Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I spent some time this evening watching Jimmy play with Tiger. Today there is nothing really in the Mac OS that gets me excited (other than Entourage 2004 and Virtual PC!). Watching some of the subtle effects, the cool widgets, the awesome animation, search, made me envy a mac for the first time in a very long time.
Yes, I love Longhorn, and yes I went to the PDC and drank the kool-aid. However, as I sit here and look at my Tablet PC I realize that I'm not going to see any real change for 2 or more years. I won't see applications that take advantage of that stuff for longer. Well that makes me sad. Granted, I can't handwrite on a Mac, can't use OneNote, can't run all the media in my house and so on. But that still doesn't change the fact that I smile when I look at Tiger... it's so pretty, and inviting.
You see, it occurred to me while watching Jimmy. Apple elicits amazing emotional response. I couldn't help but feel happy just watching all the new features. I don't have this attachment to my PC. It's really a tool that I use to get x or y done. It's a really important tool, and one I rely on (and run my life on). But I don't really think searching for a file on Windows XP is fun (actually I never find anything so, it's definitely not fun).
Anyway, Tiger looks very cool (and very stable for an Apple OS that isn't shipping for 8 or so months). And I can't help but feel that Longhorn is to far off for me to pay any attention to. I may have to go to another PDC to find the love.
But please, grow up Apple. Everyone copies everyone. I can think of a few feature in Entourage that ended up in Mail.app, and the Address Book after we did them. It's really sad that they must market their product(s) in this manner, and I think it reflects the way that upper management at Apple behaves and views Microsoft... it's no secret and this becomes pretty obvious once you start dealing with them. Apple's will retain their 3% market share because they are cool, and people like them. That should be good enough.