[unalone]

Right now, Apple's pushing for the businessplace. Snow Leopard is supposed to have out-of-the-box Exchange support, which is a step Apple needs to take. Beyond that, Apple's been winning over plenty of small businesses: not the big guys yet, but large corporations can't change on a dime. If Apple stays as consistently reliable for another handful of years, I'd predict us seeing the Mac starting to gain entry to the workplace.

[RavingGoat]

Apple needs to upgrade their support to compete with the Dells in corporate America.

[wizlb]

Exchange support? Whip-dee-doo. How about offering some _real_ developer tools?

Oh, that's cute...you think xCode, Python and MySQL can actually be compared to Visual Studio, C# and SQL Server.

[YuriNiyazov]

Actually... yes; and, I daresay, comes out on top. Having lost countless hours of my life debugging .NET Framework installation problems (yay, installer ran and finished. Why isn't this damn thing showing up in my list of components?), I have to say that never spend nearly that much debugging silly installation issues with Python and MySQL.

[wizlb]

I never had any issue with the .Net framework installation, but I'll take your word for it.

I guess I just feel spoiled by Visual Studio, while every time I start something in Python I feel like I have to spend so much time trying to find quality tools to make it do what I want. It just doesn't feel like a very complete solution to me.

[krschultz]

2nd that, the .Net installer was a big problem at my former company. Can't say Python is any better, but to say .Net is perfect shows you haven't seen it used in a lot of places.

[unalone]

While I do like that you're taking the time to reply to each of my comments in turn, could we keep this a little civil? I love flamefests as much as anybody, but this isn't the sort of argument that requires sarcasm and vitriol.

I said Exchange because it's the one thing I've read about. I am not a businessperson, nor am I a programmer: the closest I get to programming is PHP, because it's all that I need. I said that that's what Apple's been up to, because it is: they're obviously pushing to make Macs business-friendly.

I'd guess that most businesses don't have computers for the sake of programming, though. Most people in the workplace don't program. They email, they discuss things with coworkers. With a few tweaks, the Mac ought to be ready for that sort of thing in a secure environment. And that's just as much a part of business as coding is.