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Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2006-08-12 11:34:39
an interesting theory got slashdotted today.. one of the main arguments in the article (and the one i'm interested in) is that jobs is deliberately not announcing leopard features to prevent the 4th quarter sales from dropping. makes sense to me.. i'm sure jobs is aware of the osborne effect (which ironically turned out to be a myth in that particular case) and doesn't want to kill current sales as consumers decide to wait for leopard.
also, more long term thoughts: it seems like windows and mac are getting closer and closer not just in terms of features, but in terms of public perception, which is more important. i think that in the not-too-distant-future, people are going to wake up and realize that windows isn't their only option in terms of operating systems. the bad news, of course, is that they're going to think mac and windows are their only options, and by that point mac and windows will be so similar that it won't really matter what they think. linux is also slowly moving closer to the same feature set, so eventually we're going to end up with three operating systems that are the average of the windows, mac, and linux.
the problem here, again, is choice. when all the options end up being the same, consumer choice gets limited and everybody suffers. that'll be the point where somebody gets severely dissatisfied with their options, has a revolutionary idea, and presto! a new innovative OS is born. lather, rinse, repeat...
the main problem here (other than the fact that i'm bored because bus schedules aren't optimized for me), is that people and/or corporations are greedy. each of windows, mac, and linux had, in the not-too-distant-past, a distinct group of users. linux had the free-as-in-freedom crowd, mac had the eye-candy people, and windows had the people who just wanted to use their computer (not really, but you get the picture). the linux developers wanted to get everybody else using their platform, apple wanted to get everybody else using their platform, and windows wanted to keep everybody from switching. so they started copying features and techniques and methodologies from the other systems in the hope that they would attract the other groups of users. given that the groups of users are different, it makes sense that they want different things. no one operating system is going to satisfy all of them, and the "average" operating system (i.e. averaged from windows, mac, and linux) is going to satisfy nobody at all.
oh well, such are the lessons we learn, over and over and over.
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