Those cute, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, commercials really irritate me. Now I don’t want to get into the whole PC versus the Mac thing although at times it might seem like I am. What I want to explore is our love-hate relationships with our computers. No matter how much you love your computer and OS, they can be throw-out-the-window annoying at times. For instance, Word 2007 crashed just after I started this blog entry. Office 2007 sometimes crashes on me on this machine, which happens to run Vista. I use Vista at work and Office never crashes, and I help support hundreds of machines and I’ve never got one support ticket for Office 2007 crashing like this. Service pack 1 didn’t help either. If I told this to my Mac loving tech friends at work it would excite them no end because it would be fuel for their anti-Microsoft philosophy.
John Dvorak, a famous computer pundit, regularly writes columns about the doom of Vista. He’s not the only one, there seems to be a tidal wave of attacks on Vista and Microsoft. I think Vista is superior to XP, and I love Office, especially 2007, even though it conks out on me at times on my home computer. My Mac friends will gleeful attack the faults of Microsoft for hours and I’ll mention I have a user with Leopard that keeps crashing and they’ll just quickly admit Leopard has some problems and go back to attacking Vista or Exchange. How weird is that? It’s like having a wife that tries to kill you from time to time, but since you love her you don’t want to divorce her. I think with Mac fanatics, they say she’s so beautiful, how can I give her up. PC fanatics say she does everything, takes care of the kids, cooks great meals, keeps a beautiful house, I couldn’t live without her. Linux fans brag how their computer wives never try to kill them while ignoring the fact that none of their friends find their wives attractive.
One reason I hate those I’m a Mac commercials is because they are as honest as a political campaign commercial. And I can’t understand why Microsoft doesn’t slam Apple with counter commercials. I’ve always been a loner, and should have been a Mac person. I even used a Mac for years. But I know who pays for my livelihood, and in the world of work, PC computers are the team player. And since I have to support hundreds of computers and users, the concept of team playing is quite obvious to me, even though I’m a loner type. Macs are like opinionated movie stars. Arty types are just not known to be team players, so I can’t understand why Macs even want to be part of the corporate world of team playing.
When I listen to my Mac friends they want to overthrow the government and establish a radical new political system. If makes me feel old and conservative. When I hear PC pundits scream for the return of XP, it makes me think I’m living with creationists. I ask my Mac friends what should we do and they say get rid of all the PCs. And I say wouldn’t Apple become the new Microsoft? At least Windows runs on any personal computer including Macs. Why would corporate America want to switch to a system where computers only come from one company? I tell my Mac friends if I was to dump Microsoft it would be for Linux. It’s more universal than Microsoft running on anything from the smallest to largest computers.
I’ve installed Linux once or twice a year since 1993. Every time I discover I can’t do what I want with Linux and go back to Windows, but each time it gets closer. Currently, if I was to switch away from Windows I could do the most of what I do now with a Mac, but I refuse to buy into a system with only a single source of hardware, and very expensive hardware at that. And even though Mac fanatics promise Nirvana, I support Macs at my job and I well know how unhappy some Mac users are at times.
The truth is we’re all unhappy with our computer systems. Sure PCs are plain-Jane machines that are as glamorous as shovels but we’re all able to work with them. Now that the PC pundits hate Microsoft, as well as the Mac and Linux users, I have to wonder should I give up on Microsoft. Is it time for a new computer world order? Now that the major music companies are all agreeing to sell music as MP3 files without DRM, it means any computer system can play them. Now that Amazon bought Audible.com, maybe I could get my audio books in a file format that isn’t dependent on my OS. If everyone used the same file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases, sound files, etc., then it wouldn’t matter which computer system I used.
But is that really valid? Some of the countries getting the OLPC computers are complaining that it doesn’t run Windows like the people use in the rich countries. When I ask kids from India and China coming over here to go to school about Linux they go huh? They want to study Microsoft and Oracle. Where Linux succeeds best is in the corporate world where it does unflashy server work. Logically, having an OS like Linux, with its free and open source philosophy, should become the world standard and be the replacement OS for PCs and Macs – and that might happen. But success might not be about logic. For my day-to-day use Vista is the champ because it offers me more variety of services and works with more online services and is more secure than XP. Are there things about Vista I don’t like? Sure. But to switch to any other system means a lot more aggravation. Even Microsoft and Windows must evolve.
Microsoft should make a series of ads where the hippie Mac kid walks into situations where teams of people are working and propose radical solutions. Imagine today at the Super Bowl the Mac kid walking out on the field and telling the quarterbacks “Hey, football sucks – soccer is the game for America.” Or have him walk into some corporate skyscraper and go up sixty floors to the CIO office and tell the top guy he should replace his 80,000 computers with Macs, retrain all his workers and rewrite billions of lines of code so his customers use Apple friendly programs.
