iWay?
Thursday, August 21st, 2008This made me chuckle… it’s a bit dated, but then I haven’t had much time to do much reading lately. Work deadlines suck (the life out of me). Anyway, on with the funny.
They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life.
- Brad Brooks, VP of Vista Marketing (on Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads)
The most amusing part of this is that the current screensaver du-jour on all of the retail Mac boxes I’ve seen (at least at the Mac shop in the local Best Buy, because Spokane isn’t important enough to have its own Apple store) - as well as the marketing lingo on the Get a Mac page on Apple’s website - touts the Mac as being the most compatible machine you can buy. The fact that Microsoft, which can’t even build a completely-compatible version of Office for the Mac, is the company saying it is just icing on the cake, really. With the exception of a .NET IDE, a version of Windows Media Player for the Mac capable of supporting WMP9 DRM (both Microsoft products, surprise surprise) and 3ds MAX, there isn’t a single application or file format that I need to use that the Mac can’t handle, and the only time I’ve run into a software incompatibility running the other direction is using Pages to build The Archiver, because obviously Pages doesn’t run in Windows (much to Narym’s regular chagrin). Of course, Microsoft Publisher doesn’t run on the Mac either, so there’s a little bit of anti-cross-platform love from both sides in the document design/layout field (and don’t even begin to tell me I could do The Archiver in Word… I’ll kill you :P).
Really, the only category that the Mac is currently lacking in is games, which is pretty much the last bastion of the “there’s no software for the Mac” mythmongers. Fortunately, with the exception of Sam & Max (and the Mac versions of Manhole, Myst, Riven, and Exile, all of which are all basically unplayable on modern Macs, and I personally think it’s deplorable that UbiSoft is still selling the 10th Anniversary collection for the platform without doing any sort of work to make it compatible with Leopard or systems with Intel-based processors), every game I want to play is either available on a console or has a Mac version, so that doesn’t really bother me (plus, I’ve got a Dell attached to the TV for this purpose… and watching Hulu). Heck, I can actually play realMYST on my Mac, which is something Vista has made virtually impossible without GameTap.