Forward delete is an oxymoron…

Mac 101: Forward delete on a Mac laptop

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As part of my job, I come across dozens of Windows users every day. They have used Windows all their life and have little or know knowledge of the Mac.

These are, to coin a few phrases, the other 95%, the drones, the job security for hundred’s and thousands of IT Managers up and down the USofA.

Occasionally this ‘majority’ have to sit down and use a Mac for a period of time and it’s here where their ‘muscle memory’ of using the upside-down and back-to-front version of the Mac (i.e. Windows), comes into the realm of the way it was done first, and done correctly – the Mac.

One way in which this surfaces is the forward-delete key. This was first brought to my attention when a bemused PC user, typing a document, said, “where’s the delete key on this keyboard?’

My first reaction was that they couldn’t be blamed for not knowing. There’s nowhere on a mac keyboard that says ‘delete’. It’s the key with the left facing arrow, as a Mac user, I just know this through years of use.

However the PC-user, upon testing this said, “No, that’s the backspace key.”

“No it isn’t”, I remarked, “the backspace key on a Mac is the left arrow key, along with the up, down and right keys”.

Not understanding what ‘backspace’ meant, I then learned about ‘forward-delete’ from this PC-user. It’s always been on a Mac keyboard, but I’ve never used it, because it doesn’t make any sense to me. And neither does ‘backspace’.

To me, the word ‘backspace’ does not mean a destructive action. Backspace means, ‘to move back a space’, i.e. the left arrow key.

‘Delete’ means to delete something you have just done. i.e. You type a word, it is wrong, and you, going backwards using the delete key, delete that word. Where does the term, ‘forward’ make any sense in this?

You don’t place your insertion point at the beginning of the word and then when you press the delete key, expect it to move forward along the word, deleting it.

That’s counter-intuitive isn’t it?

I suppose this all comes down to what you’re used to, but ‘forward-delete’ to me doesn’t make any sense to me as a concept.

However as the ‘majority’ use it, I must be wrong, right?

Reaction to Microsoft’s answer to ‘GetaMac’

I’ve not published for a while as I have been knee-deep in the negotiations to convert my company’s website from a standard informational website in to a fully-fledged ecommerce site.

So I’ve let pass the current effort by Microsoft to counter the resurgence of the Mac with their own set of advertising, costing $300 million no less.

Being very busy, I don’t have the time to look into the metaphorical reasoning behind the Seinfield ads, but I assure you I will sooner or later.

I’m a marketing guy and I deal with peddling bullshit to consumers on a daily basis, and at first glance these ads seem amateurish at best.

In addition, I’m too late – they’ve been pulled already.

Microsoft have continued the assault on Apple with the ‘I’m a PC’ ads. Again however, the ads seem poorly thought out and clumsy in their execution.

But I’m not going to go into detail, but one thing I’ve noticed is the reception that any advertising effort by Redmond seems to generate in the media. It seems that the press is resoundingly negative in their judgement.

Why is this? Surely something can be said of these adverts that would give Microsoft some hope? Even myself at my most impartial, could, if pushed, muster some sort of positive morsel.

It seems to me that the tables have been turned.

Back in the 80’s & 90’s, the main motivating factor, the thing, above all that would sway someone’s opinion on whether to choose an IBM PC or a Macintosh, was their friendly (or not so friendly) neighbourhood geek.

The spotty nerd at work, the weirdo that fixed the computers, the clumsy nobby-no-mates that bored you senseless with talk of RAM, memory, DOS & hard disks.

And his recommendation was (you guessed it), the DOS (and Windows) PC. He scoffed at the Mac, calling it a toy, lacking in software, no powerful and something that nobody used.

And his recommendation stuck. For years. And years. We’ve been at the brunt-end of that decision ever since. The entire IT industry is geared towards pushing us to Windows and the PC.

Fast forward to the last few years. After years of crashes, viruses, trojans, malware and ever cheap computers, that seem to last little more than 18 months, the consumer who relied of their geeky friends recommendation just doesn’t believe them anymore.

So who do they believe? Well who’s left?

Their not going to listen to a Mac user either, because we get lumped together with those geeky weirdoes.

The only thing left is the media. They are listening to the media, the ad-men, all those artists who use Macs in all the creative departments up and down the land, all those PR agencies and marketing people who use predominantly the Mac.

