“Could Microsoft be the next IBM? Back in November, I wrote about how disappointed I was with both Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007. I wondered if Microsoft was coming to the end of its reign as the 800-pound gorilla of the computing world,” Andrew Kantor writes for USA Today.
Kantor writes, “Since then, I’ve had a chance to put Windows Vista through its paces. If anything would help the kids in Redmond stay on top, it was this.”
“And I can say confidently that it’s not yet ready for primetime,” Kantor reports.
Kantor then covers a bunch of Vista problems (we’ve seen similar in every review not paid for by Microsoft).
Kantor writes, “If someone out there feels like spotting me the cash for a 20-inch, 2.33-GHz iMac and Photoshop, I’d be grateful.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A true “Wow!” Kantor is among the very last we’d ever peg to even consider the Mac. We find it very hard to believe that he’d ever – using his words – “drink the Kool-Aid and join the cult of blind little Mac fanatic lemmings.” Prove us wrong, Andy. We’d love to have one less idiot’s bad prose through which to constantly wade.
Related articles:
Kantor: ‘Mac fans are nothing if not predictable’ – January 12, 2007
USA Today writer: Apple iPhone is an ‘ordinary, average product’ at heart – January 12, 2007
USA Today tech writer: Apple’s Boot Camp will get Mac users to switch to Windows – April 14, 2006
USA Today columnist calls Mac users and Apple fans a ‘cult of blind little lemmings’ – September 16, 2005
USA Today: Apple’s iPod nano ‘a beautiful piece of hardware’ – but ‘the competition has caught up’ – September 16, 2005
USA Today writer: Apple’s iTunes Music Store’s ‘restrictive license’ fosters rampant piracy – March 25, 2005
USA Today writer unhappy with MacDailyNews and some Mac users’ emails – October 18, 2004
USA Today writer attempts to downplay Apple’s role in Virginia Tech supercomputer – September 03, 2004
Too bad I don’t even have the cash right now for a new Mac. Maybe we should pass around the collection plate to buy him one.
I got $2, cash money, for the cause. And a bottlecap.
Ok, I’m outta the loop. Someone please explain the Kool-Aid/Mac references, please. You can flame me if you feel the need.
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Chump change. I probably have more than enough to cover that down the back of my sofa.
He’s just looking for an excuse not to jump and admit he’s been wrong all of these years.
Come on Apple, send him a loaner. After a couple of months he’ll be hooked and send you a cheque.
Ash: 2 words Jim Jones, and Jonestown
ok more than two. Google is your friend on this. Aslo Wikipedia i suspect
You will be assimilated into the Mac collective.
Let your wireless network speak the language of Apple.
Let your packets flow through the veins of Steve Jobs and return to you with whimsical powers.
Let the Steve Jobs distortion field envelope your body and soul.
Yeah sayeth Lord Steve Jobs.
Make it so Number One.
AshNazg:
Click that first referenced link (Kantor: ‘Mac fans are nothing if not predictable’) to see what it means in relation to Macs. IE, Mac users are fanatics that are blind slaves to the Cult of Apple and His Steveness.
The “koolaid” reference goes back to the Jonestown Massacre and the People’s Temple in 1978. The followers, fearing Government retaliation for the murder of a US Congressman and his party committed mass suicide by drinking poisoned Koolaid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
Since then its been a short-hand reference (“drinking the koolaid”) to people who blindly follow a particular belief.
AshNazg:
Read the wikipedia article on Jonestown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
Long story short, it was a cult commune which ended when its members followed their leader in drinking poisoned Kool Aid (Flavor Aid, actually). It’s a popcultural reference for cultish behavior and following without thinking. It’s used with Mac owners since they’re “cultish”, at least in the collective caricature.
I just won the $3.7 million Lotto
Macs for everyone!!!
I could throw in a Zune but I’m afraid that I’d have to pay an extra “Waste disposal fee” to get rid of it.
I’m enjoying every bit of Vista-related stories. Keep’em coming MDN.
@AshNazg
Google is your friend:
Jim Jones, cult leader, killed all his followers in Jonestown, Guyana with poisoned Kool-Aid, and then shot himself in a suicide pact.
He was a charismatic leader, but destructive to his flock.
He is still a moron, though.
