Exbiblio definitely intends to provide solutions for Mac, Windows and Unix variants, as well as Web-based and mobile solutions.

Since we live in a Microsoft-dominated and Microsoft-worshipping city, however, I think it’s only natural that we sometimes rebel a bit, and demonstrate our admiration of quality of design and excellence of engineering.

I for one don’t begrudge Microsoft their financial success. I think that’s between them and their consumers. But, although Microsoft has some significant engineering feats under their belt, such as Word and Excel, I personally love technology (and design), and I think Microsoft’s offerings are generally quite immature on that front, compared to Apple, Adobe and Sun, for example.

I think Apple, in particular, has struck a great balance between the practicalities of bringing computing “to the rest of us,” and leveraging and extending technologies available in research communities. It is interesting to note that one goal of the original Macintosh was to create a computer that one’s grandma could use, while Microsoft’s goal was to put a computer on every desk. These may sound similar, but it took great courage back in the early 80’s to suffer the ridicule of the rest of the computing community to introduce such wimpy features as all-graphics displays, mice and a unified printing architecture, which resulted in the desktop publishing revolution, and a completely new focus on usability and productivity.

I hope more people chime in on this topic.

I am a huge fan of Seattle. When I moved back to Seattle from San Francisco I was so thrilled to be here I wanted t-shirts and bumper stickers and a tattoo on my forehead that proclaimed it (thankfully I forewent the tattoo, only to get another word tattooed elsewhere – a story for another post). With apologies to the many folks who are sweet on San Francisico, the only things that foggy city truly has on Seattle are a better house music scene, better public transportation, and folks living in it that are damn proud of their city. In all other respects, everything that people generally think is fabulous about SF is equal or ten times better here.

Seattlites have a lot to be proud of, and yet, in our typical self-effacing Eeyorian style, we constantly poo-poo our own city, and I think that negative attitude has a lot to do witih why SF is considered the “better” west coast city by most. San Francisco is madly in love with itself, and that makes all the difference in the world. Me, I’m madly in love with Seattle and will defend this gorgeous city to the last.

Cheers Hugh.

Apple has consistently been the only large company innovating in the user experience and hardware design domain. Aside from the truly democratizing effect of the Apple ][ series of computers, Apple was the first to bring the modern computing metaphor to the world as a viable product.

While Apple has not been the original source all of their interface innovations, they have consistently been the ones pushing the envelope in terms of bringing those technologies to market in a viable and successful way.

These days Apple hardware costs no more than PC machines of comperable performance and quality, and in some relevant cases, the Apple offering costs less.

Microsoft, in contrast, blatantly steals from other successful products (or merely buys them), and then brings to market an inferior experience, a cheap, lowest-common-denominator imitation foisted like an imitation Rolex upon those without the sophisticaton to know the difference. These products eventually succeed only because they starve their competition by underselling them.

In that regard, Microsoft’s democratization smells more like junk food and cultural imperialism to me.