Funny comparision of Windows 7 to an old girlfriend

Doing cross-platform application comes at a cost (and not only in term of development time), even if it works well, the apps always feel a bit off compared to the rest of the apps on the platform (especially on mac) and that has an impact on usability, sales and so on....

Now for webapps, it's a different matter... but I'd still argue that if you are sure that a very small proportion of your userbase uses Internet Explorer 6, it might not make economic sense to support them because the cost of paying someone to do so is higher than the revenue generated by those users.

If you define potential by "how many people have I sold something to", then you're a sad, sad person. I could never judge a life by something that arbitrary and unnecessary. In this case especially, where developing for Windows means you're giving up a part of your soul. I'll assume you've never ever ever used a Mac application before, because you're acting like there's no difference between a Mac app and a Windows app, but I assure you that the difference is staggering.

As a rule of thumb, the difference between classy humor and not-classy humor is that with the former, you put the joke on yourself (not on others) and/or you point out that the stereotype has holes in it the size of an NSA machineroom.

"“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”"

Now, most of the specifics here are things that normal people could do (cook a meal, etc). Few of them ("plan an invasion") are something that require substantial training. But his point is that people should be well-rounded, not specialized.

The problem is, generalization isn't rewarded in any modern culture that I'm aware of. The phrase "age of the specialist" is well known; people who are fantastic experts at (neurosurgery|IP law|graphics coding|etc) and utterly incompetent outside their field of expertise always have higher status and salaries than JOATs who can turn their hand to anything and do a decent job, but don't have great mastery at any one thing.

It's even hard to argue which approach is better; who is more likely to make a significant new discovery, the scientist who knows every little detail of his entire field and can synthesize all of them, or the scientist with decent familiarity with half a dozen fields, that has bring a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem?

I suppose there's a place for both. Certainly, when you have a knee surgery done, the guy you want to go to is the one who does nothing but knees, 4-8 operations per week, and not the guy who does whatever kind of surgery comes into his OR.

You say it like it was deliberate. Historically, where Linux has said "not a chance on this hardware but hey, you could always write your own drivers", Windows has said "OK let's give it a go, fingers crossed" and it hasn't always worked.