The Kool-Aid comment is in reference to Jim Jones and the “Jonestown” massacre of the late 70s in Guiana (sp.?). Jone’s followers (all) committed mass suicide by drinking poison laced punch (thought to be kool-aid). Apparently they knew what was in the punch and drank it anyway at the insistence of Jones. Do a search and you will turn up tons of stuff about this event.
The phrase: “drinking the Kool-aid” thus became synonymous with blindly following a leader regardless of how absurd the position/direction. It is often used by M$ shills to demean Apple/Mac users in reference to believing that whatever Steve Jobs or Apple does is the best. (See also “RDF” in reference to Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field.)
MDN’s particular reference is a quote from a particular vitriol of Kantor’s some months back. Ah the irony!
zac
Ahh, thanks Neven.
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Maybe we can arrange an aluminum can drive to raise funds for his new Mac? Somebody could scour the Redmond recycle bins for old Squirt soda cans.
(Sorry)
For all the crap he’s written over the years he deserves to buy his own Mac as penance for his sins.
HEY, could ONE MORE person go ahead and explain the kool-aid reference for ua all? Huh? Please?
Maybe we can go for the record.
“For all the crap he’s written over the years he deserves to buy his own Mac as penance for his sins.” He deserves to buy one at FULL PRICE. No discounts. Ever. He has MANY sins he needs to repent for.
@Shut the F-CK up
Yeah let’s, just to piss you off.
Wonderful news, Jon1 – where do we go to pick ’em up?
Thank Neven, for leetle girls, for leetle girls get beeger every day.
I take the opposite view.
Far from being given a Mac, he should be refused a Mac even if his pays for it out of his own funds. He’s done all he can to dissuade others from using Macs and he should be kept in the land of PCs until the last person who followed his advice has switched to Mac.
Once that is done, his penance is complete and he would be welcomed.
Why should he be given a free Mac to escape the fate that he has imposed on others ? Who will be giving free Macs to those who were influenced by Kantors misguided ravings ?
kool-aid reference refers to when Steve (The Kool-Aid Man) Ballmer crahses through the partition at the MS dev con keynote and yells, “OH, YEAH, developers, deveopers, OH YEAH”
then throws chair…
What flavor kool-aid is ballmer, you ask?…. why monkey mango of course.
I refuse to drink the explaining-the-koolaid koolaid.
I just noticed at the bottom of an email from someone using an @hotmail.com address:
> Win a Zune™—make MSN(r) your homepage for your chance to win!
Desperate, yes?
And the ironic thing for Kraft foods (makers of Kool-Aid) is that they didn’t actually use Kool-Aid in Jonestown, but a cheap off-brand called Flavor-Aid
MW=learned, as in well, now you’ve learned something today….
The truly ironic part is that in Jonestown, it was a group of lemmings who followed their leader to their own detriment, all the while not knowing the truth about what he was doing to them. This is much more like the average PC user who thinks that the blue ‘e’ is the internet than it is like a Mac user. Mac users have made a choice to buy a Mac, where PC users generally go out looking for a computer, and end up with whatever the salesperson (or their friend from IT) sold them on.
“drink the Kool-Aid and join the cult of blind little Mac fanatic lemmings.”
It has always seemed ironic to me that the 95% of the world who run frantically and blindly about like a swarm of Starlings, trying to head off viruses, afraid to download anything onto their fragile Wondows systems, will pause from their mania, see the Mac user sitting idly saying “there’s something better” and then call us lemmings.
The best line in the article: “I had run into an infinite loop. “
Apple’s address happens to be 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino. And yes Microsoft and Vista have just run into it.
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As with all Vista news – “WOW.” Or “The WOW hurts NOW.”
Also, don’t forget that mass lemming suicide is a myth invented for the Disney documentary, White Wilderness by an antsy film crew.
And unfortunately, perpetuated by an early, ill-advised Apple commercial.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm
“Claim: During the filming of the 1958 Disney nature documentary White Wilderness, the film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.
Status: True.
Origins: Lemming suicide is fiction. Contrary to popular belief, lemmings do not periodically hurl themselves off of cliffs and into the sea. Cyclical explosions in population do occasionally induce lemmings to attempt to migrate to areas of lesser population density. When such a migration occurs, some lemmings die by falling over cliffs or drowning in lakes or rivers. These deaths are not deliberate “suicide” attempts, however, but accidental deaths resulting from the lemmings’ venturing into unfamiliar territories and being crowded and pushed over dangerous ledges. In fact, when the competition for food, space, or mates becomes too intense, lemmings are much more likely to kill each other than to kill themselves.”
