At events and conferences that I go to I’ve seen a steady trend of movement away from Windows and towards the Apple Mac. Maybe I’m noticing it because I’m going to web 2.0 oriented events, or meeting more design oriented individuals, where the likelihood of them being on the Mac goes up, but I see more and more smug looking individuals with their stylish PowerBooks in sleek silver or white. My friends like Dennis, Sig, Jeff and Rod have all made the switch. They wax lyrical about the speed of start up, the usability, the reliability and the lack of viruses. Sig even has the best of both worlds, being able to run Windows as well as the Mac OS on his one.
I have to say that I’m envious of them from a design point of view. Last year when I needed to upgrade, I spent a little extra and went for a slim, carbon fibre cased Sony Vaio notebook so that I had something that looked almost as pretty. But I stayed on Windows XP Professional. Why is that?
Yesterday, during an Enterprise Irregulars conversation about the development costs of Vista, and software upgrades in general, we strayed on to the Mac vs. Windows debate. Chris Selland professes not to be anti-Mac, has just moved back on to Windows from the Mac. He said:
“It’s not so much that I prefer the OS (I really don’t care much about the OS as long as it works) but I prefer the variety of applications. For example, I find iPhoto to be a memory-hog. MS’ PictureIt is a joke, but Picasa is a terrific product. So I manage my photos on Windows - because there are multiple app choices on the Windows platform, as opposed to only one on the Mac.”
He went on to highlight Ed Bott’s ZDNet blog post from a few weeks back:
“In the Mac world, you get one man’s vision, beautifully designed, expensive, and maybe, just maybe in sync with your needs. In the Windows world, you get an enormous ecosystem where you can choose from dozens of different devices using the form factors and feature sets you prefer, at a variety of price points.
I know which world I prefer.”
Over on Guardian Unlimited earlier this week, Charlie Brooker has a rant about how he hates Macs. He’s particularly irritated by the:
“current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance.”
He goes on to explain:
“The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.”
Well there you have it - the battle lines are drawn. My own argument is close to Charles and Ed (not Charlie) in terms of the extra choices you have on the Windows platform, supplemented by the fact that the majority of my customers are on Windows too. It’s easier for me to test things out and provide support for more of my customers in the Windows environment, or to exchange MS Office files and documents with them (at the moment).
That moves us on to the great Vista upgrade debate. At AccountingWEB, John Stokdyk has posed the question and generated some discussion and interesting comments that have moved the focus over to the SaaS alternatives. They also picked up on Dennis’s comments on the money Microsoft is putting in to the marketing. I’m afraid I’m a little underwhelmed by the current TV campaign, which doesn’t have much “Wow” for me. For many the cost of the licences, combined with the extra memory and processing power required will mean that they avoid the upgrade for as long as possible. Some will hang back and wait for later releases, expecting the bugs and instabilities that you get with a major new product like this.
When I bought my new PC I made sure it was a dual core processor and had 1Gb of memory to be “Vista ready”. However, I’ll be one of the ones hanging back. XP Professional and Office 2003 work fine. The one product in the new Office 2007 family that has tempted me to upgrade is OneNote 2007, which has nice new features like extra drawing and table handling capabilities that I know I will use, so that’s on order. For the rest, what I’ve got does the job well enough, and I’d prefer not to slow my nice Sony Vaio with the extra overhead of the ribbon just yet. The new interface looks really slick, and seems to be catching up with the Mac, but it certainly hasn’t come alongside or surpassed it. If we need to have Vista to make our demonstration environment look like the latest and greatest, I may be pushed in to it for marketing rather than practical purposes.
Technorati Tags : Enterprise+Irregulars, Microsoft, Apple, Windows, Mac, PC, XP, Vista, Office+2007, OneNote+2007
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