Microsoft isn't beating anyone (Score 1)

Apple's release of Bootcamp is not a victory for Microsoft. As soon as someone figured out a way to install Windows on an Intel Mac, Apple released the Bootcamp beta. Obviously, they had been working on it all along, and it seems equally obvious to me that they released it so that people would use Bootcamp instead of the hack, because otherwise Macs under warranty would be hard to service. People don't use Bootcamp because they love to use Windows, they use it because they have to use Windows for one reason or another.

Windows Vista is not a threat to Apple. "RC 1" is a mess. Believe me, I'm a beta tester. It isn't even feature-complete according to the Microsoft employee who responded to my bug reports. It has many, many good points. The user interface is great in some areas and horrendous in others. Just try to configure IIS for dynamic content. Microsoft doesn't know the difference between "user friendly" and "patronizing," and the help files are filled with novel-length explanations of what things are instead of instructions about how to do things. Vista has features that parallel Tiger, and it even contains something that does the same thing as Time Machine. However, the user interface for these features is not intuitive. Those features don't do Microsoft any good because most users won't even find them. On top of that, many nice interface features from XP are no longer there.

(Microsoft can't be copying Apple's Time Machine, because Microsoft just isn't good or fast enough to have developed the feature in the short time since Time Machine was announced. Obviously, these were parallel efforts.)

I've always been a fan of Microsoft but Vista just makes me feel disgusted.

Unless Microsoft surprises us all by pulling out from behind, the release of Vista is going to be a corporate pratfall. Apple is not going to take over the world, but it certainly won't suffer one bit at the hands of Microsoft.