from here:
Once you've got IMAP set up on your laptop, you can travel the world knowing that all those messages are sitting safely on the server, accessible from any Mac, at any time you want.

Ignoring for now great advice like, "If your ISP doesnโ€™t offer IMAP, you can find a list of providers who do," the part of this article that catches my eye is the idea that using IMAP means you can get your email from "any Mac" rather than "any computer or OS created in the last decade or so." Granted, this is MacWorld and the fellow writing is billed as "author of the e-book Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger." He also starts the article by saying, "you use standard POP e-mail accounts and more than one Mac..." This is fanlit, and we can easily read "Mac" as the replacement for "computer" in here.

How many times have you seen such a substitution in a third-party e- or maga-zine for, say, a Dell or Alienware? Rarely. But why shouldn't you? Why hasn't one of these groups done more than simply rebrand IE but offer their own usability suite/Internet utilities? It really wouldn't be that hard for Dell or HP or Gateway to team up with some software development house and create a tabbed version of IE pre-7 and a from-scratch mail handler that kicks Outlook Express off of the desktop.

They could be Windows boxes, but still provide users the "Dell/WhatHaveYou Experience." Nothing's really requiring these co's to wait for Microsoft to change the experience.

Or is there? It seems like most of the time somebody does try to push a new utility suite, they start with Linux. Why? Just because Mozilla/Netscape failed to wrest the desktop away from IE and Outlook?

What hardware companies need to understand is that they already own the desktops of their machines. Oh, I know about Microsoft getting peeved when people take the MSN link off of there, but there's enough anti-MS sentiment around now I really can't see that being a problem any longer. Even if a Moz-like suite can't stay commercially viable (though Eudora still seems to do okay, if not nearly as well as it once did, etc), no reason it can be made in a way that it sells more hardware.