Bird, I bet ME is like owning a Howse brushcutter: for the average guy, it'll do 98% of what the fancy brands will do.
Here's the history of Windows/Mac operating systems, according to no one but me. In the beginning, the operating system was IBM DOS, which ran on IBM's proprietary PC hardware. In order to have DOS do anything at all, you had to memorize and type in, on a black screen, zillions of gibberish "commands", composed of meaningless globs of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. So, DOS was like Martian, and only geeks like Muhammad and Harv used PCs, or even wanted to.
Then, Apple invented the graphical user interface (GUI) for its Macs. Gone were all commands. No Martian.The screen was colorful and full of icons, windows, pull down menus, and all the other things you now associate with MS Windows. You instructed the computer by clicking on things instead of typing in memorized Martian commands. Also, since Macs never had a DOS, or DOS application programs, the Mac OS was designed from the beginning to work directly on and with Apple's proprietary hardware in a very efficient manner. Mac's proprietary hardware was different from IBM's proprietary hardware. IBM had 90% market share of the machines sold.
MS knew a good thing when they saw it, so they "borrowed' essentially all of Apple's Mac GUI, and called their pirated product Windows. Apple sued MS for copyright infringement, but after about 8 years ultimately lost the case.
PC hardware geeks also knew a good thing when they saw it, so they "cloned" IBM's hardware design. IBM lost lawsuits, and the world of clones exploded. The bandit geeks didnt clone Apple's hardware because Apple had done more sophisticated technical and legal things to protect their hardware, and also because Apple only had a 10% (and declining) market share.
So, now, MS's pirated Windows operating system was the only non-Martian operating system that would work on the zillions of pirated PC's now being made. IBM actually developed a windows-GUI, called OS/2, but it never succeeded in the market because IBM made the brilliant move of giving MS an exclusive license to the underlying DOS. (Have you noted, so far, how MS's monopolistic success has had almost nothing to do with innovation or technical brilliance.)
It is this "underlying DOS", however, that has plagued Windows and has made it bloated, unfriendly, inflexible and unstable. MS, in developing Windows, was faced with two problems that Apple was not. First, Apple controlled the design of its hardware; MS had to accomodate whatever IBM and the pirates (= the "PCs") were doing with their hardware. Second, MS couldn't allow Windows to obsolete all the DOS application programs that people were using on the DOS PC's. So MS had to allow Windows to be backward compatible--ie, work with--all those DOS applications as well as with all the new Windows applications.
This means Windows is not an operating sytem that efficiently operates right on the hardware, as Mac OS does; Windows is actually a huge overlayer that is bolted on top of all that old DOS Martian code. Therefore, everytime you want to do anything in Windows, it all has to be emulated and translated into Martian before it can do anyhing on the hardware.
This DOS-overlayered Windows I will call Martian Windows. It became Windows 95 and then Windows 98. Gates then promised that there would be no more Martian Windows after 98. He saw the future as being with a non-DOS-based version of Windows that he called Windows NT. We will call this Earth Windows.
Earth Windows was supposed to be released in 1999. But it fell behind shedule. Gates had to come out with a new product in 1999 to meet his commitment, so he issued another Martian release and called it Windows 98 2nd edition. Then, because Earth Windows kept falling behind schedule, Gates felt he had to do "something" for the Millenium, so he did two things. First, He released another Martian version called ME. He was too chicken to call it Windows 98 3rd edition because that would identify it for what it was, and didnt sound sexy enough. Second, he released a sort of Earth-Martian hybrid called Windows 2000.
XP is supposed to be the real Earth Windows (or, at least, the hybridization is supposed to be reduced). But it comes in at least two editions, Home and Professional, and has a controversial licensing scheme called WPA. WPA is intended to eliminated pirating. You know, those geeks have continued to know a good thing, so historically have copied MS's programs from each other rather than buying them from MS. (Most geeks believe this kind of copying is a constitutioal right.) WPA locks each program's use to the serial numbers of the hardware configuration on which it is first installed. Any reinstalls of the software on the same configuration, or any installation of an additional device into the configuration, will be deemed as potential piracy by MS and will require their permission to do. (This is like having to get Howse's permission to brush cut your neighbor's yard.)
Meanwhile, Apple adopted the parallel/vector processing PowerPC G chip for its Mac's instead of Intel's Pentium chip, further uniquifying and isolating themselves. They have just released their first operating system, OS X, that has been written and optimized to run native on the G chip. Thus G4 Macs running OS X will operate at supercomputer speeds, but with the "original", never-Martian-based, ultra-friendly GUI. This breeds what appears to be zealousness by the unfortunate computer professionals who are irretrievably locked into clumsy Martian software because of the monopolistic omnipresence of Windows application programs and PC hardware machines. They are fatalistically doomed to have no free will in the matter.
Home and small business users have free will. They should look at Mac with OS X. They will not even lose their investment in PC application programs. The G4 chips are so fast that, using an emulation program called Virtual PC, the Macs can run any of the Windows operating sytems and applications at Pentium II+ speeds. In fact, you can run a copy of all the Windows operating sytem simulataneously in their own windows on a Mac.
People like me may not have complete free will. If I work in a large organization that has a Wintel intranet, the predestination-doomed computer professionals will resist any attempts to incorporate a Mac into the system.
Thus it is.
