But to the extent that software innovation might revive after a long dry stretch under the thumb of the Redmond monopolist, the industry could be in for a new phase of innovation, especially since this is one platform Microsoft doesn't control. That's not an endorsement, needless to say, for a general-purpose platform, where the main requirement is that it should just work. In the several months I've been using OS X, I've returned to the days when computing was fun for hobbyists. Unix programmers now have a platform that could be orders of magnitude larger than any they've ever seen. Maybe the truly interesting potential for the version of Unix called OS X is yet to be realized. Meanwhile, some vendors have yet to port their most popular applications - Adobe's Photoshop, in particular - to OS X, an odd lapse. At least Microsoft's Office suite for OS X works well, better in some ways than its Windows counterpart. There's no OS X Outlook client, and the OS 9 Outlook client isn't up to snuff with the Windows version. If a company is wedded to Microsoft Exchange, OS X is basically a nonstarter. But Apple's done a remarkable job of bringing an industrial-strength operating system to the desktop without irreparably breaking older applications, which run in the "Classic" mode without modification.Īpple worked hard to get networking running well, particularly in corporate settings. Not long ago, the notion that the Mac could become the ultimate Unix desktop computer would have been ludicrous. There's a lot about the operating system that's unfinished, but on balance, I'm finding myself increasingly comfortable with it. In fact, this version of Unix is becoming by far the most popular for desktop users, at least in the U.S.Īpple's Mac OS X is Berkeley Software Distribution Unix under the covers, with Apple's typically elegant user interface on top. Yet I'm typing this column on a PC running a variant of Unix. For all its strides above and below the desktop (the latter in embedded uses), Linux hasn't made enough progress to get me off Windows, much as I want to shed the Microsoft monopoly. All these moves had more to do with servers than clients, however.
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