V E R S I O N S

 

 

So let’s say I want to go down to Fry’s and buy a copy of Mac OS and a copy of Windows. But which to buy?

With Mac OS, it’s easy. You have one question to ask yourself before settling on one of two options for an operating system. That question is: "Do you run a high-powered server?" If the answer is yes, then buy Mac OS X Server. If not, buy Mac OS 9. It’s that easy.

With Windows, you have 7 options. That’s right, 7. You have (in order of increasing complexity):

• Windows Me
  
• Windows 2000 Professional
  
• Windows 2000 Server
  
• Windows 2000 Advanced Server
  
• Windows 2000 Datacenter Server
  
• Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
  
• Windows NT 4.0 Server
  

And then, of course, there’s the whole upgrade fiasco. Last year, Microsoft charged existing Windows 98 users for "Windows 98 Second Edition" which was basically the same software with a whole bunch of bugs squashed. And how much did they charge? $98 — the same price as the user paid for the first edition.

Mac OS has bug fix releases for free: these are generally the "third decimal point" releases. For instance, Mac OS 9 you had to pay for, but Mac OS 9.0.4 was free. And the only reason why you’d have to pay for it is because there were enough changes that the download would be just too big, and they had to make a CD.

I can understand charging for new features (like Sherlock), but not for bug fixes.