Marc Canter says that we, Mac users, are stuck in a ghetto. The reason should be that some developers support Mac only features (such Safari 1.1 CSS text-shadow property) or write software for the Mac.

Honestly I don't see myself stuck in a ghetto, or maybe this is a very comfortable one.

If I was in a ghetto I would not be able to communicate with the rest of the world. To the contrary the operating system I choose supports a lot of very open standards and environments right out of the box: from Apache to PHP, from XML-RPC to SOAP. Plus a very nice set of built-in applications allows me to manage my daily activities quite well, in a clean, stable and secure environment.

There are things I cannot do on a Mac (for example, something that bugs me in these days is that I cannot use Skype) and there are things that Windows users cannot do on their PC or cannot do as easily as I can on my Mac.

Maybe we are all stuck in our own ghettos, virtual places where we don't have full control of our environment and our liberties.

I don't use a Mac because I'm a Mac zealot as Marc says (I was a Mac zealot, I admit it, sticking with System 7, 8 and 9 for all those years cannot be explained differently), now I use a Mac because I choose to use MacOS X. Unlike Marc and others I've never had any personal problem with Steve Jobs or Apple and I freely choosed to live in this ghetto.

Maybe sooner or later I will move to another ghetto, who knows? Longorn seems promising and I'm curious about tablet PCs (I've never seen one), but today I think that MacOS X is the best solution for my needs.

The real challange is not letting anybody close us in any of these ghettos and throw away the keys.