Kris:
One thing is missing from your history lesson. It is the fact that Microsoft learned how to program in a GUI environment by being an early Mac developer. Jobs invited the fox into the hen house because he knew that he would need some software to run on his neat little appliance designed for the rest of us.
Excel and Word were actually available on the Mac before Windows 3.1 even came out. Microsoft developers were gathering user feedback and learning about GUI's while WP programmers were figuring out trickier key combinations.
I think there was a bit of a falling out between Jobs and Gates when MS decided to copy the look and feel of the Mac and call it Windows. They did that a lot faster than expected.
The main point of the Apple suit of Microsoft was that the application developers that got a good look at the Mac more than a year before it was released to the public liked what they saw and shamelessly copied it in violation of their agreement as developers.
From the Random House Dictionary of the English Language:
vista - 1. a view or prospect, esp. one seen through a long, narrow avenue or passage as between rows of trees or houses.
2. such an avenue or passage, esp. when formally planned
3. a far-reaching mental view; vistas of the future
In my humble, English Major vocabulary, Microsoft has appropriately named their new operating system.
In the meantime, I am enjoying the presence of Tiger on my desktop and wish that I could convince my enterprise IT people to at least take a good hard look at the system.
I fall into the MAHWAWUD category.
I would certainly prefer to have the choice to use Macs at work, not only because I personally like the interface and the integrated design, but also because I happen to be in a position to see just how much the "Windows only" network and desktops costs to operate. I am also now attending meetings that spend hours agonizing about the effort and cost of upgrading to XP - I predict we will not be there before Longhorn is released and the cost will not even be measured (tens to hundreds of millions is my estimate).
Many of the IT costs that my very large organization incurrs are related to security, application integration and testing, and user training. None of those would disappear if the organization would allow a choice, but many of them could be reduced substantially. My occasional suggestions to try Macs out are not popular with my fellow bean counters who do not like to do value calculations when price comparisons are so much easier and they do not sit well with the IT professionals that know that the cost savings will come by reducing the IT headcount.
Most of our poor users will never know just how much less effort it can be to learn how to be a power user on a Mac; they know how to use Outlook and occasionally actually fire up Word, PowerPoint or Excel. Asking them to load and edit a picture or create a video presentation gets a blank stare - the bean counters did not consider those to be a capabilities worth buying.
As the "system admin" of my home network, I know that my life is made easier because I have had to spend less time keeping the network secure, keeping the machines up to date, and teaching my family how to do more tasks themselves.
New Windows machines running XP seem pretty competitive with the best that the Mac has to offer, in the same way as a Pontiac seems pretty competitive with a Honda or a Toyota.
Chris:
My biggest problem with your article is the lack of respect that you have for your fellow humans. There are a huge number of people out here in the real world that fit in the world between your caricature of New Yorker readers and your worse caricature of NASCAR fans.
I work with intelligent, thinking people, some of whom listen to Rush on occasion. He is entertaining and provacative, but few of the people that I know would buy a product merely because he endorsed it.
I have been purchasing Macintosh computers since I completed grad school in 1987. Each time I purchase one, I evaluate the options, including the best available PC's. I look past raw speed numbers and actually test out the programs that I use, looking for responsiveness, ease of use, number of keystrokes to perform a task, etc. I use PCs in my professional life, so I am pretty darn familiar with Windows and PC software. So far, for my personal and family use the score is Mac - 12, PC - 0.
Last night, my sister called. Her son, who spent some time with us this summer, has decided that he will be buying himself a new iBook with his summer job earnings. She was finding out the best way for him to complete the purchase.
Buying Macs is a cost effective, rational decision. My own fantasy for Apple is to have them spend more effort showing corporate bean counters how much they would save in IT payroll, software licenses (did you know that Windows server licenses are required on a PER USER basis, while OS X server licenses purchased for about half the initial cost have unlimited users?), firewall maintenance, and virus removal efforts.
Chris:
Apple's marketing to the people that you call "elite" makes sense to me. If you dig deep into the numbers of PC's shipped, I am pretty sure that you will find a whole lot of corporate purchases there. Those machines may be used by regular people, but they are chosen by "elites" (who I prefer to call professionals) whose jobs are predicated on making good choices for the entire corporation.
Until very recently, it was a safe choice for IT departments to migrate to pure Windows environments from servers down to desktops, all protected by agressively maintained firewalls. With some of IE's "extensions" a number of browser based, Active X enabled applications were developed that helped leverage (and lock in) that combination.
In the past couple of years, this software monoculture has moved away from a mix of Compaq's, Gateways, and HP's (whoever happens to have the best deal at the time of the annual hardware refresh of 1/3 - 1/5th of the installed computers) to more and more shops including Dells from end to end.
IMHO - Apple now offers a compelling alternative to this model, especially for new companies or new divisions of old companies. In order to reach this market, however, you have to inform and educate the IT departments about the significant technical advances that Apple has made.
Chris:
I have been through each one of the transitions that you mention, and I believe that Apple's change management techniques are singificantly improving.
For example, I recently upgraded one of my computers to Tiger and I have had only very minor issues to correct. The upgrade process was extremely smooth.
Along those lines, I am not as worried about the shift to Intel chips as many people seem to be. Apple has apparently been working on this shift for five years and believes that it is ready to make the change with as little impact on users as possible.
I also believe that it is possible that they have made some choices that will make the transition even simpler than most people can imagine. My theory is that the Intel chips that Apple has chosen will be Intel's RISC based XScale technology instead of their CISC based x86 chips. Using RISC chips eases the software transition considerably, both for Apple and for other Mac developers. It also provides Intel with a new market that can showcase their RISC capabilities which have been under development for more than 15 years.
I expanded on that theory in my recent post titled Apple's Intel decision - does it necessarily mean x86?.
I would be interested in any comments on the logic or the theory itself.
http://www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com
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