On Dec 15, 2003, at 05:28 am, Kyle Hansen wrote:
That was over years ago. And it wasn't an agreement to oversee. It was a
payment from Microsoft in settlement to Apple if you read the legalese.
From what I remember there was *yet another* dispute between Gates & Jobs last year which resulted in MS stopping I.E. development (probably in protest against Safari - not the best strategy I could of come up with!!) and also threatening to cease development of all other applications and packages for the Mac. The latter obviously never stuck as the new version of Office is due out Q1 2004 and they bought up the rights to Virtual PC and have v6.1 on the shelves. However nothing MS has done on the PC that copies or plagiarises the Mac OS and it's associated Software has come about in anything like a time scale I would associate with any sort of 'insider knowledge'. Take CD Burning in XP, it came out with OS X on the Mac in March 2001 and didn't turn up on the PC until October the same year, and all it was was a copy of a cut-down Roxio EastCD creator API and a 'built-in' interface - a classic MS 'shortcut'.
I have always found these conversations silly. Microsoft is a software company.
Apple is a Hardware *and* software company.
Although I hate to point the obvious out to learn'ed sages like Kyle - that means they have at least 1 thing in common :-)
Also don't forget that, although MS has no PC manufacturing portion per-se, they do have a lot of force in the PC world (due to being monopolising and manipulative - did I hear a lawyer?) as to what gives. Going back to the Athlon/Intel/G5 argument, this will be critical in the 'great split' I foresee in the PC world. If MS go one way and one way only the other side will die out. Say for instance they support AMD and not Intel, that would cause a war as they have supported Intel since other CPU makers got a grip on the market. Interestingly maybe MS are hoping Intel's 64-bit effort is better than AMDs (entirely possible as they have a lot of advanced ARM/RISC technology up their sleeves!) as if it is not they may have dug their own hole in the ground...
'Tis also an odd paradpx that MS's biggest hardware market is in a n area where Apple have always, IMHO, fallen flat on their face. Human Interface. With the exception of a few of Apple's keyboards, don't y'all think by now we could have a mouse with 2 buttons and a scroll-wheel that fits in your hand a bit better? What about a wireless keyboard and mouse that use non-bluetooth high speed wireless (for those of us that have to move the mouse at near-light speeds for whatever purpose).
I could write about this for weeks... I'll stop now :-)
Apple Computers work as well as
they do because Apple controls the hardware and writes the OS an lots of
accompanying software. They aren't even comparable.
Re: my previous paragraph, MS don't do it very well, in fact nearly as well as they could. If they identified a manufacturer that was causing wide-spread heartache due to non-compliant hardware they could threaten to write them out of Windows :-)
You might scoff, but I bet Apple would do it with third party stuff for the Mac (I know it's different but you get the idea!)...
In Microsoft's defense I am surprised that their OS's are as good as they
are (referring to 2000, NT and XP..not 98 or 95, they suck). They have to
write an OS that can literally have an infinite number of hardware
configurations. It's madness.
Can you explain then why the Explorer (the Windows eqv. of Finder for those non-Windows guys) crashes routinely at least 6 times a day on my PC at work? No, exactly neither can I, I just concluded it's either the PC (works fine at home - virtually never crashes - then again i spent �675 on the essential parts of mine!!)
Madness it may be but...
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