Software:

One of the problems facing anyone that is even considering a computer for thier use is the most important question of all. Does the software to do the job I need exist, and is it's price in the range I'm willing to pay? One of the most argued items of the MacOS versus Windows debate is the lack of software on the MacOS. To a certain point I agree, but let's do a basic comparison.

Bundled Applications:

	Windows XP	MacOS X 10.2
Web Browser	Internet Explorer	Safari
E-Mail	Outlook Express	Mail
News Reader	Outlook Express	none
Address Book	Windows Address Book	Address Book
Calender	none	iCal
Photo Management	Paint	iPhoto
Movie Management	Windows Movie Maker	iMovie
Media Player	Window Media Player	iTunes & QuickTime

I won't go into an item by item analysis, but in each case, the MacOS equivalents are at least on par with the Windows counterparts, an most cases, superior. The exceptions being the Web Browser, which is still a beta, and the lack of a news reader. The Photo Management application is a bit misleading as well, since Windows XP embeds so much of the import and preview functions into the Explorer itself. It is my opinion, the the MacOS is more prepared for basic usage right out of the box than Windows is.

Productivity Applications:

	Windows XP	MacOS X 10.2
Word Processing	Microsoft Word	Microsoft Word
Spreadsheet	Microsoft Excel	Microsoft Excel
PIM/Groupware	Microsoft Outlook	Microsoft Entourage
Presentations	Microsoft PowerPoint	Microsoft PowerPoint
Database	Microsoft Access	FileMaker Pro
Page Layout	Quark Express	Adobe InDesign
Graphics (2D)	Adobe Photoshop	Adobe Photoshop
Graphics (3D)	Alias/Wavefront Maya	Alias/Wavefront Maya

Admittedly, this is just a brush across the surface, but these are the highlights of todays productivity applications. The MacOS suffers on the database side, Access isn't the best, but it's widely used, and it's cheaper than FileMaker. There are certainly alternatives on both platforms, and with the MacOS supporting Microsoft's ODBC standard, as well as having such robust Java support, using and administering the large RDMS systems like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server is readily done using inexpensive tools. What is noticable is that there is consistantly, either the same application, or a suitable alternative available.

Generally speaking, the availability of tools on the MacOS is good. While you may not have the wide selection of choices that exist on Windows, there is not a lack of tools to fit a given need. One of the areas where this really becomes evident is in the development tools world.

Application Developers are, as a rule a difficult bunch to please. We tend to push our machines and our tools harder than the average user. We also expect alot in the way of tools. Windows provides very little out of the box for developers. Certainly, many of the tools are available, including a compiler, but none of the development environments are available for free in thier complete form. The MacOS X ships with a full development environment, including a compiler, debugger, interface designer, and graphical IDE. The equivalent in the Windows world is a minimum cost of $99, and for the kind of license needed by a developer that wants to sell, or use his work in a business environment, it's $399.

For Network administrators, MacOS X brings another set of freely available tools that are going to set them back several hundred dollars in the Windows world. A commercial grade, hardware accelerated X Server for working with the X-Windows machines and running existing Unix software for X-Windows, robust SSH client, built in support every major file sharing protocol in use today, and access to an entire library of pre-existing open source unix tools that compile and run with little to no effort. On Windows XP, some of this is available through RedHat's Cygwin toolkit, some of it is available from Microsoft as part of it's Services For Unix toolkit, but none of it is as easy and readily usable as it is on the MacOS.

For the Web Developers, the MacOS offers many very good tools. It comes with the industry leading Apache webserver. It has a very fast, very complete Java 2 implementation. It has most of the web technologies in use today already installed, Perl, PHP and Apache. Adding JSP support is just a download and install, at no cost. The one technology that is missing is Microsoft's .NET environment. Windows XP Professional, comes with Internet Information Server, and that in turn brings the ASP and ASP.NET environments. You can add Perl, PHP, and JSP to the mix as well, but the configuration can be difficult, and the performance isn't what it is on the Unix platforms, including MacOS X. Even at the graphical web developer level, the tools are there, with Macromedia's DreamWeaver MX being available on both platforms.

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