Put a noose around its neck, huh? Jobs returned to Apple and changed its direction about 10 years ago. - Go to: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=AAPL - Click the 10 yr time frame. - Click the check box to add MSFT to the same graph. - Tell me again how bad of a job Steve has been doing, and how it hasn't meant anything to MSFT.

Now some more ycombinator specific points. When you get together with a bunch of web startup owners or attend a conference, do you see more or less macs than the overall market would indicate? Would you say there are more than 1 mac per 10 startups? Would you say that what startups are using, they are quite likely to support as they grow?

It hasn't. Microsoft's growth has remained relatively stable since it's growth from '95 to 2000. Apple has almost zero impact from '98 to 2005, which is where we start to see the stock perform well.

Economics FAIL. -0.5% growth over 10 year is a loss of money because you are falling behind inflation. Based on their market cap Microsoft is shrinking at a rate of 2-3% a year in real dollars while Apple is growing off the charts. You can't say that the falling Windows brand is not a direct cause of that, and Apple's contrast with Microsoft helps that. Apple's growth has more to do with the iPod than OS X, but OS X has a lot more to do with Windows falling image than anything else.

MSFT price is essentially unchanged over the last 10 years.

There's a lot more to it than just "Apple is just a gimmick..." OS X is unix and unix is the real rising star here. Apple just had the good sense to catch a ride on the bandwagon of that rising star and the competence to do a very good job of it. Apple's market share is still small but it's been growing steadily for years. Today's rate-of-change is tomorrow's level.

"bandwagon of that rising star..."

Good grief.

Apple won't catch on with business because why the hell would you pay for Apple when you could just get *nix? It's their own grave, but hey, if they're happy making consumer crap, be my guest.

Right now, Apple's pushing for the businessplace. Snow Leopard is supposed to have out-of-the-box Exchange support, which is a step Apple needs to take. Beyond that, Apple's been winning over plenty of small businesses: not the big guys yet, but large corporations can't change on a dime. If Apple stays as consistently reliable for another handful of years, I'd predict us seeing the Mac starting to gain entry to the workplace.

Apple needs to upgrade their support to compete with the Dells in corporate America.

Actually... yes; and, I daresay, comes out on top. Having lost countless hours of my life debugging .NET Framework installation problems (yay, installer ran and finished. Why isn't this damn thing showing up in my list of components?), I have to say that never spend nearly that much debugging silly installation issues with Python and MySQL.

I never had any issue with the .Net framework installation, but I'll take your word for it.

I guess I just feel spoiled by Visual Studio, while every time I start something in Python I feel like I have to spend so much time trying to find quality tools to make it do what I want. It just doesn't feel like a very complete solution to me.

2nd that, the .Net installer was a big problem at my former company. Can't say Python is any better, but to say .Net is perfect shows you haven't seen it used in a lot of places.

While I do like that you're taking the time to reply to each of my comments in turn, could we keep this a little civil? I love flamefests as much as anybody, but this isn't the sort of argument that requires sarcasm and vitriol.

I said Exchange because it's the one thing I've read about. I am not a businessperson, nor am I a programmer: the closest I get to programming is PHP, because it's all that I need. I said that that's what Apple's been up to, because it is: they're obviously pushing to make Macs business-friendly.

I'd guess that most businesses don't have computers for the sake of programming, though. Most people in the workplace don't program. They email, they discuss things with coworkers. With a few tweaks, the Mac ought to be ready for that sort of thing in a secure environment. And that's just as much a part of business as coding is.

You've forgotten the third market, technical computing, which Apple does have an interest in.

Go to a college and look at all the kids. They're using macs. That means, in the future, the people who make decisions will lean more towards mac.

I don't at all think that mac's polish is a gimmick. We know that using 2 monitors increases productivity. This is a general case of the fact that how you connect to your computer directly alters how your brain has to work in order to use the computer. It seems to me that a better user interface and a more clean design are important ways to decrease the cognitive friction with the computer. You know those little logos they put on pc laptops palmrests? Each of those, just by being in your visual field, causes a cascade of preconscious neurological activity as your brain triggers all the things it associates with the logos. Thus, just by sitting down to work in that environment, your are decreasing the brain power you can spend working. The superior mac UI generates much less cognitive friction, allowing me to focus more of my cognitive processes to thinking about what I'm working on. You may think this is a gimmick, I think it's essential to being maximally productive.

It's like the band velvet underground. Sure, there were more popular bands, but fans of velvet underground largely created later progress in subsequent waves of musical progress.