As I’m not an MS geek, I couldn’t refute the headline any better than the article does.
3 Comments
It’s quite clear from the article that Microsoft still doesn’t get open source or the internet, neither of which it can simply “spin” away like some politician.
(Apple Fanboy mode on:)
Apple of course, got open source from the beginning. NeXT, and it’s decendant OS X, were always based on open source, and even Apple, though their source was not really open back then, published all the source code to their ROMs and operating system for the Apple II, in fact, originally it had them in the basic manuals that came with the system. (Later only the programmer’s manuals had them, but they were reasonably enough priced for any programmer, and available for sale at your local computer store.)
Of course, some portions of OS X are closed-source. I welcome Linux to duplicate them, and maybe they will! (Well, they’ve already beat Quicktime with VLC, but that wasn’t hard. 😉 Other than VLC”s interface on OS X, which is awful. (gtk+ doesn’t have a good OS X look-and-feel, though at least it doesn’t need X11… I wonder how hard it would be to make a Cocoa front-end for VLC, like Admium is with Pidgin’s libpurple, for example.) Snow Leopard’s Quicktime X will be a big improvement – it will be based on Quicktime on the iPhone, which I assume is probably highly optimized. It will probably be as good at VLC or better, at least on OS X.
(fanboy mode off:)
I still don’t think Apple knows how to make Windows software, iTunes and Quicktime on Windows are a steaming pile, not to mention Safari’s Windows interface. It’s no wonder they feel like they need to force people to download them! It really gives people a bad impression concerning them though, in more ways than one. Apple seems to be too arrogant sometimes, it’s almost as if they welcome bad press and have a “well, too bad that you’re using Windows with our software” attitude towards their Windows ports perhaps. If I were in charge of Apple, I’d want to knock Windows user’s socks off with my Windows ports, not give them a bad taste in their mouth from using them. (Of course, if I were in charge of Apple, I’d be a lot richer, and Apple would probably be a lot poorer from my lack of business management skills. 😉 )
Microsoft in the past didn’t have that problem at least, they wrote, in the past, good software for the Mac. (MS Office 2008 Mac is bug-ridden alpha software, with a lot of features that are important in the enterprise and for compatibility with Windows Office removed from the new version that were in the previous one! So much for Exell and Word being originally Macintosh products.)
One thing that open source mostly gets right is portability, though Open Office is, until the native 3.0 OO.o is released, a bit of a second-class citizen on the Mac. In order to have a native appearance and not have to run X11 also, you have to run NeoOffice instead, which is imperfect because it used Java for the Cocoa bridge I believe; though it is actually prettier than the OO.o beta. (I’ll switch though, from what I hear the beta is acceptable in appearance and it’ll be less of a hog and more stable than NeoOffice, though I never encountered bugs.)
Though actually at the present moment I’m using an open-source Cocoa program called Bean for word processing. It’s very nice, though not as featureful or compatible as OO.o. It’s basically a very powerful rich-text editor that even supports images, as well as a lot of pretty stuff. If I were back to writing academic papers, for example, it wouldn’t suit my needs at all; as it has no footnote support. (Well, you can make stuff that looks like them, I assume, but that’s not the same of course.) It’s a very small program though, the disk image is 2.2MB, that suits everything I do for this. It’s very Apple-esque, pleasant to use, and not bloated. (Well, Quicktime accepted. (See above.)) (Most of what it does is probably in the OS, since OS X has some text editor stuff in the library, among other things.))
Note that I made up for your brief blog-post by my long-winded reply. 😉
Thanks, I’m sure the extra verbiage was necessary. 😉
It’s quite clear from the article that Microsoft still doesn’t get open source or the internet, neither of which it can simply “spin” away like some politician.
(Apple Fanboy mode on:) Apple of course, got open source from the beginning. NeXT, and it’s decendant OS X, were always based on open source, and even Apple, though their source was not really open back then, published all the source code to their ROMs and operating system for the Apple II, in fact, originally it had them in the basic manuals that came with the system. (Later only the programmer’s manuals had them, but they were reasonably enough priced for any programmer, and available for sale at your local computer store.)
Of course, some portions of OS X are closed-source. I welcome Linux to duplicate them, and maybe they will! (Well, they’ve already beat Quicktime with VLC, but that wasn’t hard. 😉 Other than VLC”s interface on OS X, which is awful. (gtk+ doesn’t have a good OS X look-and-feel, though at least it doesn’t need X11… I wonder how hard it would be to make a Cocoa front-end for VLC, like Admium is with Pidgin’s libpurple, for example.) Snow Leopard’s Quicktime X will be a big improvement – it will be based on Quicktime on the iPhone, which I assume is probably highly optimized. It will probably be as good at VLC or better, at least on OS X. (fanboy mode off:)
I still don’t think Apple knows how to make Windows software, iTunes and Quicktime on Windows are a steaming pile, not to mention Safari’s Windows interface. It’s no wonder they feel like they need to force people to download them! It really gives people a bad impression concerning them though, in more ways than one. Apple seems to be too arrogant sometimes, it’s almost as if they welcome bad press and have a “well, too bad that you’re using Windows with our software” attitude towards their Windows ports perhaps. If I were in charge of Apple, I’d want to knock Windows user’s socks off with my Windows ports, not give them a bad taste in their mouth from using them. (Of course, if I were in charge of Apple, I’d be a lot richer, and Apple would probably be a lot poorer from my lack of business management skills. 😉 )
Microsoft in the past didn’t have that problem at least, they wrote, in the past, good software for the Mac. (MS Office 2008 Mac is bug-ridden alpha software, with a lot of features that are important in the enterprise and for compatibility with Windows Office removed from the new version that were in the previous one! So much for Exell and Word being originally Macintosh products.)
One thing that open source mostly gets right is portability, though Open Office is, until the native 3.0 OO.o is released, a bit of a second-class citizen on the Mac. In order to have a native appearance and not have to run X11 also, you have to run NeoOffice instead, which is imperfect because it used Java for the Cocoa bridge I believe; though it is actually prettier than the OO.o beta. (I’ll switch though, from what I hear the beta is acceptable in appearance and it’ll be less of a hog and more stable than NeoOffice, though I never encountered bugs.)
Though actually at the present moment I’m using an open-source Cocoa program called Bean for word processing. It’s very nice, though not as featureful or compatible as OO.o. It’s basically a very powerful rich-text editor that even supports images, as well as a lot of pretty stuff. If I were back to writing academic papers, for example, it wouldn’t suit my needs at all; as it has no footnote support. (Well, you can make stuff that looks like them, I assume, but that’s not the same of course.) It’s a very small program though, the disk image is 2.2MB, that suits everything I do for this. It’s very Apple-esque, pleasant to use, and not bloated. (Well, Quicktime accepted. (See above.)) (Most of what it does is probably in the OS, since OS X has some text editor stuff in the library, among other things.))
Note that I made up for your brief blog-post by my long-winded reply. 😉
Thanks, I’m sure the extra verbiage was necessary. 😉