Thursday, May 22, 2008

Mass-consumption software nowadays

A lot of people like to boo Microsoft for their incompetences, and a lot of people like to praise Apple for their sexiness (and often it's the same people who engage in these acts of fanboyism), but I've been noticing that lately, this perception of Microsoft being bad and Apple good is a bit off.

I noticed that there are a lot of things that Microsoft has been doing lately that's fairly non-evil: the announcement of Acid 2 compliance in IE8, their open-source OS project in the Microsoft labs, the ODF support announcement, the progress Moonlight has been making, etc.

And rumor has it that they've been favoring hiring competent professionals for higher-up positions rather than advancing the fresh-out-of-school old-timers.

Apple, on the other hand, has been getting a bit of criticism because of its vendor lock-in platforms (look at the iPhone SDK agreement, for a prime example)

Also, vulnerabilities being found in Apple software aren't exactly harmless enough that you could just put off fixing them indefinitely.

There are also issues with drivers (my BootCamp's battery driver still pegs the CPU at 100% every now and then, for example - and this is Apple's driver running on Apple's hardware). Also, compared to the MSDN and the vast array of Microsoft's Visual-whatever products, Apple's support for Mac software developers is pretty darn lame.

Anyways, that's how I see it, being a developer, a Macbook owner, a techie enthusiast and all: there's no undisputed better choice in the Microsoft vs Apple dispute, they both suck, but for different reasons, and they both rock for different reasons.

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