Word: os
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then Gates' smug smile blossomed on that vast Orwellian screen (a Stalinesque edifice uncannily resembling the one that got shattered in the famous first Mac ad in 1984), and the Microsoft leader regaled the Apple masses with his boundless affection for the operating system (OS) whose commercial viability he had spent much of his adult life systematically undermining. "We think Apple makes a huge contribution to the computer industry," Gates assured the room, respectfully observing the taboo against speaking ill of the dead--or, ahem, the gravely ailing. Let's put it this way: you sure didn't hear...
...that long. And Apple cultists don't need much encouragement to stay psyched. "Macintosh customers have proved to be incredibly stubborn," says Roger McNamee, co-founder of the high-tech investment firm Interval Partners, "and where there are stubborn customers, there is hope." Sales of the recently released Mac OS 8, for instance, the first major Mac update in a decade, have been four times Apple's expectations. And the company can still point to considerable leads in the education and graphics arenas...
...view is grim. A decade of bungled opportunities and misguided investments has left Apple in an intractable negative spiral: lower market share means fewer developers, which means less software, which means fewer customers, which means still lower market share. Not pretty. Even the belated decision to license the Mac OS to clonemakers only drained Apple of hardware revenue...
Message to the Macintosh faithful: cuddle up with your PowerBook and see the story that inspired the ad: 1984. Starring John Hurt, Richard Burton and a ravishing (and oft-ravished) Suzanna Hamilton as Julia, it's surely what was on Bill Gates' mind when he pulled that Wizard of OS routine at MacWorld, looming disembodied over the crowd while Steve Jobs said the words: Microsoft is our ally. Microsoft has always been our ally. Apple is at war with Netscape. Apple has always been at war with Netscape. The utterance may have drawn a few boos from the crowd...
...Backward compatibility," as they call it in the industry, had been an open question since last month, when Apple, after repeated setbacks in trying to keep its aging Mac OS ahead of rival Microsoft, announced that it would buy Apple co-founder Steven Jobs' NeXT Software company for $400 million and use his widely praised operating system instead. Apple officials now say the new system will not only work with most current Mac hardware and software but will probably look and feel like a Mac as well...