Please Shut the Fuck Up!

We know you like Mac, and you all want to suck Steve Jobs off, but enough is enough. You continually compare Apple and Microsoft and discuss how Microsoft is dying, yet you fail to realise that they are different companies with different core audiences. Let me repeat that: Apple and Microsoft are going after different people. While there may be overlap in some instances, Apple is a system designed for ultimate homogeneity from the hardware available right up to the GUI; everything fits together because they dictate that it must fit together. Microsoft is a software company; they definately have dipped into the hardware kitty from time to time and will probably try again but first and foremost they are a software company and they let hardware manufacturers worry about their shit.

Mac users haven’t had any issues whatsoever (that I can hear over the fanboy alarums) with constantly changing dependencies and program requirements; as far as I can tell, there isn’t even the concept of backwards compatability in the offices of Apple. While that doesn’t affect many people when the company releasing the OS updates all its programs and the fanboys obsessively update their software, Microsoft can’t rely on those sorts of software updates from its many software developers (developers, developers…). They make an OS with some basic apps and release a few other pieces of software that keep their business running, and they have done it and continue to do it well enough to create and maintain a market share virtual monopoly; however, they do not have complete control over the software in their OS and they don’t want to break many legacy DOS and Win95 apps that many of their business and governments customers may still require. Those customers are not zealots for the hardware and software they use, they use it to increase work flow and they do not want to have to rewrite an internal helper app every time the OS is updated. That is the key to Windows’ obsessive compulsion with backwards compatibility and support of legacy software (if only marginally). Mac doesn’t require this because they are not (in general) targeting the business sector. There are some offices that are Mac based – albeit considerably fewer than the Mac fanboys would choose to believe – but they have different needs than that of typical business.

(I’m now going to break the cardinal rule of denying something before I am accused thereby implicating the negation to be a falsehood but I can tell already what the response to this will be.) Now I’m not a Windows fanboy, in fact I’ve made repeated efforts to wean myself off of Windows and onto Linux, but this on-line Mac hysteria is absurd and I see no way of it stopping until Mac fanboys just accept that both Apple and Microsoft create and steal OS innovations and (gasp!) implement them differently. They both have a focus on making these new features usable for the end user, they just have different ideas about how the end user will use the product because they (sing it again with me) have different target audiences! So please Mac fanboys, grow up and stop being so defensive of your (and offensive to anyone else’s) systems.

PS: I apologize for the number of parenthetical asides in this post. Unless you came here to flame me for my neutral and pragmatic view of the world of OS zealotry.