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Colossal
wastes of time and money...
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Anything with
the name Microsoft
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 OK,
I'll confess, I'm a Mac user. I work on, and am proficient on
both Mac and its idiot spawn, "Windoze" platforms. I'll
further confess, that I cut my computer graphics teeth on a DOS
based CAD/CAM system that I bought back around 1984 (for $40,000).
It wasn't until the end of that decade that I discovered the graceful
power & creativity of a Macintosh. But I digress.
For
years I have periodically gotten sucked into installing one of
the clumsy DOS or Windows ports that Microsoft or Corel foist
off on the Mac world as an application. Each time I do it to accommodate
a job or a client, live to regret it, vow "never again",
then end up getting sucked in again for whatever reason. Those
of you who have been down this road know what I mean. Other than
a clumsy interface (computing should NOT be intuitive, it should
be complex and frustrating) and bloated resource requirements,
there's nothing more these PC ports to Mac love than to dump a
load of crap into your system folder. I'm not talking 2 or three
extensions or libraries, I'm talking dozens. If you've ever sorted
through the six or seven billion documents in an application folder
on a PC, looking for one that had the .EXE extension, you can
see the thread of logic running through a PC programmers mind
when porting or writing a PC application for the Mac ( hhmmm...a
system folder, with thirty extensions sucking resources up there,
we can make this app require only 16k of ram).
I
remember the glowing reports of Microsoft's commitment to writing
Mac applications that look and act like Mac applications. MS Office
98 was the first shining example. I have to admit the look is
there and sometimes it even acts like a Mac app, so long as your
expectations aren't too great. One of the Macs I use daily has
to network with PC's on a LAN. So For mail I run MS Outlook for
Exchange server. Additionally I have MS Office 98 to interact
with people on the LAN that send me Word or Excel files that I
translate and integrate into Quark documents. Just for kicks I
took a look at my memory and system resources in the "About
this Mac" window before and after the launch of Outlook for
Exchange and Word or Excel. Talk about an eye opener. Opening
those two applications and their assorted system files, extensions
and libraries used the expected ram requirements for the application,
but also added an average 15 meg chunk to the system. (thud)
Enter
Internet Explorer 4.5, I can feel the suction drawing me in and
I'm powerless to resist. It was written EXCLUSIVELY for the Mac.
It has Mac ONLY features. My eyes have glazed, I must install
it and see for myself. At first blush, I love it. I's every thing
it promised, well almost. It still hasn't gone 100% on drag &
drop, but that auto form fill-in feature (auto type) is GREAT.
I have to grudgingly admit, it handles loading pages reloading
pages from cache faster than Netscape 4.08. And after two weeks
of using it as my "browser of choice" (I love these
phrases, "browser of choice" and "enhance the user
experience", they're so Dilbertesque) guess what? I checked
and "thud". That's right, why require the app to use
more than 4.1 megs of ram when you can load up the system? I'm
also seeing the signs of memory leaks when used over long periods
(an industry standard). (sigh) Back to picking all those obscure
files out of my system, preference and extensions folders. I guess
I'll never learn |
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