Most people who know me understand I'm a pretty Microsoft-centric guy. I worked at Microsoft from '93 to '99. I run Sirana Software, which is a Microsoft Certified Partner. And, at last count, my family and I have 9 working Intel-based Windows XP/Windows Server machines running somewhere in the house. All of these are daily-use machines; no doorstops.
However, I just added a new machine to the lineup that's getting a lot of use: a Mac Mini.
Why would I add a Mac, after all this time? Two related words: fun and innovation.
To me, the Mac is just more fun. Start one up, and just look at the little touches. Do you know in the screen saver, they have a feature called "The Ken Burns effect"? It's where you slowly move in-frame or out-frame of an otherwise still photograph. Paired with the beach scenes of the standard Mac screensaver, it makes the most beautiful screen saver I've ever seen. You can tell whoever designed the screensaver really cared about making it the best it could be. Not just slapped it together to shove into the OS.
And how about Apple's new Dashboard feature? How important is it to be able to track the temperature in several different cities, along having handy access to other minor tasks like metric conversions? Well, I can tell you it's enormous fun (and practical) to have build your own dashboard, and have quick access to these applets.
On the innovation side, the Mac is better than WinXP as well. Spotlight makes it easy to find documents and all of the other content on a system. Looks like Longhorn will give us that next year. We hope. Or I can download something from MSN, Yahoo or Google today. And how about RSS feeds? RSS is already really important as a way to manage web content, such as this blog. But is there an RSS reader in Windows, or does IE have any support for handling RSS?
Nope. But on Windows and the Mac, you can download Firefox to handle some RSS access, or use Apple's bundled (and great) Safari browser.
Some of this picking on WinXP is due to the fact that it's old. My copy of Windows XP Professional says "copyright 2001". Sure, it's had service packs and so on since then, but that's four years ago. We won't get a new version of Windows until late next year, at the earliest.
I don't know about you, but every 5 years seems like too long for an operating system upgrade. Does Microsoft really think that the industry is moving that slowly? That no one minds if they take their sweet time about upgrading the platform? Add to the fact that it's been even longer since Internet Explorer had any real innovation, and you feel like something's not quite right.
Now, there's plenty of stuff wrong with the Mac. Don't get started thinking I've drunk all the Mac kool-aid. I'll post about that in a future blog. But the Mac is a fine platform, that should get a lot more attention than it does.
I can tell you that today our house is 9 Windows PCs and 1 Mac, but that ratio won't stay the same for long.
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