the mix, as the best 'marketeers' on the planet, makes it far more treacherous for the future of the winning format. Just put a little lipstick on the pig and the herd will buy it.
Before I get flamed on my above choices of superior technology, I'll say the degrees of superiority may be thin but still present. In the case of Betamax vs VHS, that was herd mentality all the way. The reason VHS initially gained so much ground is not the movie length problem, it was blank tapes which cost $24.00 U.S. each. Of course you want to get as much recording time as possible at that price, even at the expense of a viewable picture. Movie length was solved quickly with Beta-II, still a better picture than VHS. Video recorders were bought because Billy-Bob had one and that's good enough reason.
The VHS camp almost lost the show when Betamax sprouted Hi-Fi channels. Consumers did notice and VHS couldn't technically match that stunt for a year. The technology to do [inferior] Hi-Fi on VHS increased manufacturing costs with more complex video heads and leveled the pricing playing field. A year after that, SuperBeta Hi-Fi offered a noticable 20% image sharpness advantage and all the VHS camp could do is trot out VHS-HQ with (marketing speak) '20% higher quality'. In fact it wasn't anywhere close to what Betamax could was doing (it was just relaxing the white video clipping) but it was enough for the herd to buy into the lie.. er.. marketing and believe they made the right choice.
Just a note, the last consumer Betamax was made in 2002, so it was a good ride anyway.
This is great. Everyone is arguing about physical media. That has the least to do with anything. It's what is encoded on it and who gets paid for it
Microsoft watched helplessly from the sideline as the world walked right past Windows Media Player as the next distribution "standard". The format wars are here because of the delays of H.264/MPEG4 tweeking and a little of getting AVCHD to work. They took way too long turd polishing those codecs and opened a window for a competitor.
Using that time, Microsoft had two years to work very hard and FINALLY allowed their proprietary codec to be separated from Windows Media to get published as a SMPTE standard called VC-1. Now that VC-1 was a viable, published standard, manufacturers would consider using it. After testing, everyone who had seen H.264 rejected VC-1 as being measurably worse at the same data rate. However, Microsoft talked the floundering HD-DVD consortium into requiring it on their disks. The Blu-Ray people told them to bugger off - nobody trusted Microsoft on that side of the isle, especially after a very high level meeting between Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft yelled at Sony for ignoring the obvious next standard, Windows Media. Sony [puzzled by the assumption] replied that it wasn't a standard so stop yelling at me, and they walked out. That went back and forth but that's the reason Microsoft supports HD-DVD and the ONLY reason it's even on the radar screen today. Otherwise, HD-DVD would have already slipped away quietly.
Now, Microsoft has a foothold in a future physical media market and can exert control over it to some degree, eventually turning HD-DVD into an anti-consumer profit engine for Microsoft and everyone who supported them. In exchange, HD-DVD, if it succeeds, will migrate toward the most restrictive iron fisted format that Hollywood could hope for - just like Microsoft promised them.
Physical media is all moot anyway with downloadable movies happening now. Pay per play will be the future because the people who profit from it are writing the laws we will be living under without opposition. Proof that consumers are stupid cows.
A cop friend told me the poorest people in the worst part of town always had the biggest TV they could get. It wasn't about picture quality or prestige - they were just harder to steal.
For the same reason that so many people use Macs instead of Windows. If everything was so complete and wonderful on the Windows side, Macs and Linux (and Irix and Solaris etc) wouldn't be necessary at all. So, yes, there is a void to be filled on any platform. This particular void comes from the specific Windows-only applications which Mac owners wish to run. With virtualization, the end result quite often (for those who try it) is Windows users choose to own a Mac and run whatever the hell they want on a single machine. I've seen that repeated many times where I work. New people come in puzzled over our mixed platform environment, ask out loud why we have Macs at all and wind up buying one themselves before the year is out. Eventually, Windows itself could become irrelevant as long as the apps keep running. That's called very subtle but brilliant marketing, a fact that isn't lost on Microsoft who is very busily sealing off those avenues of attrition.
