The mind of a Mac fan

I'm a user of and developer on Windows. In fact, I would go so far to say that I PREFER Windows. In fact, I prefer Windows so much that I have even chosen to work for the company that makes Windows (I've been an employee of Microsoft since May of 2005).

I don't think, however, my preferences have ever gotten so bad that I sound like Tom Yager over at Infoworld in a recent piece to which the adjective "gushing" seems a bit understated.

Because I can't resist, I thought I'd pick out some of the juicier bits. You tell me if they sound over-the-top, or if my bias is just preventing me from seeing just how right he is.

Apple supplies a consistent, familiar, and well-documented path for developers to do any given thing. In contrast, an entire industry has sprung up around providing developers with proprietary plugs for the gaps that Microsoft leaves in Windows, often intentionally as an aid to the third-party development community. The completeness of the Mac frameworks leaves no room for a marketplace for Mac developer library enhancements.

That's an interesting point of view. The Mac library is so perfect and complete that it don' need no steenkin' extras from third parties. It has nothing to do with the fact that Windows has 21 times the market share, and accounts for the lion's share of developer activity in the world today.

There is no room for third parties, because the Mac does EVERYTHING. When I build my spaceship to Alpha Centauri and am looking for an operating system to drive its hyperspace drive, I'll be sure to call up Apple.

Differences of opinion in Mac land do exist, as is clear from this parallel review by John Siracusa over at Ars Technica, where its clear he really likes Leopard but is not so dismissive of potential roadblocks in the way of the Mac as a software platform (as opposed to end-user tool).

Mac's competition is .NET from a software platform standpoint, and at version 3.5, is a very robust and complete API. Third parties will write extensions built on that base, of course, but that's because .NET doesn't have components to control a hyperspace drive. My point is that extensions are a sign that people are looking to apply a framework in ways that the framework designers never imagined. If platforms did EVERYTHING, I wouldn't need to go out and buy accounting software. I would just sit down and start doing accounting, because the platform supported it.

A native API is not the future, however much fans might wish to spin it otherwise.

Unlike Microsoft, Apple is not afraid to put developers out of a given line of business. Leopard integrates e-mail, browser, calendar, search, preview, dictionary, thesaurus, media player, code-free scripted workflow, accessibility, and almost innumerable top-level bundled apps and capabilities that, in one sense, take out any market for supplanting these things. No matter how well Apple does something, someone has cooked up what it feels is a better, but usually just different, way to do it.

Leopard addresses that. Rather than seeing Leopard as a popping of the balloon for third-party enhancements to the Mac's core user experience, a more accurate way of looking at it is that Apple frees developers from trying to improve on that experience. Third parties can focus on new applications instead.

I'll be sure to tell Microsoft's legal team to use that argument next time they opt to integrate a product into Windows. We aren't shutting off avenues to developers. We are just freeing them to create NEW applications. Alternatives aren't better. They are just "different."

Apple should be free to integrate anything it wants. But that doesn't mean that users have to pretend that it doesn't change the shape of competition atop the platform. Inclusions DO make a difference. A better argument is to convince people to try to outdo Apple. It may be hard to imagine that is possible to dyed-in-the-wool Mac fans, but short of Apple's Cupertino campus being populated by archangels, it might do to find outsiders capable of showing Apple how to do it better.

Yager shouldn't encourage third parties not to try to compete with Apple. That's a path to stagnation.