Full Circle

Back in the early 90's, I really started paying attention to the industry that I made my career in. Windows 3.0 and OS/2 were both out and based on a opinion piece I read in PC Mag (no, not by Dvorak) I got my boss to buy a copy of OS/2 to work on. At the time, I had moved from being a operator on a Wang mainframe, to an administrator on a Novell network and a programmer and assisting the Wang staff.

Compuserve was the medium of choice for online discussions, especially technical ones (although I met two of my favorite sci-fi authors on Compuserve and I extremely regret not staying in touch with both of them).

The more I read about that Northwestern software company, both online and in PC Mag and such, the more horrified I became. One technique that I really thought was terribly egregious was to release an updated version of their software that has no effect but to break other software. When Windows went from 3.1 to 3.1.1, they said it was to refresh the drivers. However, OS/2 for Windows stopped working. How many times did they change their word processor document format so that import/export in other word processors were broken?

I was never a Apple fan during this time, just because their software did not work the same way I did. To this day, I open several software applications at once and switch through them as I need them. I did not find that easy to do on a Mac pre OSX.

So I used OS/2 until it just did not make any sense any more. In the late 90's, I bought a Dell and was suddenly running Windows at home outside a virtual environment for the first time. (I went from TRS-DOS to DOS to DR-DOS to OS/2). That survived for just under a year. A friend introduced me to FreeBSD, which I ran for several years. A few years later, I convinced my boss (different boss) to let me use a Mac at work because I wanted to try out the new Mac OSX because it was based on FreeBSD. A year later, using a bonus, I purchased 2 new Macs for home. Currently I'm running one of those Macs and OpenSolaris on a Gateway Laptop.

Although I'm still not a Apple fan, I really do like their hardware and OSX. I own an iPod, and if the iPhone was on Verizon, would probably own one of those (if Verizon gets a gPhone first, I may never have an iPhone).

Just recently Apple has put out a new version of iTunes that has, as far as I can tell, the single purpose of breaking the Palm Pre's ability to sync with it. Yes, Apple controls iTunes and it is very much in their rights to do so, but why do it? Not so much break the syncing, but why put out a version just to do that. It should be so beneath a mature, honorable company. Reminds me so much of that other company.

Will this, by itself, keep me from buying Apple products. No. But it does make me start to worry about where they are going and what kind of company will they be. It very much reminds me of where I started.