Good day to you, ladettes and lads out there in the virtual
world!
While you are slowly but surely being taken over by the holiday bug
(whether it is Ramadan, Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas, or any other
semispiritual or paganic holiday you might be having) or desperately
trying to escape the Christmas melee, I was sitting one particularly
dreary evening last week in front of my iBook, browsing through
the digital desert out there for any inspiration, when a young snapper
on AOL send me 
an IM asking me to join the highly
secretive "Macaction Committee."
Asking what this was all about, I was being passed on to his
cell-boss, who informed me that they were actively campaigning against
AOL UK's decision to stop development on any more Mac software. This
deemed me rather curious, as I just one hour prior to this little chat
happily downloaded the new OS X client for AOL from Apple's FTP
server. After a bit of adjusting to UK settings, I was quite happy to
use it.
Not that I'm a huge AOL fan, but for my simple needs at the moment,
it serves it's (limited) purposes. Anyway, the catch is, that although
AOL US is still distributing its Mac clients, AOL UK will stop. This
means that the sole purpose people have been using AOL - sticking a CD
in your Mac, and hey, here you go - is no more. If you want to use AOL
for OS X, you'll have to download it from somewhere, adapt it to
UK's system, and only then you'll be able to use it. In other words,
it's appeal for the (Mac) mass-market is gone.
I can hear you scream, "Why the hell have they done that?" Well,
step forward AOL UK's Communication Officer Matt Peacock, who said to
Macworld
UK, "It's not possible for us to justify the considerable
investment required to create a new localized version of our browser
for a niche market platform such as OS X."
Now wait a minute, mate: You calling me a niche market? This raises
a couple of questions: Either my prophecy has come true, and Apple is
rapidly losing a place in the mass-market with the introduction of
OS X, or AOL is just too daft to take the current (US) version of
their OS X client and slap a couple of UK access numbers on it, as
this was all I had to do to get it working.
But as this will be a task too complicated for the average AOL user,
another incentive for your average first time Mac-Buyer will be gone. I
can just hear it happening around the corner at PC World: "Aaaaah,
that's a nice-looking computer: I saw Jeff Goldblum using one of those.
Should I buy this one? Och nay, ya can't even put AOL on the
thingie!"
Well, I have to admit that I have to take back a couple of things
I've said about NeXTstep, er, Apple's newest baby. As skeptical I was,
OS X has now been running for over two months on my iceBook
without any (and I mean any) hitch.
Okay, it still doesn't support my Samsung Laser Printer, but that's
something I can live with thanks to Classic. Apart from that, I didn't
have to use the bloody terminal once (thanks to MacJanitor),
but AOL UK obviously thinks that OS X is not worth an investment
into the future.
Gosh, I really hate it when I'm right.
Anyway, I'll be back just before Christmas. Write to let me know
what you want from me this Christmas (For this column, okay? No cheque
requests or spam.), and I'll see what I can do!
Jingle, Jingle, Jingle. 
