If Steve Jobs would put his money where his mouth is and sell the Mac OS then a lot of folks might try Apple.Where would one get the OS if you did indeed want to use it on aPC you build?CraigYou can't without a hack! I believe there is a proprietary protection chip on the MAC, that prevents installation on anything other than a MAC. You would have to defeat that before you could install it on a PC. It's amazing how Apple can get away with this, while MS would get sued for Anti-Trust violations if they tried the same thing with Windows!

It's been a while since I've run MS FS, I switched to Mac 2 years ago and haven't looked back. I've got a new MacBook Pro that will be delivered soon, and was thinking about plopping MSFS X onto a Boot Camp partition and running it, then I realized that the install is 14GB (!!), with just 160 GB for everything on my laptop, I just don't think I can spare upwards of 20GB for it, sadly.What I'd love to see is Microsoft take the same route EA is and invest a little bit of time into the Cider technology that they're using. While there would undoubtedly be a performance hit, it's still better than nothing at all, and possibly would be a relatively low-cost way to cross platform the thing.I'm hopeful for X-Plane 9, which does seem to be in development, but we'll see what happens. X-Plane just doesn't have the same 'fall right into using it' factor that MSFS does, and for the amount of time it takes to load the thing I could probably reboot into Windows Boot Camp and start up MSFS!

>True, Gates was funded by IBM who contracted with him to>supply DOS for their PC. Of course it has to be said that IBM>completely mishandled that arrangement and allowed Microsoft>to retain rights and essentially freelance DOS to folks likeIBM did mishandle the whole Microsoft affair, but that's because their where inside forces within IBM that supported the development of the newly, inexperienced formed Microsoft corp. These members had vested interests with Microsoft, not IBM. IBM was foiled from within. It happens all the time in big industry, insiders leaking information to further the development of their own company.>Compaq who kicked IBM's butt.They did? Have you ever seen IBM's computer chip research and development labs? Stock prices as of Jun15:Compaq $45.71Microsoft $30.49IBM $105.09Investors often invest in quality company's that have futures and past records.>I was there in the '80s whenI was there too, what department did you work in?>the PS/2 was being marketed with it's proprietary>micro-channel architecture (MCA) against EISA and ISA. BTW,>who did IBM contract to write it's failed OS/2? When IBM took>OS/2 back in house, why didn't it kick Window's butt? It was>probably a technically superior OS to the 16 bit Windows 3.x.>Why didn't IBM kick Windows butt? Simple, cost and insider knowledge. OS/2 was initially created by Microsoft, funded by IBM. To be successful in the "general public" arena, you must produce a product and sell that product for as little as possible. Quality does not always sell a product, but the cost certainly does. You know the saying, "you get what you pay for"Examples where quality has lost to a cheaper product of lessor quality. MAC/OS2/ looses to Windows 3.0/WIN95Beta looses to VHS.Token Ring looses to Ethernet.Big corporations have "research and development" costs associated with every product they produce. The user pays for these costs, but if someone comes along with a cheaper product, you're out the door. Even better, have a company pay for your research and development costs, then leave that company high and dry, and sell a cheaper product that was really funded by that "big corporation".If you worked at Microsoft, and were now spending your own money developing a new operating system called "Windows 3.0", would you not now have vested interest in Windows 3.0? Would you not want to see OS/2 fail?Microsoft was cunning, and still is to this day. How do you define success?>As far as AIX, you're correct that it's found in many>enterprise data centers on RISC systems sold by IBM. However,>there are many more Intel servers in the average large data>center, and many of them run Windows (some Linux, and a>rapidly declining amount of NetWare). if you count absolute>numbers of servers, Windows leads the pack.Windows leads the pack currently, because of cost, not quality. They lead the PC arena because every PC sold comes reloaded with Windows. Kinda like being forced to eat those vegetables as a child? Eventually you learn to eat them...People have always, and will continue to buy and use the cheapest solution available to them. You talk about Servers and Windows leading the pack? Linux is free, and their is a big switch from Windows Server 2003 to Linux. We'll see in a few years which "pack" is leading who. Lee

Thanks all for the posts and the enjoyable read.I'm just wondering if this thread will go for 10 pages after FSX is rereleased for DX10. :)It should be quite a show!jjjallen