The Apple apps are well co-ordinated: as an example, hover the cursor over a date in a Mail message you have received, and you can add an entry directly into iCal without leaving Mail or launching iCal manually.

URL lines break on Windows mail systems, too.

Reading your response, I frankly have my doubts that you're actually working at Apple, by the way!

You said: "Within dialog boxes, there is no way to use keyboard accelerator shortcuts on the Mac. Windows has them." Just so you know this is not true, there is a way to control dialog boxes. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. At the bottom of the window, hit the radio button for "all controls." Now when you go to close a window that has an unsaved document, for example, you can hit the space bar to hit "Don't Save."

Under Mac Os 10.5.5, you must press Ctrl+F2, then the first few letters of a menu, then the down arrow key, then the first few letters of a menu command, then Enter, and maybe some up or down arrow keys to execute a command on the keyboard. Under Windows, Alt+a letter, plus one more letter, then Enter does the same thing. Within dialog boxes, there is no way to use keyboard accelerator shortcuts on the Mac. Windows has them.

Then there's the application speed difference. On an iMac, there's a noticeable lag, from a fraction of a second to several seconds between a keyboard actions for Word and Excel. Under windows, I don't have to think about this issue.

All this doesn't sound like much of a difference, but over the course of a day, the difference is 25% productivity, plus the added stress on the mousing hand.

In addition, the gorgeous new iMac monitor displays unpixellated fonts only at its highest resolution, as far as I or Apple's internal support can tell. This results in tiny system and application fonts, producing eyestrain after a normal business day, if you have astigmatism, as I do. Even one resolution setting lower on the display produces noticeable pixellation. Sure, there are utiltiies such as TinkerTool, and hacks to the Apple OS that control some font displays, but not all, and the apps don't adjust well to anything larger than the original set of point sizes.

The free, Apple-supplied applications — Mail, Safari, Address Book, and meeting maker/ical — are rudimentary and uncoordinated. After using Outlook on the PC, it's a big step backwards to use the equivalent native Mac tools. And Entourage, the MS offering for integrated mail, calendaring, address book, and to do lists, has an HTML engine so old that it doesn't support sending contextualized hyperlinks, which is a big deal if you're trying to avoid sending multi-megabyte files behind the firewall or deep links outside it without the URLs wrapping lines, and thus breaking for the mail recipient.

So, color me unimpressed by the Mac for office productivity applications.

Maybe. It may also transpire that in tough economic times, an operating system that costs people money because it is unstable will face mortal pressure from an increasingly unforgiving market.

Gone are the days when folks were so impressed with new programs that they would tolerate a freeze and shutdown every couple of hours. Software is old now, and people just expect computers to do their thing. The wow factor is gone from new software.

And so folks are reacting to vista in a different way. There is less tolerance. More folks are asking why it is so fundamentally unstable. That has been my professional experience, anyway.

And as computers become tools rather than novelties, I think Apple will continue to grow for precisely the same reason that American machine tool manufactures became globally dominant during the past century.

The folks making them cared more, and the products were better quality. As computers become tools rather than toys, Microsoft will be shown the door.

AAPL market cap: $85B

MSFT market cap: $220B

With the economy down, people will defer increasingly to cheaper Windows PC's

Actually, since a doubling in sales will likely come largely at Dell's and HP's expense, and each unit represents more money on average than a Dell or HP unit, sales need not triple. A doubling would bring Apple very close to second place.

Apple need to grow their global market share.

Apple is an American company.

Most global enterprises are American.

A global enterprise may have 100,000 employees in 150 countries.

PCs may be starting to move from VGA to DisplayPort as a standard.

For the sake of a few millimeters, Apple have chosen a non-standard DisplayPort connector which means that no manager in any enterprise will ever switch from a PC to a mac because he never wants to be the only competitor in the room who cannot give his presentation because he has left his adapter in his other suit !!!

Nice use of the CNC machine as the picture for this article, by the way. Very tasteful. Very modern.

It shows HOW MUCH YOU CARE.

That guy from the video, the designer from hell, he is going to sell so many macs for the divine one. He is pure gold.

I think Europeans are used to paying higher prices and so value better quality and style. Apple just need to raise their profile in Europe and build Apple Stores.