Mad as hell, switching to Mac
Winn Schwartau, a self styled die-hard PC bigot, who also happens to be a security columnist for Network World, got so fed up with WinTel he switched to a Mac, and blogged about it. I've been on both sides of this switch throughout the past 20 years, and to be honest, I'm not sure these days it's any more important than switching from Ford to VW. Here's a little history...
Schwartau's article caused a slashdot-fueled furor. Perhaps it's because the author was well known, and his experiences---generally saying switching isn't as awful as one might thing---rubbed hundreds of millions of slightly undersatisfied Windows users the wrong way. "See, he's clearly mistaken, or we'd all be using a Mac too."
The Network World article that started his saga postulates the basic reasons for the general Windows/Intel bugginess, while his thoughts apres switch are available on his security awareness blog.
Schwartau's blog may be an eye opener for many Windows users, but with a dozen Wintels and a half dozen Macs in our family, it seems to me the only reason we're not all using Macs is that for a long time, the computing world was a terribly small and inbred place. The choice of OS or platform used to matter, but not any more. What matters now is how we use computing to simplify our world.
My first PC was an Apple II, next was an Apple //c, and after that various Macs through the end of college. Then I wanted to sell PCs, but Apple's policy said I needed to carry $100,000 in inventory to qualify as a dealer. Even in the late eighties, PC prices dropped every month, and that kind of inventory depreciation would have killed a startup entrepreneur. So I became a white box vendor and my customers bought Windows on IBM beige box clones instead of Mac OS on Macintoshes. Windows 3.11 for Workgroups was abysmal. Windows 95 was a nicer DOS shell though clearly a blatent ripoff of the Mac ("It's not a Trash can, it's a Recyle Bin!"). Windows NT didn't really make it out of the server room, and Windows ME was update-bait. Not till Windows XP did Microsoft finally put a truly consumer friendly interface on top of their version of VMS, a 1970's operating system for Digital's VAX hardware.
In the meantime, Apple II's education profits carried the company through the development of the Lisa and well past the launch of the Macintosh. Unfortunately, the Mac was a user friendly appliance without much software at a time when computing was still in the "early adopter" phase. In the eighties, computers were mostly chosen by group necessity or individual enthusiasm.
I think Apple's lock on the education marketplace cost them in the long run. Thanks to a wealth of educational software, schools kept buying and providing Apple IIs long after these should have been replaced with Macs. The Mac defined iconoclastic cool, and thanks to QuickDraw and Postscript served as the natural workhorse for publishing (a phenomenon still driving the perceived "pro Apple" bias of journalists today), but schools were using the wrong Apple, and the rudimentary computing needs of industrial America were met by the simple green or amber text of Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Sure, kids still used the Apple II at school, but when they came back home and asked mom for a computer, the IBM clone offered much the same features (and software) as the Apple II while letting mom do her office work. If the choice had been Mac or IBM clone, kids' influence might have led to a different purchase.
For several years after the Mac's launch, game and education software developers remained focused on the color Apple II family and relatively easy cross-development for the IBM, not sure what to make of the object oriented Mac OS and it's comparatively small market. Hobbyists or enthusiasts liked to tinker, and the clone world offered a flood of upgradable parts. To these early adopters, the IBM "BIOS" seemed accessible while the smiling Mac boot logo revealed its toaster soul. Even today, Linux fans love the text that scrolls by while their kernel du jour boots. Like a transparent plastic Lego gearbox, the text screens let them see what the insides are doing. (Hold down Command-V during a Mac OS X boot to freak out your local gearhead.)
But all of the technical arguments aside, the success of the IBM clone versus the Mac largely boils down to the story arcs of the two cleverest borrowers of the last century. Bill Gates borrowed products (like DOS from Seattle Computer Products) to backstop insanely lucrative business models, and Jobs borrowed ideas (like the mouse, from Xerox) to build insanely great products. Both men also borrowed from each other (Windows from Mac OS, Applesoft from BASIC), and both still borrow from their 1970's past.
In the 1980's, Gate's business models won. The business market spent their dollars on legions of beige boxes; Apple's soda pop CEOs did their best to bugger up its education market foundation and the cleverness of the Mac; and "the rest of us" were mostly blissfully unaware. So we use Bill Gate's operating system on Steve Job's interface to run Tim Berners-Lee's world wide web.
Today, this is changing. As computing technology fades from its Gee Whiz prominence into nothing more than the means to an end, ideas become more important. Who cares that the Mach kernel in Mac OS X and its drawing routines are really Job's NEXTSTEP operating system (geeks knew we'd seen the dock somewhere before). Who cares that Microsoft acquired a handful of Eastern European antivirus companies to put paid to Windows' insecurities? Everyone's investing in Google, because---for today anyway---they're having the coolest ideas.