Great interview - though posted kind of late. That must have been sitting in the queue for a while eh? "Can't wait for Panther"... "Got one of the new G5s?"
I spent enough time getting my roommate's XP Toshiba to play ball with our new 802.11 network. And I know from others that they still have UI issues.
Personally, the major leap for me was Windows 2000, not XP. 2000 is fairly stable!
The major advantages of OS X lie in other areas: Spyware, Adware, Viruses / Security. Interoperability with other Unix systems. Great (albeit sometimes too slow) hardware, especially the Powerbooks. And a beautiful, uniform, very easy-to-use UI...
You're marvelling at that graph, possibly under the mistaken impression that this reflects a renevue stream for Apple, or the rate at which songs are sold. It doesn't - it seems to show the aggregate: how many songs were sold in total. If you plot the figures in a more meaningful way, that is, to show songs sold per month, you'll get a much more linear increase. Still, very impressive, but not a crazy exponential growth.
Yet, you don't have to be Gauss to realize that...
The AppleMatters Interview: Herbie Hancock
The AppleMatters Interview: Herbie Hancock
The Mac mini Advantage
Milking iTunes for Every Penny