The Size of Microsoft vs Apple by market cap

[Kintaro]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+market+cap+%2Fmsft+market+cap

It looks like Apple have secured enough investment to catch up on Microsoft after all these years.

[Refalm]

And here's the funniest part:
Macworld Boston 1997-The Microsoft Deal

Microsoft gave Apple a financial injection at the time, since they saw a market in providing Office and Internet Explorer on Macs.
And of course having Internet Explorer as the default browser on the Mac gave Microsoft that warm and fuzzy "ownage" feeling.

[Aloone_Jonez]

They still sell MS Office for Mac.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office2008/default.mspx

The only thing they dropped was IE which is probably not a bad thing. They probably realised that they couldn't compete with alternatives such as Safari.

[worker201]

More like they realized that if somebody was going to download a browser to compete with the one that comes preinstalled on a machine, it sure as fuck wouldn't be a piece of trash like IE.

[Refalm]

Also the iPod saved Apple. I know tons of people that had old laptops, wanted a new one, and got a MacBook.
Just a few years ago, there where silly preconceptions about Apple hardware, but now people see the iPod and want that same user experience on a laptop or desktop.

[worker201]

I do know a lot of people who went to Mac because they really liked their iPods.  But I also know a lot of people who went to Mac because the colored iMacs and iBooks changed their perceptions about what a computer was supposed to look like, which had a real effect on their relationship with their computers.  And there's also a bunch of people who just got sick of the hassle with antivirus and spyware and went with the other OS that can run Microsoft Office.

I personally switched because it was the best system to get both Adobe Illustrator and a *nix CLI, but stayed because Aqua/Quartz is so beautiful.

[Kintaro]

I am stuck with Windows IE 8.0 for as long as I am stuck with Vectorvest. I've tried it under Crossover Office but the browser crashes a hell of a lot. Vectorvest is a very unique bit of software but is written by simpletons in the form of some odd visual basic browser plugin and ASP on the server side. This software is incredibly old and because Microsoft maintains a reasonably stable ABI, Vectorvest never need to change it. Microsoft's long term dominance seems to be less about embrace, extend, extinguish these days are more about: comfort developers, maintain support until the end of time itself, and allow them to never change anything.

When you already can avoid keeping up with Windows releases as much as possible, would you even bother with the effort of porting to another platform? From a business perspective it means taking on an expense of keeping up to date with things (or apt and version changes will simply outgrow the product that uses ooold libs) that the same people won't need to do with Windows.

Not all Windows programs have this luxury. Browsers tend to need to keep up with Windows (independent taskbar thumbnails per tab, on 7 for example). Opera has to keep up with Qt because for a long time it used Qt 1.3 and just about everything even the usually ancient debian lenny uses Qt-2.0. This made it slower to release 10.3 on Linux. This here is the problem, the downstream tards at just about every distro never consider the benefit of keeping older libs, especially when there is no conflict in having this backwards compatibility any more.

I think Microsoft will sit on Windows 7 for a while and maintain compatibility with it in anything they release in a future. Some of the games and software of today in a decade could keep people using Windows as the dominant OS for a long time to come.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I am stuck with Windows IE 8.0 for as long as I am stuck with Vectorvest. I've tried it under Crossover Office but the browser crashes a hell of a lot. Vectorvest is a very unique bit of software but is written by simpletons in the form of some odd visual basic browser plugin and ASP on the server side. This software is incredibly old and because Microsoft maintains a reasonably stable ABI, Vectorvest never need to change it. Microsoft's long term dominance seems to be less about embrace, extend, extinguish these days are more about: comfort developers, maintain support until the end of time itself, and allow them to never change anything.

I bet it requires IE 6 compatibility mode to be enabled to ay?

Yes that's shit, as you know, lots of sites no longer support IE 6 now.

Not all Windows programs have this luxury. Browsers tend to need to keep up with Windows (independent taskbar thumbnails per tab, on 7 for example). Opera has to keep up with Qt because for a long time it used Qt 1.3 and just about everything even the usually ancient debian lenny uses Qt-2.0. This made it slower to release 10.3 on Linux. This here is the problem, the downstream tards at just about every distro never consider the benefit of keeping older libs, especially when there is no conflict in having this backwards compatibility any more.

Why don't they simply bundle a copy of the older library with Opera?

I think Microsoft will sit on Windows 7 for a while and maintain compatibility with it in anything they release in a future. Some of the games and software of today in a decade could keep people using Windows as the dominant OS for a long time to come.

Very true, hell lots of modern software will still work on Windows 2000 and some will run fine on 9x.

[Kintaro]

No Internet Explorer 6 compatibility needed, they recommend IE8 because they made small changes so it works with tabs a bit nicer. Under Crossover IE6 won't run it at all, and IE8 just crashes. Never had it crash on Windows. Probably something different in cxoffices libraries.