In LA

I just did a bit of googling for PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak’s columns relating to Apple and Windows in an attempt to try and find one from a while back that I found particularly worthy of April Fools Day (i.e. laughable). Instead I hit the trifecta.

I’ve put these three Apple vs. Microsoft articles in order by date and have summarized their main points. These were all published within a 1-year period. I’m getting whiplash just trying to figure out how one person could flip between three such contradictory lines of thought so quickly.¹

1. Jul 25, 2005: Windows Vista: Where’s the Buzz?. Summary: OS X is going to win over the entire x86 landscape due to Vista’s crappiness.
2. Feb 15, 2006: Will Apple Adopt Windows? Summary: Apple might, or will, or should drop its own OS and start shipping machines that run Windows (Vista?) with some OS X-like GUI tweaks.²
3. Apr 17, 2006: Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source; Clouds are looming if the company doesn’t do so. Summary: The strongest bit of reasoning in the article is that “clouds” are looming over OS X because of his assumption “… that as this is being written, Microsoft has coders in its skunk works tearing into OS X looking for deep flaws that it can exploit and publicize. Don’t think otherwise. It only makes sense that they’d do this.” He argues that this bad MSFT-generated publicity will somehow cause Apple to want to open-source OS X³.

   That’s the most well-reasoned part. Cough. The most hilarious bit relates to how “The Boot Camp product is pure test marketing. It’s so obviously test marketing that it’s hard to believe that people are foolish enough to get worked up about it.” He goes on to detail exactly how this test marketing scheme will work in an incredible flight of fantasy that seriously includes the possibility of “protests, picketing, egg-throwing, and flaming” from rabid old-school Apple partisans. Awesome!

Now that I’ve realized that he’s a humor columnist and doesn’t pose as a serious and knowledgeable technology writer with unnamed sources who are not-exclusively mental, I’ve lightened up. Those articles are pretty damned funny after all.

Why am I picking on a set of 3-year-old articles? Because a google search told me to!

1. To be fair, within the articles he occasionally notes where one article seems to contradict another and explains why it really doesn’t –using a level of logical analysis that I’ve decided is actually a sophisticated form of humor, invented by a hyperintelligent shade of the colour blue. [↩]
2. Oh how this one makes me laugh,”Luckily, Apple has a master showman, Steve Jobs. He’ll announce that now everything can run on a Mac. He’ll say that the switch to Windows gives Apple the best of both worlds. He’ll say this is not your daddy’s Windows.” Maybe the Apple fan bois he holds in such high esteem won’t show up with torches and pitchforks! [↩]
3. to give him the benefit of the doubt, he must only mean the portions of OS X that are not already covered under one open-source license or another –it is a BSD Unix after all. [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Amusing, Apple, Geeky, Media, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.