The Mac’s time has come – for years the IT geeks recommended the PC to anybody who would listen, well those days are gone. Now that the consumer’s ear is turning towards the media, we will recommend nothing but the Mac.

Poetic justice for all the years of misery they’ve put us all through.

My god, these people still exist..?

Live with it: Mac is not the greatest

Oh dear, I thought we’d already discussed this a million times on every forum in the known universe.

The public has spoken, and they want Mac’s, not PC’s – live with it.

I thought that people like this would just, y’know, go back to their server rooms or something, but it seems that every now and again, between chocolate bars, squeezing spots and the hosing down and reinstallation of Windows, they post flame-bait like this.

They can say anything they like, because they are journalists with a PC-bias, and we are just Mac-users who just want to tell everyone that there’s a better way.

We can’t say anything in retaliation because if we dare to speak up, we’re pigeonholed as blind cult followers.

All those stories you hear about Windows users switching to Mac and then wondering why they didn’t do it years ago, well that’s just lies put about by these ‘weird’ Mac people.

But you can’t win with situations like this, so I suggest to everyone that please, please, please when the next Windows-spod pokes his head from around the server-room door, and tries to convince you that all these Macs are a waste of time and you ought to be on Windows, just ignore him.

Please don’t reply to his article, even if it’s well meaning – he’ll just use it as ammunition against us.

If you want to post a retort, then start your own blog if you have to so you don’t give him the traffic that he most sorely needs.

In another few years these people will quieten down, after the people they work for/with start bringing in iPhones, and telling everyone they’ve just bought a Mac as well, and that they’d wished they’d done it years ago.

Apparently, we’re weird because we like computers to look nice…

 

Apparently, we’re weird because we like computers to look nice…

Link: I’m going to write about people who I completely misunderstand.

This recent posting postulates the question, “Mac users don’t like others touching their stuff.”

The reasoning behind it is that because we pay so much (apparently) for our kit, we don’t like other people using it and supposedly breaking it.

But, as usual PC pundits fail to see the wider issue.

It’s because I don’t want ignorant PC users who see technology as a useless commodity, covered in stickers, touching my pristine Mac’s/iPod’s/iPhone.

It’s got nothing to do with how much I paid for it, it’s to do with the way in which Windows users treat their technology.

If I get another PC user coming up to my flawlessly clean LCD screen and smudge it with his or her greasy finger, I’ll scream.

I walk through our Windows IT department daily and see ugly tin boxes, covered in dust, stickers, pen marks, yesterday’s lunch wrappers and worse.

When the electrician’s come to my company and test all the electrical equipment, they have to put an ugly ‘tested’ sticker on everything. PC users are quite happy to have this sticker anywhere on their PC, I have almost punched said electrician for considering to stick it on the ‘front’ of my G5 Tower.

I had to loan a little iBook to a PC user once, I received it back a month later and it was filthy, and had what looked like jam on the LCD screen. I actually felt sorry for the poor thing and spent over an hour giving it a good clean.

PC users don’t care. PC users pay next to nothing for basement-spec PC’s. PC users think nothing of the hardware.

Am I weird? Probably, but I have to work with these computers all day, and I also have to be creatively active at a moments notice.

I, like most creative people realise that ideas best surface in a clean, ordered environment, where the equipment I use has had time spent on it’s look and feel (both hardware and software).

This is why we don’t like PC users, ‘using’ our equipment – they just don’t think that this is important.

 

More Windows problems…

 

Currently I have a PC in my studio that is connected to a USB printer, and this printer in Windows is being shared to the network.

I also have a couple of Mac’s that access this shared printer, and occasionally use it if the main workhorse A3 laser printer is busy.

This has worked fine on the Mac side, but occasionally, about once a month, the Mac’s connection to the printer doesn’t work.

The standard way to fix this is:

Test the PC to see if it still prints, 100% of the time it doesn’t, so we call in our in-house Windows IT spods to recreate the printer and share it again.

The Mac’s then work normally again, with no reconfiguration at all, they simply pick up the new printer and they’re good to go.

The mantra is, “If the PC prints, then the Mac will print also. Automatically.” This is why I use the Mac, it just works.

 

However, last week this wasn’t the case. The Mantra didn’t work.

