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Reprint by San Jose Mercury News (the Merc) - it seems WSJ didn't want their idiocy available on-line. http://www.sjmercury.com/business/compute/moss0126.htm
Ah, yet another "bash Apple" article from the WSJ. The Wall Street Journal tends not to mention in or around any of these articles that they have lots of business dealings with MS and Bill Gates - which may be inspiring some of the vitriol - though normally Mossberg is not so bad as this.
This article is basically saying some really silly thing, that definitely pissed a lot of people off accordingly.
The tone of the article is summed up with the first paragraph -
``After carefully reading the plan and interviewing top Apple executives, I believe the strategy makes buying a Mac a relatively risky investment for these consumers, compared with buying a computer running Microsoft's Windows 95 or Windows NT operating systems.''.
It only gets dumber from there. The whole point of the article is that despite the Macs ease of use, 14,000+ applications, and all its other advantages - consumers should buy PC's - not because they are better - but because Apple will be another 18 months before it delivers Rhapsody (its NeXT generation Operating System).
There are some major leaps of faith required to buy into his premises - like claims that Win95 or WinNT is more stable. Read my site or other sites on the true stability of Windows. Mossberg misunderstands NeXT technology and what it is about - and makes the gross assumption that it is for Corporations only - which it is not. He makes some negative assumptions about compatibility -- despite Apples amazing transition from Motorola 68000 processors to PPC's and other historical successes. Lastly Mossberg calls System 7, "outdated as compared to Win95", when Win95 barely catches up to a small sub-set of System 7's functionality and even then it does those functions so poorly as to not really count. (Shall we discuss long file names or Plug & Pray on Win95 yet again?). Worst of all, Mossberg implies that the collection of hacks on DOS referred to as Win95 is a "modern" operating system, when anyone with a clue about OS's would not make this claim.
It seems that when some users get frustrated by the marketing hype against Macs - they just cave in, ignore reason, ignore facts, and start becoming blind parrots, sheepishly following whatever they are told to think, and conforming to group-think without understanding the issues they report on.
I will not belabor the points - other than to point you to responses that are far more eloquent than my own -
Time responds to WSJ <- A great read!
The technology guy at Time Magazine gouges some serious holes in WSJ and Mossberg for silliness and bad claims.
The original was removed from Apples site (Hmmm?) - but I have this local copy.
http://www.tiac.net/prefab/essays/mossbergspessimism.html <
Prefab software has a response to the same article.
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