Why Apple never achieves acceptance in the business world
Why Apple never achieves acceptance in the business world
While I could spend hours ranting about how craptastic OS9 and Apple's previous hardware was but that's like complaining about how poorly the dinosaurs lived. So let's get onto present and the past 4-5yrs.
Apple's biggest folly is their disregard for backward compatibility and their obsession on "innovate even if we have to abandon" motto. The thing I feel they also don't deliver on is the fact they don't even attempt to target their solutions towards business even when they have business grade products.
I also find it humorous that they confuse the end users by naming their current product (OS10) the same name as their server OS (OSX). I mean, did the OS10 team not even know about their companies other products? Ok Ok I digress....
So while it's not good enough that all previous mac software now has to run in a 2nd class emulated mode just to work in OS10, then Apple decides that after the Mac community has finally accepted OS10, they go and screw that up by changing their platform to a new x86 design. Ok well now every company will have to yet again rewrite their applications and for large applications this means some serious work. Hopefully their apps were well made and well abstracted to reduce the amount of work.
So yet another straw Apple as decided to abandon future Cocoa support in Java. Is it a travesty, not really, but it shows how wishy washy Apple is when it comes to their market. Until Apple can sit down and stabilize themselves, they will never be a serious contender in the computing world. Sometimes I think the ONLY reason they can stay in business is by gouging their customers by charging for service packs (that include a skin and a couple apps so they can pretend it's an OS upgrade) and enforcing hardware lock-in.
Don't get me wrong, I'll probably be sporting a G6 (or whatever they call their x86 based systems) with a dual boot to Longhorn and OS10.5 but then maybe I shouldn't waste my time with Apple if they are just going to sway so much.
Get a clue Apple, Microsoft wins because of their dedication to NON BREAKING CHANGES and the fact that even the oldest Win95 app still works. I will admit MS burnt some minor bridges when they jumped from dos to windows as older dos apps couldn't use their drivers over windows, and imho this is something MS still needs to address (I'd love to see DosBox get 1st party integration into Windows).
I still give credit for Apple for being the only company to put a decent UI over a *NIX (BSD, Linux, etc etc) kernel.