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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Saturday, January 24, 2004Simpleton comparison of Apple and Microsoft digital mediaA reader noted the mutual exclusiveness of two comments I posted here:1. Personally, I'd love to see iLife come to Windows. Then Apple could kick Microsoft's butt in photos, movies, and DVDs too. 2. Both Apple and Microsoft have done a great job with digital media technologies. The notion that Apple is leading the way or being copied, however, is ludicrous. And asked which was true. It's a good question. My overly simple response was: Apple is kicking Microsoft's butt in getting out updated retail packages of iLife on a regular basis. Microsoft's add-ons tend to be free, or very low cost, and few people know about them. Comparing them head to head: Photos: iPhoto is better than Microsoft's free shell-based offering but is performance-challenged. Microsoft's Digital Image Suite, naturally, is much more full-featured than iPhoto, but it's $50-$120 depending on the version. Movies: Windows Movie Maker 2 is much, much better than iMovie, and it does instantaneous rendering of effects, transitions and titles. Music: I like iTunes better than Windows Media Player, but WMP is much more full-featured, and the music stuff in the Windows shell (automatic album art for folders and other meta-data stuff) is unparalleled on the Mac. DVD - iDVD is excellent, if slow, and Microsoft has nothing like it. Third party utilities like Sonic MyDVD and Nero are excellent, but cost as much as the entire iLife does. So it's a toss up from what I can see. Also, he asked if Microsoft was so instrumental in designing the Mac OS, why did it take them over 10 years to come up with a comparable OS of their own? I noted that Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985, about a year after the Mac. It didn't become popular until 1990 or so. Arguably, that isn't a great answer, as the important word in that question was "comparable." The answer there is complicated. But obviously, Microsoft had an installed base of millions of text-based IBM-compatible machines to worry about. Unlike Apple, which essentially abandoned its Apple II installed base when it developed the Mac from scratch, Microsoft wisely chose to keep its customer base when moving the PC world to the GUI. It took a while, and by the mid-1990's there were still people chugging away on DOS because they liked WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, or other text-mode applications. I should note that Apple wised up to this strategy by the mid-1990's too: When it released it's PowerMac systems (and later, OS X), the company was very careful to bring with them compatibility modes that allowed older 68K and "Classic" applications to run in each environment, respectively. Also, one might argue that with each version of Mac OS X, Apple has carefully re-added key "Classic" Mac OS features back to the OS (spring-loaded folders, etc.). Heck, the initial OS X release didn't even include DVD movie playback capabilities. So one might also ask, why isn't Mac OS X yet comparable to their older OS? There are still key missing features. [ Posted at 11:40 AM | Permalink ]
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