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Microsoft to Respond to Apple's 'Get a Mac' Ads
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Your kidding. Right? Billy stole windows from Apple in the first place. Did he not?
Yes...plus the first version of Windows [1.0 - 3.11] was nothing more than an Operating Environment. It wouldn't work without DOS...[wow showing my age]...
Mate, Dick Smiths in New Zealand are selling Acer Inspire laptops for below NZ$1300 and still students are going for MacBooks. Doesn't that tell you something - that saving NZ$600 isn't worth the pain inflicted by Microsoft?
Please, for the love of [insert deity of your choice] don't the whiners on forums as a benchmark for what Windows or Mac OS X is like.
Good lord their ads are crap. They settled for *that* company? Christ, if rescuing Vista is a priority I would have gone for Saatchi & Saatchi.
Or more correctly, as stated previously by Microsoft, their biggest competitor is themselves in the form of older products. Mac OS X is competition, but their main one is Windows XP.
Of course we have been presuming that MS would at least keep the type true. Because they could lead with Bill saying "oh you know Macs are hacked everyday. Then take it down hill from there... and make their perception be the world reality. 
And there lies the problem. From scratch, not quite. MS-QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System)
was compiled by hacker Tim Paterson, a Seattle Computer Products employee, who literally hashed it together in a mere six weeks.
Microsoft purchased QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and later versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history.
The Get-a-Mac ad I'd like to see
Mac: "Why the long face, PC?"
PC:" "It's my sister. She got a great price on her laptop with Vista Home Edition. But now she needs to connect to her company's Virtual Private Network, and for that she'll need Vista Business Edition."
Mac: "What's the big deal? Can't she trade up?"
PC: "Sure, if she wants to spend over $200. Heck, Best Buy wanted an extra $300 to sell me a Vista Home laptop that they've upgraded to Vista Business."
Mac: "Bummer."
PC: "Well, Mac, you must face that sort of hassle, too."
Mac: "Not really. You see, MacOS comes in just one edition. If something works on a Mac, it works on my Mac."
PC: "Maybe my sister can 'lose' her laptop and file an insurance claim."
Mac: "Worth a try."
Mac: "Why the long face, PC?"
PC:" "It's my sister. She got a great price on her laptop with Vista Home Edition. But now she needs to connect to her company's Virtual Private Network, and for that she'll need Vista Business Edition."
Mac: "What's the big deal? Can't she trade up?"
PC: "Sure, if she wants to spend over $200. Heck, Best Buy wanted an extra $300 to sell me a Vista Home laptop that they've upgraded to Vista Business."
Mac: "Bummer."
PC: "Well, Mac, you must face that sort of hassle, too."
Mac: "Not really. You see, MacOS comes in just one edition. If something works on a Mac, it works on my Mac."
PC: "Maybe my sister can 'lose' her laptop and file an insurance claim."
Mac: "Worth a try."
Just took a look at their ad examples.
Not too good IMHO.
Don't expect much from their Microsoft ad attempts.
This is actually one of Microsoft's strengths - improvements are made without breaking older applications. Keep the old routine as is, and create the new routine with a different spelling. Every time I run some old 16-bit DOS or Windows 95 application on my Vista system, I appreciate Microsoft's compatibility.
What would you prefer - that an OS should drop old APIs and force application vendors to do pointless rewrites? (cough - Carbon64 - cough)
One small difference sunshine; Netscape's products were completely and utterly crap. Anyone with a decent memory will remember just how monumentally crap Netscape Communicator/Browser was on Windows (or infact, any browser it ran on).
Apple is in an entirely different situation now, they have a quality product line up and a focused CEO who knows where he wants to take the company.
Again, there is a huge difference - I'm surprised so many here have such short memories on just how crap Netscape products were.
are you implying QDOS is a significant foundation of windows?
sorry, i was not kidding, tell me how did Bill steal windows from apple in the first place. did apple wrote the majority of the code of windows or what?
I don't understand what he's getting at with that last line. In case MS hasn't figured it out already, they lost. they just don't know it yet. A Mac is the best computer system to buy hands down, because it can run the Mac OS AND Windows, not to mention nearly all flavors of Linux and a variety of unix apps for the true geeks. A Mac is the ultimate computer. How ironic that he could even mention software compatibility, when a Mac beats the snot out of Windows PCs in that arena.
Idiot.
an ultimate computer can't offer 15% game compatibility? how is it ultimate?
or do you mean "ultimate only when you use it in a certain way"?
As well as it is one of Windows weaknesses - It's a tradeoff really. True, backward compatibility avoids breaking old software. This is difficult, however, because the APIs were poorly thought out to begin with, so programmers have worked around them relying on the underlying implementation. Emulation (such as Rosetta) might have be a better solution, so as to reduce the enormous amounts of excessive and redundant code necessary to maintain backward compatibility. I would prefer a Windows with a slimmer profile which would be less vulnerable, more agile, responsive, and less demanding of memory.
QDOS isn't a major foundation of Windows, but it is a major foundation of MS. Windows NT isn't a "Ground up" OS either. It's major underpinnings are LAN Manager, which ran on top of DOS. It was developed along with 3-Com to replace their old Network OS, all built on Netbios. NT stole a lot from that, as well as OS/2.
So Windows or NT [and now all the other flavors] are not innovative at all. It's a compilation of old code, rewritten to some extent, and patched. Why do you think they rely on DLL files and Registries?
Now this is sincere discussion, my questions are
1. When you say windows is a compilation of old code, how much of those old codes are written by Microsoft?
2. do you think OSX is written from scratch by apple then? and if not, in comparison, how much did microsoft write in windows, and how much did apple write in OSX?
Microsoft hasn't lost. Lost would be like Enron or Worldcomm or Bear Stearns selling to JP Morgan. It's like the Beta vs VHS argument, did the best quality win? Don't underestimate the 800lb gorilla.
Let's not talk about memory usage, I have a macbook with ichat, mail, terminal and safari with only three tabs open and I'm using 1.3 GB WTF????
Bill actually stole the concept of resizable, overlapping windows with title bars from Apple, not code.