Steve Gillmor likes to talk about MS Office being dead. I’m ready to say OS X is dead, shambling dead, but still dead. Once the Mac hardware switch to Intel, it’s just too easy to run Windows. In the end, dual-booters will find themselves hanging out in Windows more often than not. The story will be, “I like the look of Apples and I need reliable hardware for this messed up Microsoft OS.” Nevermind that Apple has had a series of hardware goofs in the past year.
Check out this story about how a Microsofty ran presentation about Vista and Office 7 using Vista running on a Mac laptop. Then check out Cory Doctorow’s annoucement that he’s switching to Ubuntu. Cory admits to being an Apple fanboy. When people like him publicly switch, it tends to inspire a lot of people. And it usually means that the smartest people already connected the dots a year before.
I’ve recently switched my desktop machine at work to Ubuntu after running Dapper on a little Dell laptop for four or five months. After I figured out that I could run Meeting Maker under WINE, I only had to wait for client work to ease off to make the switch. Nearly everything just works. I have an ATI video card, which is less convenicent than one from nVidia. nVidia play nicely with the open source crowd. Anyway, it’s a minor annoyance and kind of fun to play around with.