Anil Dash had a strong negative reaction to Apple’s little joke at the expense of Windows in Leopard. If you haven’t seen it yet, Apple’s icon for PCs on your network (or anything that looks like a PC) is a CRT monitor displaying the dreaded blue screen of death.
It’s funny how Apple’s perception of itself differs from Anil’s perception of it. Apple obviously still sees itself as the struggling computer company, trying to build better products to compete against an incompetent but incredibly powerful Goliath. Apple has always seen itself that way, and still does, apparently, even though it’s now worth more than IBM.
For Apple, it will always be 1995. Microsoft was just coming out with Windows 95, which aped many of the best features of System 7, and Apple was in the doldrums, not shipping software upgrades and creating hardware that was ruinously expensive and mediocre at best. I have still never forgotten the famous “C:\ONGRTLNS.W95” that Apple ran, mocking the old file naming limitations from the DOS (and Windows 3.1) days. Back then, Mac users felt like they were under siege. Apple was doing poorly, nobody would let you use a Mac at work, and Microsoft was garnering a ton of publicity for releasing features you already had on your beloved Mac.
What the icon indicates to me is that Apple’s perception of itself hasn’t changed much since those days, even if the company’s circumstances have.
I should mention that in an ironic twist, some people trying to upgrade to Leopard are running into blue screen problem themselves. Hubris never stops amusing.