BusinessWeek: ‘immense potential’ of Rendezvous ‘a direct challenge to Microsoft’

“Apple is delivering on the immense potential of its no-fuss networking system. With luck, it could be a direct challenge to Microsoft. When Apple first unveiled Rendezvous at Macworld last summer, the crowds went wild. And rightfully so. Steve Jobs and company yet again jumped ahead of the competition with the first mass-market implementation of zero-configuration networking technology — a program aimed at allowing users to talk to other Rendezvous-enabled machines without manually changing any settings. True to the Apple mantra, it just worked. At first it only did so with iTunes, Apple’s top-notch digital-music software. You walked into a room bearing a laptop running Jaguar (the latest version of the OS X operating system) with a wireless networking (Wi-Fi) card, and you could instantly see the iTunes music files of everyone else in the room with a similar setup. Still, at the time many Apple observers reacted cautiously. “Cool app, but show me something real and meaty,” seemed to be the general feeling. Well, the beef has arrived,” writes Alex Salkever for BusinessWeek Online. Full article here.