Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Matt Peterson who wrote (21617)	1/4/1999 12:09:00 AM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213176

I am very skeptical of this talk of Linux integration. Let me explain why: 1) I hear a lot of comments like, "It's hard to believe that a group of hobbiests produced this." This represents a common mismapping of other engineering professions to computer science. In the end, one, talented, specialized and motivated engineer can produce software that 100 paid "professionals" cannot. If having 1000s of paid software engineers was all that matters, IBM would own the software industry. 2) As great as Linux is, it will never be a consumer OS in its current incarnation. Why? Because people seem to quickly forget that what adds value to the platform is the 3rd party applications. Good interface design is not something the system can impose on developed applications, it has to be designed in from the ground up. All that Linux software out there has been engineered without any semblance of UI guidelines (even Windows has more clear guidelines, although Microsoft doesn't always respect them or keep them constant year to year). What differentiates the Mac is the care and guidelines designed into Mac applications from the ground up. This is one of the reasons the Mac never ended up big in games - after all, every game has its own non-standard UI. Apple can manufacture machines that run Linux, but then they are just selling hardware competing on price performance with Intel and the PC Clones - not a great place to be. 3) If you make a Macintosh OS that runs Linux applications, those applications will not look or behave like Mac applications. At that point, the great usability of the Macintosh falls apart. It's like the old argument with running Windows applications - sure, you could engineer the Mac OS to run Windows applications (SoftWindows and Virtual PC do this). However, the Mac OS will never run Windows applications as well as Windows, and you lose all the Macintosh advantages in the process. The Mac advantage comes from using Mac applications over the Mac OS. You pull that thread and the tapestry completely unwinds. Now with Mac OS X's BSD basis, that makes it very easy for applications with BSD source to Mac OS X. However, I currently doubt that Linux will compete on the consumer side, without surrendering the strength that got it this far. Linux seems to represent a general thumb in the eye of Microsoft by the hobbiestsl; working proof that they can create, produce, and use an OS that is technically superior to MS's generic Windows.