As usual the Mac stopped printing to the shared USB printer. However this time, the PC printed fine.

So I asked the Windows IT spods to recreate the printer anyway. They did, it still didn’t work.

So I recreated the shared printer on the Mac and this is where we got to the bottom of the problem.

When you connect to a shared Windos printer on the Mac, it asks you for the login information for the PC. We knew this info, and we put this info in correctly, however the PC wasn’t accepting it, giving a ‘NT ACCESS DENIED” error, whatever that is.

So we thought the problem was with the Mac, and after half an hour trying different things, I gave up, telling the Mac-user to print to the A3 printer instead in the meantime.

I thought that was that, except next day the Windows PC wouldn’t log in to it’s desktop at all. The same log in info now wasn’t working on the PC either.

The spods came in, took it away, seemingly recreating the user with a new account & login.

Guess what, when I tried recreating the shared PC printer on the Mac – it worked fine.

So the problem was the PC simply deciding that it had had enough with that account and the only solution was to create a new one, which in turn solved our printer problem.

One day, Windows simply decides it’s not going to work anymore and needs massaging back to workability, and a whole career has been created around this concept.

I can see now why WIndows IT people are needed – and why they are scared sh*tless of the Mac.

 

Microsoft PlaysforSure, doesn’t play for sure anymore (for sure)…

Here’s the bad news.

It’s amazing that this has not been reported more widely in the press. After countless arguements that Microsoft’s DRM was the future, and you’d be mad to go with iTunes, now comes the news that puts Microsoft’s take on the user/provider firmly into sharp relief.

Put simply; you know all that music that you spent your hard earned cash on from any one of a number of ‘PlaysForSure’ partner of Microsoft’s?

Well, they want it back please and no, you don’t get your money back.

Can someone please explain to me again, why Apple isn’t at 95% market share and companies like Microsoft at 5%?

Why do Windows users put up with being slapped in the face constantly – do you think they actually like it?

Can anyone really trust Microsoft again?

I’m glad that all my online music purchases are from iTunes, because at least I know that Apple will still be around in 10 years time.

It’s strange that back in the 90’s the ’still being around in 10 years time’ was the reason given by a lot of IT Managers when giving a reason for choosing Windows over the Mac.

How times have changed, it’s a pity a lot of IT managers haven’t.

We’ve reached 21% (10% worldwide) – so it’s plan B…

 

 

Think before you click.

 

I’ve spoken in previous article’s how Apple’s plan to completely dominate the computing landscape is well underway.

 

Various initiatives such as the move to Intel, the fleshing out of Apple’s software, the iPod and iPhone halo effect, are all part of their plan, and that plan is going very well.

 

21% consumer market share and 10% worldwide is nothing to sniff at – we’re winning the war against the great unwashed PC masses.

 

They, for various reasons, continue to stick with the outdated model of proprietary OS on open hardware, but constantly complain about the shortcomings of that model – it’s reliability.

 

Although we’re making great strides, this dinosaur will be difficult to kill, too many people’s jobs, lives and whole personalities are propped up by the Windows monopoly.

 

They have tried in the past to discourage the ignorant masses from choosing the Mac, but those reasons are becoming more difficult to justify.

 

The Windows OS, is not getting any better with each release – indeed quite the opposite, and they couldn’t care less about Vista.

 

The Windows OS, is still prone to viruses and malware and they’re fed up of constantly having to call their geeky friend or pay through the nose for an expert to fix their PC.

 

They have however noticed that the Mac OS, just gets better and better.

 

More of their (non-geeky) friends are recommending it.

 

They’ve been to an Apple store and been very impressed.

 

And guess what? They are ignoring their geeky friends advice and actually buying a Mac.

 

In the eyes of those whose very existence depend on the Windows monopoly continuing ad infinitum, this cannot continue, but the old tricks aren’t working anymore.

 

And so we come to plan B.

 

Call in all the favours, gather in all the shills, and start planting stories of companies switching away from the Mac – astroturfing, something that Microsoft are very good at.

 

So, please don’t click on this link, your life will not be any the richer because of it. Just see it for what it is.

 

The dinosaur to getting scared and is finally starting to contemplate a future that doesn’t include it’s influence.

 

Expect lots more articles such as this to follow…

In response to this pile of drivel…

  

Think before you click please 

Every reason over the years that stood in the way of a Windows user to switch has been shot down.

