Former vice president Al Gore recently spoke about another kind of inconvenient truth: his role as the last Mac standing in what became a PC White House during the Clinton administration.
Nowadays, Macs and PCs coexist in the inner sanctums of power — iPads abound for playing Pac Man or catching up on email — but back in the day it was much more an either/or proposition.
Mac Directory recently published an interview with Gore, where he touches on being the last Apple holdout in the West Wing, as well as the importance of Apple’s commitment to open source and how it may influence and help grow the Cupertino company.
Q: Are there any Macs in the White House?
Al Gore: I had the last Mac in the West Wing. I was the last holdout and a lot of specialized programs that are in use in the executive branch were developed on the PC platform and I finally and reluctantly switched over. But I’m glad I switched back now. And I think now there’s really no reason not to switch to Mac because they can run any PC program now.
Q: You were quoted in an Apple press release as saying that you were impressed by Apple’s commitment to the open source movement. What does the open source movement mean to you?
AG: Well, it means the power of distributed intelligence.
In a very general way, distributed intelligence has been the principle behind representative democracy, behind capitalism, behind new business management techniques, behind massive parallelism in computers, and applied to software design and the broader direction of the information technology industry as a whole is a very powerful phenomenon.
It doesn’t mean it’s the answer to every problem, it’s not, but being open to it and being committed to facilitating it is important. And Apple has made that choice.
Q: Continuing with that, will open source result in Apple’s ability to harness that greater community of developers and grow that much faster?
AG: I hope so.
Source: Mac Directory
