MS & Bill, have no TASTE. True.... It will not be pretty, logical, intuitive, or "Nice".

It's like "Movie Maker" vs iMovie/iDVD. MS Music Store vs iTunes, WMP vs iPOD, because steve is right.... They have no taste!

"The program will be similar in design to GarageBand, but will be optimized for Windows Vista and the Aero user interface,"

so basically a S***** garage band running a S***** version of os x

Oh man, I shudder to imagine what audio software from MS is going to work like. If history has taught us anything, it's that MS will add these features to Windows just so they can have some bullet points with the feature listed, but it won't be actually usable for another ten years...

Redmond hasn't had an original idea yet...why should they start now?

Proof positive that Apple does indeed innovate.

I thought GarageBand was a hacked version of Logic or one of those other apps apple bought. Like iTunes was SoundJam. And iMovie was something bought from Macromedia. In fact, iLife is largely lacking in original ideas when it comes to apps. Presentation/implementation, well, that might be different. But innovative is not at the app level.

Oh, and if you want to look at a positive here for Windows users, at least its free (like Moviemaker). With Apple you have to spend money to get these apps.

It's believed that Roz Ho will do a breakdance demonstration at its introduction keynote.

...the iLife apps is ridiculously low. prior to iLife, you would have had to buy separate, and more expensive DVD authoring, web page creator, movie-making and music software.

and none of them would be a simple and elegant as iLife. the cinematic rendered themes in each program alone are worth the cost!

I often read the comments to see how testudo will bash apple next. rarely does testudo have an actual point. For less than $100, you get a great movie editing program and DVD autoring/burning solution, GarageBand (which i haven't done much with but does let me make little ditties very very easily), and a couple other apps that are simple enough for grandparents to use and enjoy. key word, that - "Enjoy".

Yes, the "engine" behind Garage Band came from the purchase of eMagic however the user interface was new. (I'm sure the Logic interface was deemed to complex for the average joe user and probably rightly so.) So you could certainly say that Garage Band is a heavily cut down version of Logic. Much like iMovie is a heavily cut down version of Final Cut Pro. In that case (again) the "engine" was purchased from Macromedia and in fact originated at Adobe as a replacement for Premier before the Adobe management canned the project and Macromedia management canned the project and finally Apple scooped up the developers resulting in something useful.

FYI, I recall that eMagic was in financial trouble just before Apple bought them up. Same thing happened to the eMagic competitor: Steinberg, the maker of the Cubase and Nuendo software, was purchased by Yamaha.

As to the cost of the iLife apps, well, you get them for free with a new Mac. Else you can buy them for cheap. A license of OS X and iLife combined is less expensive than an XP Pro licenese.

Anyone here ever used Windows Movie Maker? - I'd hardly put it on the same plain as iMovie. My guess is "monaco" will be the same - way behind it's iLife couterpart.

Should be called GarbageBag.

You can buy a fashion... but style is inherited.

Now, with Boot Camp, you can buy Win XP and make your Mac wear it.... but what does that say about your sense of style?

These are the moments from M$ that I savor; the ecstasy of their press release guaranteeing a great product. In time, it becomes much more like dog food; so much better looking going in than the final product leaving the dog.

compete with GarageBand. Microsoft's Windows customers are not going to defect to Mac OS X because of GarageBand (I'm sure there are some exceptions). But MS will lose users if Mac OS X continues to improve beyond the capability of Windows. Or if viruses and malware continues to plague Windows, and leave Mac OS X virtually untouched.

So Microsoft... Focus on getting Vista out the door. No one cares about your "competitor" to GarageBand.

Monaco is known for one thing: It s football team. Then who cares about this software? Off course it will not be user friendly, have a terrible UI and crash randomly.

...often do not go together. Generally speaking, it is not the innovator who reaps the rewards, it is the person who comes along afterwards and really makes the idea or product usable, accessible, and/or desirable. I think that's a key to Apple's success. As others above have noted, they have acquired many innovative bits of software and then took that stuff and really maximized it. MS has never been as good at this as Apple, and if we could somehow "reset" the number of users of each company's OS so that they were equal, we'd see Apple achieve dominance very quickly.

Unless MS has brought in a new team of people for Monaco who have not been totally "microsofted," we can expect that Monaco will be yet another hapless me-too product with no real fan base or third-party support.

personally,i think the monaco will provide PC users with an application that can replace garageband

ya monaco wil finaly giv ppl with PCs an app that works like garageband. its a good idea