Can’t find anywhere to buy Mac’s? – Sorted with the new Apple Stores.

Mac’s use non-standard chips – sorted with Intel.

Mac’s haven’t got the exact software I need – sorted with dual booting or full-speed emulation.

No games – PC’s are on the way out for gaming, buy an XBox/PS3/Wii.

No, there’s only one thing left to shoot down, and that’s the army (and I mean ARMY), of Windows IT support people who still, to this day, recommend Windows over the Mac. We’re making some inroads with these morons and some are seeing the light, but we’ve only scratched the surface and there’s a long way to go.

I feel that we’ll have to wait until the die-hards retire or drop dead through over prolonged exposure to Stockholme Syndrone until we see the tipping point and Apple’s 1/2 point increases in market share start to accelerate.

The Windows maze… where do I begin?

I’ve long thought that the complexities of the Windows world were, in part, exaggerated by Apple users and their media (I’ve even been guilty of it myself), but I’m here to tell you now, it’s worse than everyone’s ever thought. 

I’m now in charge of the company’s website. I relaunched it in the middle of last year and when faced with the complete rewrite that was needed, I decided that the best approach was a Content Management System (CMS) for the website so that anyone with a basic grasp of computers could update it. I certainly don’t have time to administer the website using Dreamweaver, so the plan was to buy in a CMS so that the less web-ware members of my staff could update the site in my absence. 

The journey through this has been a difficult one with various problems too numerous to mention, except one. One that has shown me that the complexities of the Windows world are not exaggerated. 

At the heart of the website is a registration system that allows a web-user to fill in a standard html form, upload a couple of graphics and then submit this to a choice of a dozen or so destinations. In the background this submission is then uploaded to a centrally stored database, and then automatically emailed to 1 of 10 users of the system. Once received, these users then contact the web-user and process their registration. 

Except it doesn’t work. In fact in the 10 months or so since the website launched, it’s never worked.Of course, actually finding this out was an arduous task in itself.

Suffice to say after tracking the problem it appears it boils down to this: The web-users form is received centrally, perfectly. It’s when this form is emailed through my company’s webserver, we have a problem. It just never gets there. Doesn’t even register as spam, it just doesn’t arrive. 

Changing the destination to a ‘@googlemail.com’ domain – it works fine.

It’s something to do with the website’s backend software communicating to our email server, they just don’t get along. Of course the one set of Windows users (who run the back-end website software for us), blame the other set of Windows users (who run our email server). I have the envious task of arranging a meeting between these 2 groups to hammer out a solution. 

In the meantime, I, a lowly Mac-user, not versed in the intricate voodoo of email systems, has come up with a solution. All submissions from the website go to a ‘@googlemail.com’ email address, I set up for this purpose. They then come through to Apple Mail, where a Apple Mail set of rules, then examines the email, determines which destination it’s meant for and then forwards it on. This works fine. 

But why doesn’t it one Windows based email system, work with another? It seems to me that these ‘experts’ haven’t a clue, at a low-level, how Windows actually works, and that is a scary thought, and it has taken a single G5 Mac and Apple Mail, to sort out the problem (at least in the short term).

How to kill a Mac design studio…

Sorry it’s been a while since my last post, but as well as going through one of the most busiest periods of the year, I’ve also had to move the entire studio to new premises whilst this busy period was in full swing. 

It was one of the hardest move’s I’ve ever had to accomplish. The studio, since moving to the previous premises has expanded considerably, adding 2 large format printers and 2 new members of staff and consequentially, the move took about a week to complete, (and it’s still not really finished) the studio’s at about 80% capacity now. 

It’s not been without it’s problems though. I’ve wrote long into the night about  Windows IT Managers and their constant battle to make the life of the Mac-based, in-house design studios difficult, if not impossible and their overall goal being to get rid of them completely. However the biggest problem I’ve had with the studio move, has not been the IT guys (they seem to have, at least for the moment, given up on the anti-Mac crusade), but something else entirely – dust. 

The studio was at it’s old premises for about 3 years, and it was always  going to be a temporary thing, because the premises were totally unsuitable. Noisy (vibrations from heavy equipment outside), dusty (were attached to a full-service centralised warehouse) and cramped (making planning for large scale projects difficult). But, things seemed to tick along fine until about 3 months before the move.

