That’s much of the point of using a virtual machine: to avoid driver, library, and other such compatibility errors. Software under VMWare uses a virtual VMWare graphics card, network card, etc. instead of accessing the physical hardware.

In contrast, thanks to its control on both hardware and software, Apple has the ability to ensure that its OS and machines keep the same pace. It’s also benefitted at the consumer end by providing modest but noticeable performance gains in its OS upgrades for people with relatively new kit.

It’s a different ballgame, but Apple ensure that its third-party developers could buy Intel machines at a relative discount to port their apps in advance of the commercial switch—and swap those development boxes for a shiny new iMac once they appeared. Again, that’s a luxury of controlling both sides: were Microsoft to make a similar transition, the OEMs would have a fit.

Yeah, when I saw the NYT piece’s details about 50M lines of code and the delay I immediately thought three things:

1) I hope the project team remembers reading Brooks.
2) Didn’t Bill Joy once say that you couldn’t write a program larger than 10K lines without bugs (much to the chagrin, no doubt, of Watts Humphrey)? Is it even possible to write a commercial product with 50M lines of code that isn’t a complete wreck? Isn’t this why fighter jets and space shuttles are so ridiculously expensive?
3) Douglas Hofstadter’s hilarious Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you think, even accounting for Hofstadter’s Law.”

And if what you’re saying is true about MSDN/VS—it’s too bad, and a bad whole product strategy. They don’t generate much revenue from that stuff anyway. Spending $2000 on VS Enterprise & MSDN (which is what it was when I last subscribed) for a developer in a small shop is peanuts & the apps that person writes will stick them to MS forever. It was a great deal for everyone.

OK… time to get out of slashdot wormhole/memory lane.

As for revenue. Well Apple is mostly a hardware company, so their costs per unit will be far higher that Microsofts. And the MS margins sort of reflect the fact that in software your main costs are fixed, no matter how many licenses you sell.

The future may be the consumer – but I doubt that’s windows, or MacOS. The trouble with computers is the things are too complex, and too prone to breaking.

Agreed. This is why it’s suprised me so much to see the incredibly exhorbitant pricing on the latest incarnation of MSDN and Visual Studio. Their basic development package for businesses is now stratified into three editions, the most basic of which is more expensive than their 2003 version of visual studio (which is the current standard). Their MSDN subscription has tripled in price. It’s almost as if they’re showing the finger to small business developers, hoping (maybe?) to get a bigger margin on medium and large business sales of development tools. This alienation is something uncharacteristic, and it seems like a bad move.

PRTM?

MS makes 90% of its profits from OS and Office. If sales of these two take a significant hit, they’re hosed (X-box still loses them hundreds of millions a year, they don’t make much on big server stuff, and Great Plains acquisition is all but a bust).

Have a nice day,
Antti

Dan K—
It’s not clear to me what this means: “…the iPod/iTunes/OS X combo is a stronger proposal than x-box/vista.” Is this from a top-line corporate perspective or a consumer choice perspective? In the Apple instance, it’s all they have (damned good, at that); but for MS, there’s no stopping a Windows user from buying an iPod (I have three) and nothing prevents a Mac user from buying an Xbox (is there?)—and certainly the MS revenue stream is much more balanced than X-box/Windows?

For all that, just did a quick check of comparative revenues for last year & wow, is Apple catching up. Apple had $1.34B net on $13.9B rev, while MS had $12.25B on $39.8B—who’d have imagined Apple would ever approach even 1/3 MS revenue again? Of course, the MS margins are, as usual, nasty. Thirty-percent net margins… it’s enough to make you hate them just for that.

Hmm. I thought everyone on the left already used a Mac ;)

The situation is rather different than the article suggests. First of all, Microsoft went through the the transition that Apple did much sooner than Apple, first when it went from the 16-bit, Windows 3.x programming model to the 32-bit programming model of Windows 95 and NT and then when it killed the old Windows 95 kernel and went exclusively to the NT kernel in Windows XP. Apple, by contrast, kept the OS 9 architecture alive LONG past its expiration date. Given how primitive OS 9 was under the hood (in terms of memory management and threading to name two critical areas), it is amazing that Apple was able to keep cutting edge software running on top of it for as long as it did. (Recall, too, the failed efforts and many-year delays in getting a successor to OS9 out the door almost killed Apple).

Next, Microsoft’s Internet security problems aren’t really due to weaknesses of the kernel or the underlying programming model, but rather poor decisions and poor security discipline in developing Internet-enabled applications. Internet Explorer has been so exploitable because Microsoft intentionally designed it to emphasize openness and extensibility rather than security—an enormous mistake, as it turns out. Maintaining backward compatibility with older Windows applications has nothing to do with this.

Lastly, compatibility with the vast universe of Windows software and Windows hardware is absolutely fundamental to the Windows (and MS) ‘eco-system’. A new OS from MS that gave up all that would be DOA (except in special-purpose devices—the XBOX 360 for example).

In the meantime, seems like there’s (CT surprise!) near unanimous consent: Macs are cool, but legacy business apps are going to hold people to their current platform.

Of course, MS still has all those AS400/RPG users to convert while waiting for Vista—over their customers’ dead bodies (as I learned when working with legacy customers at ERP shop in 90s).

Given the dominance of the IPod, I think that Apple is acting a bit like Microsoft used to act.