Tikkabik

So, Al Gore was appointed to Apple's Board of Directors, and MacCentral's readers promptly went completely nuts. The crux of the complaints are that Gore has no private sector experience, and that it seems to be more motivated by Steve Jobs' liberal tendencies (a well known Clinton supporter) than by any business reason.

Well, even though Gore's appointment is largely ceremonial -- do Boards of Directors actually *do* anything -- I certainly can say one thing without any reservation: It certainly was a polarizing decision, at least for the vocal minority who post to MacCentral's story forums. Some people say they'll get rid of their Macs over the decision, and others say that they're going to forgo purchasing decisions that they would have made otherwise. I sincerely doubt it'll have a significant long-term effect on Apple's bottom line one way or another, but one thing's for sure: Apple sure surprised a lot of people with the decision.

I'm somewhere between ambivalent and supportive of the decision, to be honest. Gore is a well-known Mac user who only started using Windows PCs after he had trouble getting the software he needed to run on it, and in a government sector job, that's no big surprise at all. Now he's back on the Mac, according to Steve Jobs, so that's a plus -- I doubt that many of the other board members really use the hardware all that much. As for his politics, I don't see that it has any more bearing than the politics of any of the other board members, and I don't know anything about their beliefs.