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Re: Oingo
Now I get you. I couldn't see the lock in before. I guess I'm a combination of optimistic and cynical about the Mac/Linux issue. Sky Dayton is a Mac user from way back. His house is full of Macs. His colleagues are Mac users. Earthlink was founded to offer ISP service to Macs (it was easier) in the very early days. Earthlink remains the most Mac friendly ISP. Dayton has promised Mac support. Apple has the motivation to support Dayton's desire to support the Mac. Etc. So all of these factors combine to me to say, if they had infinite resources and developers, the Mac and Windows versions would have shipped simultaneously. Given finite resources, they went for the biggest business traveler buck, which is almost certainly 90 percent or more Windows laptops, maybe even 95 percent. The graphic design market is surely still more like 75-25 split Windows to Mac. The Linux market consists of a very few people taking their Linux laptops on the road. From any reasonable viewpoint, it's a good idea to hit Windows first, the others later as resources allow. Of course, this opens business opportunities. With the market that Boingo has helped to open, a savvy Linux entrepreneur could probably very quickly put together some of what Boingo has: cross-network authentication (maybe not as well developed as Boingo, but still simple), SSH tunneling or freeware IPSec, and consistent pricing. Ditto for Macs. I wouldn't be surprised that if Boingo lags on the Mac software if Apple didn't put in a skunkworks-like team to create a Mac interface itself. The problem on the Mac side, as I've mentioned, is that you don't have NDIS 5.1 to talk to the hardware, you don't have VPN protocols in the OS (Windows 98/NT/2000/XP), and you don't have the same control over dipping into the lower ISO layers as you can on Windows. You can do all those things, but I'd guess that developing the Mac version will take 1.5 to 2 times longer than Windows for those reasons. Which is rarely the case, programmers tell me.
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