If Software Platforms were Cell Phones…
The Microsoft Cell Phone: Cute, quirky UI hides slow features in places that make sense to anyone who uses the phone for more than a year, but are confusing to first time users. Claims to cater to ‘Professional’ users, and therefore has enterprise versions of everything, but this means that the severs the phone connects to for all non-voice traffic are constantly down or unusably slow.
The Linux Cell Phone: Control options for everything, from the tone and volume of each keypress, to the type of digital encoding desired for voice. However, no one has yet coded a decoder for the digital transmission coming back from the cell towers, so all you get is a series of binary beeps. Mail to the cellphone-users mailing list asking if anyone is working on this feature is replied to with “Patches Welcome”.
The OS X Cell Phone: Originally build from the Linux Cell Phone, but with a working incoming decoder. Attempts to be the ‘hip’ phone include rotating images of the person you’re calling, and an intensive graphical display for every number entered when dialing. Due to its lack of ‘enterprise’ features, this phone is kept entirely out of the professional marketplace.
Okay, so it sounded better in my head than it turned out.