Cross platform compatibility

He's a Mac user.

There aren't any other platforms.

They flat out stole someone's code

Speaking of hypocrisy, when someone copies (read: pirates) a game, it never takes long before the pedants and whingers jump in to make the tired observation that it's "not theft, it's copyright infringment".

But now, when a games publisher does it, it's suddenly "flat out stealing".

Granted he's had a bad week, but it's also generated a reasonable degree of sympathy for the guy. I'd be surprised if Apple would want to court the bad publicity it would bring by firing the guy.
Make a mistake at Apple? Get fired? Doesn't come over well, especially when the public can now put a name and a face to him.
An anonymous engineer would have been easy to let go. This might just have saved his bacon.

I think you make a fair point, and although you flirted with the subject you seem to have managed to avoid making the clear statement that a lot of people do, about the superiority of the Apple system due to the finite amount of hardware that the OS needs to cater for. I'll put my hand in the air and admit I used to subscribe to this theory. And then a while ago I was sitting at my Mac Pro 1,1 (ludicrously overpriced and fortunately paid for by my previous employer) and realized what a crock of shit this idea is. My NVidia 8800GT is a markedly superior card in terms of performance under Windows - in fact the majority of graphics cards as far as I know perform better in Microsoft's OS. Don't get me wrong. I'm a Mac OS X devotee and wouldn't change, but the idea that having a significantly smaller range of hardware automatically makes for better software is just wrong. Granted this isn't entirely Apple's fault - it's as much the card manufacturers responsibility as anyone's, but if Cupertino can't sort out decent drivers for the few graphics options available, it's a pretty pathetic showing.

There are a lot more issues than just getting used to a new set of tools.

I recently set up a new small startup company. We have 4 staff, but 3 of us work a lot from home, coming into the office only once or twice a week. As an experiment I set us all up on Google Apps Premium. The email is great - no complaints. Gmail has always been my webmail of choice, and with POP/IMAP support my 2 Mac guys can use mail.app to their hearts content.

Calendar is so-so. Sharing calendars, particularly more than one seems a bit erratic, but it's just about good enough for us to use (we really need shared calendars do the the business we operate).

Docs is the main weakness. The office suite just doesn't have the feature set of any of the offline suites. Offline support is lacking. It frustrates me that Google make a huge thing of this being a set of "collaboration" tools and yet leave out (or don't implement) a really simple and obvious feature like folder-level sharing. If you want to share a folder containing sub-folders with other people in your group, you have to meticulously go through the directory structure and share all the bloody files in each sub-folder individually. Why the hell can't I just share the top folder and have it apply sharing to the rest of the tree?
What worries me more, is that when you go into the requested features forum, you can see that people have been asking for this for a long time now and it's not happened. Which makes me think that Google simply aren't putting a lot of resource into developing it. I don't like entrusting the future of my business into something that they might just drop like a stone if they feel like it. And without more feedback from the devs, and noticeable improvements over time, it certainly feels like they could.

The docs file manager tool itself seems completely brain-damaged at times. You can drag a file from one folder to another, and it disappears. The folder displays (2 items) but only 1 is visible. Where the fuck did it go, and why should I have to kill my browser window and re-launch to see it? I could go on, but I think a couple of examples are enough to suggest that there are what I would suggest are basic areas of functionality that simply aren't ready for prime-time yet.

Eventually we gave up and went back to an offline office suite. Google Apps is a nice idea, and I'm sure that when it's anywhere near fully functional it'll be a very handy for us. But right now it's not even close.

I apologize for the rather disorganized rant. If I'd had more time I'd have written a more organized critique, but given that I was on my way to bed, I banged out this comment in a quick 5 minute brain splurge.

I tend to take a less generous view. I think any IT department that can't figure out a strategy to upgrade IE6 is either useless or fucking lazy. I simply don't believe in this mythical "mountain of HTML code" that has so many problems that couldn't be fixed in a relatively short space of time by a competent professional.

I've heard these kinds of excuses time and time again, and on every occasion I've asked the IT admin staff responsible to give me some solid examples of where the problems lie (i.e. actual apps/code that moving to IE7/8, Firefox, Chrome or whatever would break and couldn't be fixed within minutes). Never seen a single example yet. They don't even know because they don't have a clue.

You've just described in a short sentence why Linux, despite being freely available for anyone, still languishes in a distant third place.

You appeared to have entirely missed the GP's point. OSs haven't fundamentally done anything new from a user perspective for a decade.

As was pointed out, most people want a word processor, a web browser and (if they don't use webmail) an email client, plus one or two other apps depending on their casual requirements. They fact that a product like MS Office has struggled to invent anything new for users to do since about the late 90s, or that the latest versions of any web browser will most likely function on XP well after it goes into double figures age-wise is indicative of how little the underlying OS matters to most people.

I agree that's an issue for Australia, but it's never really been a major issue for Japan. Given that the home nation is the only country where Japanese is widely spoken, most of the population rarely browse sites outside the national borders anyway.

Posting from your iPhone again?

Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox

Interesting how stories spin out differently depending on the browser in question. If it were an IE story, there would be howls of derision that the vulnerabilities existed in the first place and questions about why Microsoft didn't fix them more quickly.

I thought the tech was nice, but the applications were a really poor way of demonstrating them.

Apart from the word/math games for kids, some of the other ideas were really lacking. The music sequencer was a perfect example where they'd taken something that works perfectly well with current tech and tried to shoehorn their blocks into it, to make a cool demo. The word puzzles were fine - you could instantly see how much fun it would be. But some of the other stuff was just gimmicky.

What they need to do is identify where these blocks could be applied in circumstances where they become an ideal medium that offers something over and above conventional methods. It seems that they have a great product but not a great deal of inspiration about how to use them.