Kantor is an ass. Now that it is once again chic to jump on the Mac bandwagon and Mafiasoft has been outed for being lower than a snakes belly, he wants in.
F*ck em!
Sheesh! The guy must make enough money to buy his own iMac (why not go for the 24″ while he’s at it, too?) and Photoshop. He can probably write it off his taxes anyway.
@Real IT guy… What’s up with Answers.com using faux handwritten fonts. Can’t read that stuff worth a dime. Seeing the same thing all over blogs, too, these days. Form definitely not following function.
What is that shit about Kool-Aid?
Someone please explain.
I don’t drink Kool-Aid. I drink Gin.
Could Microsoft be the next IBM?
It’ll be a lot worse than that.
MS is on track to become the next Gateway.
Listen, I think it would be a nice gesture if we each sent him ten bucks to contribute to a new mac for him. He can get his own copy of photoshop.
so…
Roanoke times
where, virginia?
or we could eMail him with our addresses, and he could send us a stamped self addressed envelope to return the cash tohim if he is really earnist about this project.
“But” that might not work either.
No worries about passing around the collection plate, Apple PR will undoubtedly pick this up.
Sure, the guy has been a typical FUD spewing dick toward Macs. BUT, regardless, Apple should just GIVE the guy a Mac for 6 months with he stipulation that he use ONLY the Mac.
We all know the drill, he’ll twist in the wind and whine a bit at first, but he’ll end up LOVING his Mac! He won’t want to live without it.
As they say, there’s nothing worse than a convert. So, once he finds out that, indeed, Macs DO just work! … Just imagine the POSITIVE things he’d suddenly write about Macs.
Somebody like that could swing a LOT of folks away from the Dark Side!
Kantor writes, “If someone out there feels like spotting me the cash for a 20-inch, 2.33-GHz iMac and Photoshop, I’d be grateful.”
Kant or won’t?
MW: choice
Microsoft may have continuing problems on the home front where AT&T slowly grinds out its IPTV rollout
……………
Far more worrying are the constant leaks to the press in the US from AT&T executives, bemoaning poor software from Microsoft that cannot carry out the specification of the services that it wants to offer its customers, and the worryingly low numbers of US take up, last released at around 7,000.
We have even heard rumors of an AT&T “secret lab” that is working on an alternative series of technologies so that the Microsoft system can be replaced at the drop of a hat, but no-one will go on the record about it.<>
(NDA from Apple maybe? Fear of the Wrath of Steve™.)
<i>The Microsoft message these days is definitively more about winning friends that contracts, and Ed Gracyzk, director of marketing at Microsoft IPTV was keynoting the Connected Home conference in London this week, and released details from a recent survey the company had just carried out.
“We asked 7,000 people in 9 countries to rate 22 features of IPTV, and what they told us is that they want more detail in the management and control of the service. They want whole home DVR, multiview and VoD services and an easier program guide,” he said.
Microsoft arranged features into clusters such as a feature set it calls Communication, which offers program recommendation, caller ID on the TV screen and on screen instant messaging; or one it calls Commerce, which allows them to order songs, buy DVDs and limits them to targeted advertising, and then asked them to choose which feature they would like in an IPTV service.
This sounds rather like “which version of Vista do you want today” to which the reply seems increasingly to be “none”.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/08/microsoft_iptv/
brau…
“95% of the world who run frantically and blindly about like a swarm of Starlings, trying to head off viruses, afraid to download anything onto their fragile Wondows systems”
LMFAO!
I HATE starlings!
BRILLIANT observation! It really makes you wonder what people are thinking.
Starling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starling
Kantor, it’s fine that you’re starting to see a little light ….you must be as pale as a geisha from all your dark years of clinging to the earths underbelly but you know what? ……you can still kiss my ass for all the senseless venom you’ve spewed across the internet.
Oh, ….and I’m sorry for spraying you with roach poison.
Man, am I thirsty! Anyone got some KoolAid?
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
Ahhhh, Twisted Mac Freak.
I see now.
It never ceases to amaze me what Windows users will put up with just to continue the franchise.
