I ran into Tablet PC visionary Bert Keely (he is one of the architects on the Tablet PC team) and he showed Channel 9 how he souped up his Tablet PC. He's so fast at working with the Tablet PC and is looking for ways to make the Tablet even faster to work with. Very inspiring person to meet with.

Daring Fireball (John Gruber): The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform Licensing and Market Share.

Excellent essay. Very interesting. The one thing that he forgets is the part that pricing played in all of this (and developers -- the Macintosh was hard to develop for, while Windows and DOS were very flexible -- a heritage that remains true even today). I remember several of my friends at college buying IBM-oriented machines because of price. The Mac was a lot more expensive, even after a student discount. This was 1989, keep in mind. When I started working at BasicPro magazine (later to become Visual Basic Programmer's Journal) I saw that developers liked Windows better than the Macintosh. I remember trying to get developers like Dan Appleman to support the Macintosh and he would show me why developers liked Windows better (seriously, ask him someday about the times when I tried to evangelize him on the Macintosh -- he was the founder of Desaware, a company that made products for early versions of Visual Basic).

College administrators that I was evangelizing the Mac to had the same pushback "why should I buy it, when it's $500 to $1000 more per machine?" The Unix heads at San Jose State were even worse "why does anyone need a toy interface?" they'd ask me. (Today they all use Windows or Linux with a GUI).

Even back then the Mac was getting entrenched in desktop publishing departments (due to the $5000 Apple LaserWriter II which was far superior to other printers at the time) but other departments were going with the cheaper DOS-based machines since they didn't care about the then new desktop publishing scenario.

I'm glad Apple made the break with the Apple II (I used Apple II's in junior high and high school) because the Macintosh is what really got me into computers. I could never get into DOS or command-line interfaces like CPM or the OS that ran the Apple II.

The question is, what does it mean for Longhorn and Linux and OSX today and tomorrow? We'll see in 10 years and John will be able to write another weblog. Hint: I'm staying at Microsoft. ;-)