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Matt on I am a PC campaign: "Of course not. "

Matt on Candace Gingrich: A Letter to My Brother Newt Gingrich: "I love that this is happening..."

Jan-Paul van den Bos on How to Sync Entourage, iPhone, and iCal: "At first it seems if setting..."

Rick Hightower on How to Sync Entourage, iPhone, and iCal: "Thanks. This helped a lot. I..."

Joy on How to Sync Entourage, iPhone, and iCal: "Hi - in iTunes, I don’t..."

Matt on Don’t want to be in there.: "Well, the fact that it passed..."

Josh on Movies.app - Find movie showtimes, reviews, and tickets on your iPhone: "Movies is great, but I think..."

What he said. Mine hasn’t even arrived, and I love it already.

Video iPod, I Love You

I did break down and buy a plastic protector thing for it. Can’t have any scratches, now, can we.

In other happy news, my video iPod has shipped. Bring on the next insanely great thing. I am eyeing that Madonna “Express Yourself” video on the iTunes Music Store now.

I think we’re reaching the end of the line - Microsoft has so lost control over its own platform that it cannot regain it. Steve Jobs and the Mac have essentially won. And they have won in a way that the Mac is showing itself to be superior. Not “beta vs. vhs” superior, where the differences aren’t clear. But massively superior in a “it is obvious that this is better” sort of way.

Boot up an infected Windows XP computer today. You may get a pop-up warning telling you that the computer is infected with viruses, spyware, adware, etc. There is no way you can trust such a warning - did it come from Microsoft, or a malicious piece of code? Recognition has been completely lost as to who the “good guys” are. When your computer is infected, what do you do? Most people don’t know what to do. Their IE browser is basically incapable of resisting attack, or being functional anymore. It is just a matter of time before the computer is compromised. Does anyone want to compute that way?

Look at the Mac. You plug it in, you turn it on. And it takes a blind eye to any sort of attack that you throw at it. Apple is so aggressive with security updates, you can’t help but install all of them. The Mac sits happily on the network as the PC-intended attacks fly right by it. If a warning does come from an Apple piece of software, you can trust it. Apple has so well engineered the user experience that you know what is core to the OS and what is third party.

Think about Mac software. Even the software designed by Microsoft for Mac works better than that designed for the PC. Entourage, the mail client, happily tunnels into exchange mail servers and pulls out your mail, securely and without a hassle. It integrates well with your outside POP mail and makes for a great computing experience. How is Outlook for PC? Can you say “mess”? Over-engineered and bloated, with features that hardly make sense. What’s up with the “Tools…” and “Options…” menus?

I have never been happier to own a Mac. And the thing is, at least since 1999, I have been happy to own a Mac because I enjoy using a Mac, not because I don’t like Microsoft or want an alternative to Microsoft. The only thing that I didn’t like about Microsoft is that at one time it looked like it was going to take away my choice in terms of computing platform. Once that wasn’t going to happen, that was fine. I say more power to them - they could really redefine computing if they wanted to. But can they at this point?

When Gil Amelio was CEO of Apple, apparently one of the items on the table to rescue Apple was to rebuild the OS with a Windows NT kernel. In Amelio’s book, it said that Bill Gates said this could be done successfully. Now it’s 2005, would the rescue strategy to build the next version of Windows on a Mach (OS X) kernel?

One thing I did not predict, and which still amazes me, is that it would be security that would take down the Wintel platform. I honestly believed that another company would come out from nowhere and out-innovate Microsoft the way Microsoft out-innovated IBM. It’s a shame for Microsoft. With good leadership I think they have the resources and ability to take computing to the next level, monopoly or not.