Cote: if only good luck getting the time of day from them - i can’t even get responses to inquiries.

Mike: i’ve been making the Apple “really missed an opportunity to hurt Microsoft by restricting OS X to their hardware” argument for years. frankly, that’s the primary reason i won’t run it. i like their hardware, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a much smaller ecosystem of parts and so on.

i usually get two responses to that assertion:

1. support/qa (to which i usually respond - their qa can’t be great given their so-so build quality, but whatever) - and frankly, this is a legitimate issue. one of the most difficult tasks for any operating system - Windows, Linux or OS X - is the hardware support. everyone builds for Windows, OS X has a much smaller focus, and Linux has a wide community. but still, i don’t see this as an insurmountable problem.

2. they’re a hardware manufacturer, and can’t jeopardize those revenues. to which i usually reply, you’re absolutely right - they are a hardware company. they’re just protecting the wrong piece of hardware.

So… this project dragged on forever. Was a nightmare for everyone on the team. Then we got beta releases of OS X (Cheetah I think it was for). What a difference - it was like Apple took my Caldera eDesktop 2.4 Linux (or whatever distro I was on at the time)and just made it absolutely stunning. Sure they had many kinks to fix, but the changes were fantasic compared to 9. With OS X based on Unix, we found an open source app for Linux that nearly fit the bill for what we were trying to write natively to OS 9 and bam - we had an answer. Took the Linux app, fixed some of the bugs compiling it on OS X (a BSD variant I think), and by the time OS X 10.1 came out we launched with a really cool application that also brought along tons of services/migration revenue for our firm upgrading all the desktops/servers to OS X
I used OS X from then on until I went into grad school and got back into straight linux again. I miss OS X a bit - even stop by the NYC Apple store just to look at the new stuff - but like Mark points out… why go back to closed apps, closed file formats, and proprietary hardware?? I like the fact that I can put an mbox dir out on a network drive and access it from Windows or Linux.

Apple had a killer desktop OS - Linux is catching up fast. Anyone using the latest Gnome (and a little XGL) can see the pathway is there. It won’t be long and Apple sure doesn’t have the volumes to support major investments in OS X, iTunes, and iCrappola that it tries to hook people onto.

Here’s a thought - what if Apple actually supported OS X on all hardware - or at least major vendors like Dell? Hmmm…. I thought OS X would have been a great way to kill Windows XP as an open source tactic. Oh well…

If only there were some firm they could hire to tell them how to build community with that group, and many other types of groups… ;>

http://www.alexking.org/blog/2006/06/19/mac-software/