Example: my father in law is a contractor and had a four year old XP machine. My mother in law is a Mac OS X user. In the last year, my father in law started noticing the contrast between the Mac and Windows experience. Two months ago, he drop kicked his XP machine and bought an Intel Core2 Duo iMac. Now, he uses Crossover to load all the bullshit CD-ROMs he picks up at Home Depot. He's got all his Windows based framing calculators and load calculators running on his iMac under virtualization - no Windows required. Sure, all that stuff can be had as Mac native apps or even Java apps online, but that's not what's on those CD-ROMs. Not everything works under Crossover, so I find an app that works natively and load that. Point being it isn't a handicap that he doesn't use Windows and he's much happier with his Mac.
Code writers bother, alright. So far, every function I've wanted to do on a Mac has bunches of software available. Some commercial, some open source, some shareware and some just plain free. Now, there aren't 2,000 different pieces of software that do that same thing like in the Windows world but there's certainly no shortage of native Mac apps and all it takes is a few good choices. No worries there. If it's a worthy function, someone is going to make it Mac native.
"Awesome work ethic you got goin' there dude."
I agree.
Why would I buy anything from a bad attitude software supplier?
For charity?
Out of good will?
Beware of indignant responses from your former user base.
"my last computer purchase was a mac. the retarded one button mouse makes it unusable as a laptop in class. its slow. its hot. its fragile. it needs to constantly be plugged into the wall. its breaking after under 2 years of usage"
We stopped using the G3 Wallstreets a long time ago
Seriously, our experience is quite the opposite. I don't know what you do with your machines but I've deployed Dell Inspirons, ThinkPads, HP somethings, iBooks and PowerBooks over the last few years. The sample size is in the dozens of laptops. Before two years was up, all the Dells were on the junk pile and the ThinkPads (which mostly still worked) were rejected in favor of the Apple machines. None of the Dells survived a drink spill but several spills into PowerBooks did not damage the machine. Just let it dry overnight and get back to work. The ThinkPads were too clunky and nobody liked them. After 3 years of deployment, only a single HP laptop is still being used and the rest are all the original iBooks and PowerBooks. The HP can't be left in a car in the winter because it won't boot until it's room temperature. Even then, you may have to bend the chassis a little to get it to start. Now, our oldest Mac laptops are 4 years old and we still haven't lost any to failures.
Thanks for playing.
You don't have to worry about me buying an app that only runs under virtualization. I'll just wait until one of your competitors comes out with a native Mac version. It will work better, look better, integrate better and probably kick your ass for features.
Very few people I know want to run Windows. They just want to run Windows apps. Two different things.
After looking at all the brain bending going on here, I'll second the motion to use a Mac with an iSight (built-in or not) and iChat. Sorry, it's not expensive, difficult or proprietary (NetMeeting, indeed) but that doesn't mean it's no good (I know how you people think!). It's so easy, I use this system with my inlaws, for chrissake.
We have two offices and I set up one of these rigs in each of the public areas with essentially an "open mic". It was sort of the "window to the other world". After a day or two of people showing off in front of the camera, it turned into a walkup window to ask questions and get work done. It's not heavily used but it has brought a good social understanding of the two offices closer together. Each of the Macs were set to auto-answer an iChat call (open the terminal on the Mac and put in the following:
defaults write com.apple.ichat AutoAcceptVCInvitations 1
defaults write com.apple.ichat AutoAcceptACInvitations 1
Of course, put a zero at the end of the statements to undo the hack. The link seldom went down and was easy to reconnect. It's a cheap cheap cheap but fabulous solution. Bandwidth is limited to 200Kbits on purpose and plays well with our T1 connection. Just do it.
That's a nifty little gizmo they've got there, but I can track iPods just as easily by looking for white earphones.