Cowboy_X

common misunderstanding of antitrust law. "Prominence", dominance or even monopoly is not actually illegal. There's nothing wrong with being absurdly successful, after all.

The anti-trust laws are for when that power gets abused -- when one uses their monopoly power as leverage over another market. In the case of Microsoft, by bundling IE with Windows, they were using their OS monopoly to crush a competitor in the market for web browsers.

None of this applies to Apple because they have nothing close to a mobile monopoly. If they did, the lawsuits would be over their position as gatekeepers of the entire market for mobile apps.

It is a miserable neighborhood to work in.

I dropped my paid account. I still unfortunately must keep a free account due to sharing with clients.

Please spend an hour in traffic, and then an hour In your kitchen -- cooking for a hundred people -- and tell me what is less work.

Joking aside, I'm surprised more isn't being made of Balmer's hand in this mess. Some of XP's staying power is surely due to it's being the first "good enough" Microsoft desktop OS (win2k notwithstanding), but the back-to-back failures or Longhorn and Vista had to have an enormous hand in a generation of users never upgrading. That eight year chasm is breathtaking.

What do a pair of grimacing women have to do with anything? Are they trying to pack explosives into an old Gateway desktop?

Okay, I'm listening.

Wouldn't Google Chrome'a "native client" be a perfect fit for this?

Race to the bottom, guys. Race to the bottom. Jobs was right again.

ooooh I have a story similar to this

Back in 2010 I moved to a new city, and was trying to find a graphic design firm that wanted an in-house web developer. I shopped a resume (with prominent link to on-line portfolio) to all sorts of shops, never got a single call back.

A while later, I had brief access to a Mac, and decided to check out my site there (those were the dark OS 9 days when Mac testing was sort of optional). Turns out that a CSS glitch in IE Mac would take down — not just the browser — but the entire computer. I had been walking around crashing systems and losing peoples work for months.

Yes. I had sporadic trouble with it under ios 4, but it resumed working properly in ios 5. Never liked uncommon ports, though.

You seem to have a pretty good idea of your own shortcomings — which is a good sign imo, nobody can or should be good at everything — so why not play to your strengths and partner with someone else for the design work?

I've been doing small self-generated projects with 1-2 partners for years. One of them is gaining traction and about to take off in a big way (I hope). I never would have got to this stage on my own.

Note that having a partner isn't the same as selling out, or developing a project with an overmanaged 12-person team, etc. It's pretty much the same as going it alone but with a friend to bounce shit off of.