Mailbag: Apple for the Masses, Microsoft and Multi-Core -- Redmondmag.com

Barney's Blog

Mailbag: Apple for the Masses, Microsoft and Multi-Core

Doug recently called out Apple for not doing enough to expand its market and asked readers how they would bring Apple products to enterprises and low-income consumers. Here are some suggestions:

Why, license OS X to hardware vendors, of course. But that would kill Apple's moneymaking proprietary hardware business, so it'll never happen until it has profitability problems -- at which point it would probably be too late.
-Ed

I would do one thing that would immediately expand the Mac market: drop the whole company in a waste basket and set it on fire. Mac has never been a user-friendly OS or company and should fall to the wayside. Just my thought on the matter.
-Joe

And Mark thinks that when it comes to multi-core, Microsoft comes up a little short:

We have been working with multi-core server and desktop systems from the moment they were available. While no single application becomes dazzlingly fast, we have noted how much more consistently software on all-multi-core systems tends to behave. Single-core systems exhibit too many long user interface pauses as more recently developed software, primarily from Microsoft and Adobe, puts too much demand on very limited processing resources.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the Microsoft OS kernels that is mitigated by the presence of multiple CPU cores. Process management should be Kernel Architecture 101 by now, but for some bizarre reason, Microsoft just doesn't get the fact that users expect real-time software interaction at all times. If the interaction is not real-time, users tend to think that their computers and software are broken. To be fair, Apple's OS X, Sun Solaris and Linux also present dysfunctional user interface pauses and even go out to lunch when sufficiently loaded. The threshold is just much higher than we experience with all versions of Windows.
-Mark

Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below or sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 01/05/2009 at 1:16 PM

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