Four Great Programs?

Jul 26, 1998

Ask yourself this question. How many different types of software have you used in the last month? Or last year? Or decade? Perhaps then you'll realise how incredibly ridiculous this ongoing debate about the lack of software for Macs - compared to Wintel machines - is. We're talking about so many thousand titles for the Mac versus so many more thousand titles for Windows, we've lost count along the way. But of these, how many are really top-quality stuff that have either made you much more productive, given you hours of entertainment, or shared with you a wealth of knowledge? We'll get back to that in a moment.

Since the WWDC or earlier this year, Steve Jobs has taken every opportunity he'd been given to talk about the unwieldy Macintosh product line which he was introduced to upon his return to Apple, and how it had since been trimmed to the now-famous '4 Great Products'. Maybe that's the same problem we're faced with as far as the software debate is concerned. We've got so many in the market on both platforms, that apart from those by the major software developers, no one is really surely how many great titles there actually are out there. So the argument is ultimately reduced to one of numbers. The Mac loses out, of course.

But let's say we could somehow rank these thousands of titles on both platforms and weed out all but the best 4 of each generic category so that the list is reduced to one which is more realistic in relation to our capacity to actually use these programs. Then we would have a more level playing field, as the consumer would have an easier choice to make, his judgment based on quality rather than the pull of the majority.

Of course, this can't be done. It would be a massive exercise, and who's going to do it? So borrowing Jobs' idea of the '4 Great Products', let's assume we could literally work out a more manageable list of X number of really great software titles shortlisted for the Mac platform which cover the major categories of software, like business applications, content creation, games, and hey, even dental software. These could then be matched against the best that the Windows world throws up, not the thousands and thousands of drone software that they hide among. Only then can a fair comparison be made.

I'll leave you to think about that one.

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