I like my Mac and Linux friends, but I get tired of all the Microsoft bashing. And now that all the PC computer magazines and websites are starting to bash Microsoft too, it’s getting depressing. Computers are very important to me. It’s like my last blog entry about living without electricity; I wouldn’t want to live in a world without computers either. I want my computer to work faithfully and not annoy me, but I don’t want my OS to become my religion or political party or philosophy.
Jim
Auxiliary Memory 
Wow, imagine that. We have become the topic of a blog entry?
As one of Jim’s Mac/Linux friends I feel I need to say something. I do not see things the way Jim does. Does that make him wrong and me right? Maybe, but no necessarily.
I moved away from Microsoft years ago. I think it was before Windows came out. I had a 286 running DOS, then I became the Apple Certified Support Techinician for the campus. Naturally, I need to know what I was doing so I moved full time to the Mac (Mac OS 6 on a Mac SE/30 built from spare parts, as the big boss did not buy me a Mac). Maybe that is not being a “team” player, but if I supported and repaired Macs, I needed to know all I could about them.
That move was eye opening. I went from a command line based OS with sporadic support for GUIs to a GUI based OS that did what I needed in a consistent manner. I did not have to relearn things each time a new application came out. They were more consistent. Things just worked.
Over the years, things changed. Microsoft came out with Windows, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP and now has Windows Vista (on the desktop). I upgraded from Mac OS 6 to Mac OS 7 to Mac OS 8. I always had a PC as well, I became the Campus Network Administrator and was responsible for many Novell servers. I earned my CNA and my CNE. I kept up with Mac OS, Windows and Novell. Jim forgot to add Novell bigot to my list of computer snobbery. Somewhere in the mix of this I became a Linux fan too. I used on a daily basis all the OSes that were available to me. I preferred some over the others. On the server side, Linux and Novell were my choices. I ran NT from the time it first shipped (NT 3.1 and NT 3.1 Advanced Server).
The first official FTP site for the University was run on Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server on a 486 66 Mhz machine at my desk. Later it was moved to a DEC Alpha running OSF/1. I used NFS to copy files to it from my Mac, a Quadra 800.
I used my Mac to copy files to the NT system as well, I ran Apple services there which made it easy. It was also easy to connect an NT machine to a Novell server through a gateway that Microsoft supplied. This allowed one to get around the Novell user limit. This was the beginning of Microsoft going after Novell. Novell helped them by trying to compete on the desktop by buying Wordperfect. Between Microsoft and Novell, they successfully relegated Netware to the scap heap. Like Beta to VHS, Netware was to NT. It was better. Being the most popular does not make something better. There are more cockroaches than people too. Unless your sole measurement is who survives nuclear holocaust, then you get my point.
Apple had really low points when it failed repeatedly to ship a real multitasking OS (Multifinder was not real multitasking). Novell was sinking, Apple was sinking. Linux was rising. I was skilled in all of them. So I did not despair. I had more than one tool in my belt. NT and Linux became the front runners. Most everyone wrote off Apple. I was not one of them. Rumors of Apple taking over Be and the BeOS lead me to take a trip to Nashville to see the BeOS in action. It was not to Be. 🙂 Apple bought NeXT and brought back Steve Jobs who helped bring Apple back.
So, with the exception of Windows 2003 Server and Windows Vista I have used every version. I have used every version of Mac OS since version 6. I have used Red Hat Linux since version 3. I have used many other Linux versions as well. I think I have the experience to know what I like and what I don’t. I have not heard anything that ever makes me want to run Vista. I have many issues with Leopard which I freely tell anyone who will listen.
It is not religion, or politics or even philosophy Jim. It is called preference, based on experience.
Donnie
I agree that you have a right to choose what OS you want. But that’s my point, we all pick something, and it’s relative as to whether or not it’s the best. Every OS has something annoying about it. But I chose Vista, and lately all I hear is constant hate against it. When I was out to lunch the other day with you and Brian it felt like an hour of anti-Microsoft preaching.
I like Linux and Mac OS X. I was using my Linux machine at home this weekend while burning CDs with my Vista machine. If Macs were affordable I’d add one to my collection of machines. But what I get tired of is the constant anti-Microsoft hatred by Linux and Mac guys, and now more than ever, by Windows users themselves. And I think some people’s whining, like Dvorak, is unfair spreading of toxic ideas, like how some Republicans spread lies about Kerry’s swift boat service.