I have a friend that just got Vista and they are so excited that its very Mac like. Aside from the fact that they don’t know where anything is they think it’s the best version yet.
I suspect this is because the GUI was made to look prettier. In my opinion that was the only real change made to Vista.
The Stockholm Syndrome is fully in force and Apple will need to advertise differently to get these drones out of their misery. It is truly proof that misery loves company.
And Bill Gates is wanting to bring in SCAB labor into the country to pad the bottom line of his monopoly. Anybody that gives money to Microsoft deserves to have their jobs outsourced to cheaper labor!
Okay, I just read all these comments but haven’t seen anyone reference this very telling (and somewhat arrogant) quote from Kantor’s article:
“Then I discovered that Vista would not allow Firefox to be my default browser no matter how hard I insisted. I even turned off Internet Explorer through the Default Programs control. Still, any link I clicked in an e-mail message would open in IE, while Firefox confidently told me it was set as my default browser.
I finally fixed this by not only disabling IE through Default Programs, but by delving into Vista’s Registry and manually changing some keys, replacing IE with Firefox. (If you don’t know about editing the Registry, don’t worry — it’s not something for the casual user.)”
How condescending: “don’t worry — it’s not for the casual user” ???!! So if you’re not an uber-geek ready to delve into the registry (because it’s not for the casual user) you should what? Simply accept the notion that MS has locked you into IE? Don’t worry, says Kantor. Kantor likes to show his mastery of technology by tossing off the phrase about manually editing Vista’s Registry, but doesn’t seem empathize much with all the mom & pops out there who wouldn’t — and shouldn’t need to — know what or where the Registry is.
How typically Microsoftian is that it will allow FireFox to install and be set as the default browser, and yet turn around and have all applications launch IE when a URL is clicked? But accept it, okay, because fixing it is not for casual users.
Masa–I don’t drink Kool-Aid. I drink Gin.
Good for malaria but bad for gout.
Huh. Maybe this dates me but I have always thought that “kool aid” was a reference to the the late 1960’s acid parties/road trip saga (and resultant detachment from reality) of Ken Kesey and his loons, and chronicled in the book “the Electric Kool-aid Acid Test”.
You buncha f-cking assclown f-ckheads will never learn.
It’s not cherry Kool-Aid, is it? I don’t like the cherry….
The Windows lemmings are starting to see the light.
“You are coming to a sad realization, cancel or allow?” Even th PC guy the commercial says “allow.” Kantor is coming to the “sad realization” that Windows Vista is at best not worth the upgrade cost and at worst a piece of garbage.
Hate MS, hate Windows .. but I will give MS credit for one thing only, the new Office 07 is great.
“I had run into an infinite loop. The Application Data folder redirected the software to the AppData folder, bla, bla, bla…”
Thats what happens when you avoid Infinity Loop
This article warms my heart… About 90% of my income is derived from the fact Microsoft exists. Things have been a bit slow lately. This just gives me hope a turn for the better is around the corner. Microsoft Vista = easy money for me!
Spark,
Yeah, I saw that, too. Very damning for Mafia$oft. I’m the justice dept. would like to hear about this.
hey, we oughta do a fund raiser for Kantor to get him a new 20″ iMac
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I’ll spot a Benjamin Franklin:-)
“For all the crap he’s written over the years he deserves to buy his own Mac as penance for his sins.”
Nah he should be sentenced to a life of Windows without possibility of parole.
Really I think the Kool-Aid thing fits Windows users better. Except when they drink Windows Kool-Aid and their computers get sick – viruses. It would work better for Macs if the story went, they drank Kool-Aid and stayed happy.
Yeah taking what their leader offered and paying the price definitely fits Windows users better.
Although…
” rel=”nofollow”>This Could Work
Kantor is an ass. He can and should buy his own Mac.
In addition, his pathetic attempt for compassion is more than outweighed by his unapologetic history of Apple bashing and sycophantic support of Microsoft. I’m not convinced that Kantor’s frustration with Vista hasn’t caused him to have a break from reality. I will wait to judge how sincere he is with his new found respect for Apple and his recent redemption from the evils of Microsoft.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…………………..kool aid!!!
Sometimes, ya know, it’s lots more fun to just keep feeding the trolls – or in this case, give them a nice, tall, cold glass of fruity-tasty koolaid!