What is the world coming to?!?  This afternoon, Wally McClure, one of the most ardant Mac haters in the world at one time..................went out and bought an Apple MacBook.  I have a white MacBook with a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of ram, and 120 gigs of hard disk space.

Why do I say that this is such a big deal?  In my 3.5 years in corporate IT at Coca-Cola (1992 - 1995), I was a part of the Apple Cider project.  The Apple Cider project was an attempt to get rid of Macs that did not have a business reason for being there.  The cost of supporting the Mac platform was significant vs. the PC platform on a per capita basis at the time.  At the time, this was the right move.  Macs didn't communicate well within the Coca-Cola infrastructure at the time, which consisted of Token Ring networks, Novell NetWare, IBM AS/400s, and we were just getting into Oracle Databases communicating over IPX/SPX and TCP/IP.  Macs just didn't work real well in that environment.  At the time, Apple's market share was gradually being eroded and their financial results were getting worse.  Apple reached a low point in the late 1990s.  I figured IBM would eventually buy them and that would be the end of them.  Fast forward 15 years and things are in different shape.  Apple's market share is still relatively small (5-6%), but their financials are really good.  I doubt that their market share will ever increase significantly, however, Macs remain in the market place.  I felt now was a good time to go ahead and see how the other half lives.  I'll be interested to see how things work and how much I learn.  I hope that the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) becomes a reality soon.