Tue 20 Nov 2007
I’m a quite satisfied Mac user. I switched two years ago, never looked back, had two Mac laptops since then and I’ve been overall quite happy with the experience. There is, though, one frustrating point – iChat. It looks so cool when Steve and his colleague demonstrate it during keynote presentations. It has fun (backdrops) as well as useful (theater) features built in.
I really like it but I’ve never ever been able to use. Why? Well, because there is no one to talk to.
It is not that none of my friends has a Mac – some do, even within my company I’m not the sole Mac user. However, no one has iChat open and running. Everyone has Skype. Part of the reason why is not only immensely wider user base, but also the fact that Skype works well over firewalls and iChat fails miserably even over a simple NAT. So it is currently a very nifty, very nice toy which is completely pointless unless most of your friends use Macs and happen to be on network connections with public IPs (rarity today).
Quite frustrating. Rather than waste their resources on putting Safari on Windows Apple should have developed iChat for other platforms. Too late for it now, I think. Maybe they should start talking to Skype then.