Re: Apple advertisement

[sheldon@atlcom.net (Sheldon Simms)]

In article
<NOSPAM***bjbear-ya023680002402971728280001@news-s01.ca.us.ibm.net>,
NOSPAM***bjbear@ibm.net (B.J. Major & Dennis J. Gorin) wrote:

> It never ceases to amaze me that PC owners continually scoff at the Mac,
> only to be so short sighted not to realize that their own computer would
> not be what it is today if it were not for the Mac.

That's not really true. Even if the Mac (and Lisa) had never been many
of it's features would have appeared eventually. The thing that's really
stupid, and that I have seen consistently among PC users who are not
particularly technically literate is the derogation of some feature of
Macs and then when the same thing appears for PCs it's "awesome", "cool",
or whatever.

This started with the GUI itself. I can't count how many PC people I knew
who said they'd never use a Mac because of the stupid mouse and windows,
etc... "can't get any work done for all the fluff", etc. Yet when Windows
3.0 appeared who were the first ones in line?

Then it was, "who cares if the Mac can do all that sound stuff? my PC is
a business machine." and a few years later... "This rad soundblaster is
much better than any old Mac!"

And so on and so on. Similar things still happen. I know PC users who
claimed that they couldn't use a Mac because PC CPUs were faster. Now
there are PowerMacs faster than any Pentium, Pentium Pro, MMX, or
whatever PC. All of the sudden that's not important anymore.

None of these things excuses Apple for the mistakes they've made and their
failure to significantly improve the OS. However, even that last failing
is somewhat excusable for another reason. Apple has been committed to
backward compatibility in it's Mac software for a long time. A PowerMac
running System 7.6 can run many programs that were written for the
original three Macs (128, fat, plus. A PowerMac's ability to seamlessly
run 68k applications is a technical achievement of the highest order.

Apple could easily have started from scratch and written a brand new OS
in a year or two. However, rewriting the OS and maintaining compatibility
has proved to be a task more complex that most anyone could have
imagined.

It is only my guess, but I think that Microsoft may well have intentionally
done what they could to cause Apple trouble in this regard. Microsoft is
fairly well known for deliberately flouting good Mac programming style in
their applications - that is they go to the hardware, they use their own
routines instead of Mac toolbox routines, etc. Apple may well have ended
up faced with the decision of upgrading the OS and breaking all Microsoft
apps, and not upgrading the OS.

-- 
W. Sheldon Simms III   |   2000 is *still* the 20th century
sheldon@atlcom.net     |