h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I can't believe that we're still getting the tired old line about Macs being "incompatible" with PCs. On my Mac I use Internet Explorer, Outlook, Office Lotus Notes and a host of graphics apps. All the files are fully binary compatible - I can open them from Windows on my Wintel box, and from MacOS on my Mac. I can open PC formatted floppy disks, Zip disks and CDs, I can read and write CD-R interchangeably between the two systems.

And that's without running SoftWindows, using whihc I can boot NT in under 10 seconds (try that with a PC!).

In fact the only difference between the two is that my Mac takes me about one hour per year to keep running whereas my Windows 2000 PC takes half a day per month (Critical Update, anyone?).

There are of course two areas where the Mac does lag behind: games (of which I use exactly none) and viruses, where Windows has the market virtually to itself.

Macs are compatible, it is windows that isn't!!!
try putting a dos disk in your mac, works like a charm. Try putting a mac disk in your pc (with windows) won't work without extra programs! Whoever said mac are incompatible is mad!

Yes, Windows is incompatible with everything else - including sanity

It's part of MS's marketing strategy.

Like when they found out that they couldn't buy Java, they decided to make their own java-like language and drop support for Java from all future OSs.

Yes, nature abhors a vacuum and Microsoft abhors a standard. When FTP and NFS already existed, they had to invent their own file sharing "standard" - and implement it in at least six different, subtly incompatible ways.