The thing about computers is you can change them. Any problems with Vista or Exchange can be fixed or dealt with. Ditto for other platforms. I don’t rile against Leopard because it crashes some during it’s rollout. Also, if the company you work for picks a platform you don’t like, deal with it instead of constantly grumbling.
I think Macs are beautiful machines, but when you’re supporting hundreds of Windows XP machines and some new employee demands to have a Mac it seems unfair at the team playing level. If I went to work at some company that had all Macs I would never be egotistical enough to demand a Vista machine.
Jim
I find it hard to take this seriously. Are you able to say that with a straight face? At least if/when Mac people bash Windows it is from knowledge/experience with the product. As a Mac user I have had to suffer the ignorance from Microsofties since 1989.
Most who hated on Apple had never taken the time to get to know what they were hating. At least if I bash Microsoft I speak from experience. Some of our most staunch Microsoft supporters in IT realize what a terrible OS Vista is. I do not need to bash it, the ones who are using it do so. How useful is an OS than prevents you from saving files downloaded from the internet, even files from the maker of the OS? I suppose if you wanted an Read Only OS then Vista could be the one for you.
No one is telling you not to speak your mind. Please have the courtesy to allow those who disagree to speak theirs. If you disagree with them, the argue your point. It has nothing to do with being a team player. There are many valid complaints about Vista.
Take for example the email situation. Since moving from the severely outdated Netscape Messaging Server which ran on a single Solaris machine, we have bought and installed no less than 9 Exchange servers. If it were not for the blind “need” for Exchange, we could have email run on a couple of Mac, Linux or Solaris systems. This need is really a want. People want to use Outlook and think it requires Exchange. Microsoft loves this line of thinking.
Microsoft is a big company and they do not need you to defend them. Maybe you have a desire to feel needed? I dunno.
I think I’m failing to make my point clear. I’m not saying that the criticisms you make are untrue, I’m saying I’m just tired of hearing them. I’m saying our lunch the other day was spoiled because it was over an hour of anti-Microsoft talk. Microsoft might indeed be crap but its an unpleasant topic for me. When I kept trying to turn the conversation around by asking for you guys to tell me about a better email system it was because I was wanting to hear something positive.
When I go down to visit my boss and he shows me all the cool new features of Leopard that he’s using I’m pleased and excited. I like hearing about cool things, new things, inventive things. I don’t attack Apple because I don’t use it. I do grumble about supporting it, that’s true, but I do admire Macs.
Whether you like Exchange or not, it doesn’t really matter because that’s what we have. If you guys were telling stories about some problem of Exchange and how you found a neat trick to overcome the problem then that would be fun to hear.
I wouldn’t want a lunch conversation of Apple suck, or Tux suxs either. My answer to Dvorak is: Vista is here so write some essays how to make it better. Microsoft products are what I use. I know they have problems. What I want to hear is how to fix them because I’m not going to switch. And the point I keep trying to make is I’m not sticking with Windows because it’s better but because it’s just the practical choice at the moment. Hearing blah blah blah Microsoft is shit blah blah blah Windows sucks blah blah blah Vista needs to pulled off the market blah blah blah is boring.
I know this sounds Pollyannish and I know you love to argue but this topic is just not a fun anymore.
Jim
Don’t hate on the Macers, Jim. They just might know where you live? 😉
I personally find the commercials entertaining, more so because I just don’t buy the whole Mac superiority thing. Or more importantly, don’t care. If the things Mac users are doing with their computers are easier or more functional that with a PC, good for them. I personally am a PC gamer. Mac is not a good platform for gaming because those who make PC games have not recognized it as a legitimate (read profitable) platform for gaming. With the increasing performance of consoles, PC gaming may die its own death someday, but that time is not now and I still get better performance on my PC with games that any console systems. It is getting closer, but not there yet.
If I was doing more artistic stuff with my computer I might want a Mac. As it is now I get as turned off by the Mac superiority argument as I do with politics. The commercials are funny. The fanatics are not.
I don’t hate the Mac users, I just hate hearing about this or that computer sucks. If I had more money I would own a Mac just because they are cool. And those I’m a Mac commercials are funny at times and I give their creators high points for ad creativity. It’s just they keep the war of computer OSes going, which is what I don’t like. Everyone has a reason they like their computer OS, like how you like PC gaming. It would be nice if we could just live in peace. I’d prefer Mac commercials that touted their positive qualities without reference to other OSes.
Jim
Observations and rules of thumb provide valuable guidance for practice when findings are not available. ,