One of the large format printers broke down with various error messages. After 3 vists from a technician, it was deemed that the problem was dust. It was cleaned up and now works fine.

It wasn’t until the move that the dust in the Macs became apparent. It seemed by moving them it unsettled the dust inside them and caused even more problems. After moving all the equipment over and trying to set the studio up, I was faced with the following problems:

1) One of the work drives in the G5 was DOA (just a clicking noise and no mounting), thank goodness I have good backup.

2) The superdrive in my G5 was unoperational

3) One of the 160gb backup drives was DOA.

4) The CD drive in one of the G4’s was unoperational.After cleaning up I’ve managed to get one of the optical drives partially working (now burns CD’s but not DVD’s), but the rest need replacing.

It’s made me realise that part of my maintenance routine needs to be more hardware related than software, and I’ve ordered several cans of spray air.

Email bankruptcy..?

The Washington Post reports that some PC users have declared their email bankrupt, announcing to everyone on their contacts lists that they are giving up on responding to the glut of e-mail in their inboxes. Some are even giving up on email entirely and returning to the communication technology that started it all – the telephone.

I look at news like this and roll my eyes and sigh. The world has been given short shrift on a fantastic communication technology, one that should have revolutionised our lives for the better. What went wrong? I can sum it up in one word – Microsoft, and the minions that serve them.

I run a small art department inside the belly of a larger PC-based organisation. Having set up this studio myself from the ground up, I had complete say in exactly what I wanted – the Windows based IT department is full of clueless PC drones who’s last experience of the Mac was sarcastic Mac-bashing articles from copies of PC magazines back in 1996.

So I was left well alone – and thank god. Mac OS X 10.2 was my choice when I got the studio running and I made sure that certain things were in place:

1) We had our own network – all Mac network & printer ethernet cables go through a single switch, positioned in the studio, and we have a single ethernet cable which connects us to the PC network, therefore any problems caused by the PC network can be disconnected straight away.

2) Although we use the PC network’s email, we do not use software that they recommend. I used the crap OS8 port of Outlook for years – very painful. No, we use Apple Mail.

3) All Mac IT related problems are our problems – we sort them out, and in turn, we end up sorting them out with minimal fuss. No putting a support call through to IT and then waiting 3 days before it’s answered in this department. Not that this happens very often, I’ve had 1 days down time in 6 years, and that was to upgrade to Tiger.

So there I’ve set the scene. The company email used to run through Outlook. Lucky for us, it allowed POP or IMAP access, so Apple Mail worked quite happily, as long as we knew the IP addresses.

However I began to notice that when sending email back to PC’s I would sometimes get no reply. Upon investigating I found that it was not a technical problem, it was a social one – the recipients simply had too much email spam to get through and would either resort to deleting it en masse, in the hope that any really important messages would be re-sent, or simply ignoring their email completely.

Something has to change. The IT department decided to ‘upgrade’ the email, by moving over to a web mail service provider (not one I’ve ever heard of), with (apparently), 1st class spam filtering.

This move didn’t affect us; I didn’t expect Safari (or Firefox for that matter) to work, and it didn’t. However being web based we could access it via POP or IMAP in Apple Mail, so that is what we do, and it works fine.

However the spam problem still remains. The ‘1st-class spam filtering’ seems to mean that any email that isn’t our company domain is labelled as [SPAM], it still gets through,it still clogs up people’s email, and ‘real’ email still gets missed.

The main problem (and its solution) here is the difference between the way in which Apple Mail handles spam, and the PC server handles spam.

Faced with the spam problem, PC-based IT departments choose to handle the spam centrally – all email is fed through the filter and one size fits all. I get important communications for instance from newpapers, telling me about last minute availability of ad space. Guess what? It’s labelled as spam, and I can’t tell the server that this shouldn’t be labelled as spam, it doesn’t work like that, it sometimes goes into my junk folder, sometimes doesn’t.

Now somebody else getting that message, may agree that it IS spam, in my department it ISN’T spam. Get it?

The solution to the whole spam problem, is to handle spam at the client level. The spam filter in Apple mail is absolutely the best piece of software engineering I’ve ever seen. I roughly get 300 emails a day, about 25 of these are legitimate and Apple Mail 99.9% of the time gets it spot on, I’ve been training it for about 3 months, but it got it pretty right first time.

