Monday, June 21, 2010

I don't know how many of you reading this are gamers but for those who are especially those who use the Steam gaming platform life is getting interesting. Most of you know that Steam is now available and run on the Mac OS and the rumor is that it will be running on Linux soon as well. They also have the source based games ( half-life 2, Team Fortress 2 to name a few) are now also running on the Mac OS and rumored to be coming to linux as well. Now I am very curious to see how this affects computer sales. One of the big draws for for people to windows is it's prowess as a gaming machine. Now i'm not saying windows is a bad operating system; I myself have been a windows guy for a long time and for the most part I have been happy with it ( we will not speak of windows ME) I even liked Vista once I got around to tweaking it a bit and now I find using windows 7 to be better then all previous versions. That being said I have to admit that the Mac OS is a nice stable operating system. My son has an old G3 that is slow as can be and it never crashes. It has been shut down numerous times by hitting the button on the power strip with no apparent problems when it restarts. I have been impressed. I have also been using the latest version of Ubuntu version 10.4 and have been quite impressed with it as well. Now the question is with top tier games coming to the Mac OS and possibly Linux as well what is Microsoft going to do to keep themselves at the top of the sales chart? It will be interesting to see how much of an impact a game distribution and management platform like Steam will have on computer sales as a whole.