This morning, I switched my default browser from Safari to Firefox. Next, I think I’ll look at moving from Mail.app to Thunderbird. Maybe I’ll go back, but I’m increasingly starting to feel uncomfortable in Apple-land.
Hmm, I just switched back to Safari after getting hosed up by Firefox (my fault: I was using the hardware-specific builds and the one-size-fits-all 1.0.2 release didn’t). I found fault with a lot of the aesthetic concerns Tim does (the crummy looking widgets mostly).
So far so good. It still visits the beachball on me, but it doesn’t last too long (1-3 seconds) and in general it seems to feel better. And the Services menu is there.
I understand Tim’s angst about infofascism but I don’t really care all that much (does owning AAPL stock and watching it quadruple in value and then split, while SUNW has been circling the bowl over the same period make a difference?). Does it work for the company and by extension it’s shareholders? And by transparency, does he really feel that SUNW and MSFT have more in common in terms of transparency than SUNW and AAPL (the names Darwin or Darwinports ring any bells?)?
But in the main, there are more differences that similarities (how much consumer lust does a Sun workstation engender?). Apple is a consumer-facing company and Sun is an enterprise shop: Apple does have some designs on the enterprise (XServe/XSan) but the bulk of their success comes from products that start with a lowercase “i”.
For one thing, if anyone at Sun wants to get into a pissing contest about speed vs price, Intel will be glad to oblige: at CNN.com we ran all Sun from 1995 to the early ‘oughts for one reason — software. At that time, revenue was tied to products that only ran on Solaris or Windows (tough choice). As soon as the AOL merger was done, ad service migrated to the AOL ad infrastructure and hardware is now mostly, if not all, Linux/x86-based.
http://cnn.com was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 23-Mar-2005 18:44:32 GMT
It’s a competitive world. I still remember visiting the nice people at Oracle in 1999 and, for all their talk about the evil that MSFT represents, every laptop-based presentation I saw was in PowerPoint on Windows.
I give Sun a lot of credit for realizing some years back that to have anyone else’s hardware in their datacenters was not credible, but I’m not sure it’s worth pursuing the desktop/laptop segments. Star/OpenOffice are one thing: they undercut the “I need this OS to run these apps” excuse.
Better to make Java, et al, the true “write once, run anywhere” infrastructure it has been billed as for 10 years. But does Java 2/SE5 on all platforms? Or just SPARC/x86/AMD? Does J2SE 1.4.2 run everywhere? You can guess the answer, but go look.
<digression>I get so tired of the “you must run IE to do this” or “you’re using an unsupported browser.” I have been working on an elementary school yearbook and their web application demands you use IE. I can’t figure out why: I enabled Safari’s debug menu and happily masquerade as MSIE 5.2.2. Works fine, as far as I can tell.
The promise of Java has been fraught with this nonsense as well: running it on non-Sun UNIXes — or anything but Solaris and Windows — has always been a nuisance, and OS X is no exception. </digression>
If Tim really thinks “I work for Sun, I’d like to run our software. (
5)” why does he think it’s Apple fault? What Sun software doesn’t run well on Apple hardware and how hard has he worked at making it run on his choice of hardware?
Maybe I misunderstand his argument — he emailed me to say he didn’t understand mine, though that could be the TheraFlu talking on my end. I just don’t know that ripping on an OS vendor — your partner/customer — when your code doesn’t perform well makes sense, and for anyone at Sun to make a plea for more cost-effective hardware jars.
<update Wed Mar 30 09:21:25 PST 2005> So what he means is, (per email) he wants to run Solaris on something fast. Well, if that’s the case, then a PowerBook is a non-starter. Beating around the bush about Safari and “infofascism” is just a distraction.
Now, to be clear, showing the flag in public is fine, nothing wrong with it at all. If your employer offers a product in a given space and you’re visibly not using it — guys like Tim get around in public — what does that say? But if what he wants is a faster laptop that runs Solaris 10, just say that.
Ah, jeez, now I see in an update this morning that he’s running fink and an update-all run stomped all over a bunch of stuff. I gave up on fink, what, two years ago? If he stays with OS X, I’ll suggest he run Darwinports.