One person’s spam, is another person’s great offer, so why don’t we just let it all through and let the user decide? Because again, this shows the fundamental problem with computer infrastructure’s: you dear user are hated and loathed by those people who should serve YOUR best interests, instead they choose to serve THEIR best interests.

An unknown writer once said, “”Personal computing can be seen as serving the needs of those who have CREATED the system, instead of serving those who USE the system.”

Where is Steve Jobs going with this?

Okay, it’s been a while, but after reading various viewpoints on the whole scenario of Bootcamp, Intel Mac’s and Apple’s true intentions, and after having commented on various forums about my viewpoints on the subject, I finally feel ready to get down on paper (well not paper exactly, erm… pixels maybe), what I feel is inside SJ’s head right now, and where he’s going with this.

I’ve thought long and hard, and those thoughts have been both positive and negative, and all the compass points in-between, but I’ve finally decided. Decided what? Well read on, but let me just say from the start that I am right, and you are wrong.

This article covers a lot. It covers Apple’s move to Intel chips, Boot Camp implications, Apple’s support (or lack thereof) of Windows XP, is Apple moving to Windows, adopting the Windows API, adopting the Windows Vista kernel and many other things in-between, so, it’s a ‘biggie’.

Apple’s move to Intel Chips – why?

The reasons for this were obvious. The Motorola/IBM team simply did not have the funds/will/intelligence to create a chip in sufficient quantities for Apple Computer to use in order to drive sales of the Mac, and to keep up with the Wintel camp. The mhz myth became the ghz myth and it was difficult to have to admit that maybe Intel had a point.

Although I think Steve Jobs’ plan from the start was to eventually move to Intel chips (the Marklar project is proof enough of this), he wanted to put it off for as long as possible.

Why? Well, Apple had to wait until they had decent emulation of the PowerPC chip, to ease the transition, and Apple was trying to encourage as many developers as possible to move to Xcode. They had been pushing this for years, way before Marklar was confirmed, and I think this is another clue that Apple had been planning to move to Intel eventually. The Xcode development suite started life at Next, and had always been binary compatible with Intel chips, and now, simply clicking a tick box compiles your app for Intel.

So you can argue the pros and cons of PowerPC/Intel, but I think it was inevitable. The recent problems that Sony is having with the Cell processor is proof enough that Steve Jobs was right. Apple are now in the enviable position of having a limitless supply of (relatively) cheap, fast chips. Historically, Apple have never been able to create Mac’s quickly enough to meet demand, now they can, it’s a win-win situation for them.

Boot Camp & Virtualization – why?

The inevitability of someone hacking the Intel Mac, in order to boot Windows was well, inevitable. What surprised everyone, was that Apple would come up with the technology themselves. The question is, did Apple plan this from the start, or did the quickly come up with this technology when they heard that some geek had hacked it together?

The answer is that this is all part of Apple’s long term goal.

Once Apple committed themselves to moving to Intel, then running Windows on Mac hardware was something they must have anticipated. They new that this was one of the aspects of the move that would have happened whether they liked it or not, so they must have planned to find a way to turn it to their advantage.

What is the advantage? Well, it all comes down to the series of decisions that any computer user must make when contemplating a switch. A PC user switching to Mac has to take into various costs, such as the move in hardware, software & peripherals.

This is why the switcher campaign did not return the numbers, peoples interested was captured, but on further investigation, they balked at the cost.

With the move to Intel, this has greatly smoothed the way. Hardware isn’t a cost anymore, they were going to buy a computer anyway, software cost has been lessened, because a lot of what the average computer user uses is already free on a Mac, and any software that isn’t can be run using BootCamp or virtualization which I guarantee will become part of Leopard. Peripherals have never been a problem anyway. Most USB based devices work out of the box.

For those of you who say that Mac’s are still expensive, then you are comparing bargain basement PC’s, or build your own – markets that Apple isn’t interested in. You cannot maintain the Apple experience on cheap or build your own PC’s, or maintain a decent profit margin.

Apple support (or lack thereof) of Windows

Apple will not stop you from running Windows on your Mac, they’ve even given Windows users an easy way to do it, but this isn’t because they are moving to Windows. It’s because it knocks away another reason that Windows users have cited as their reason for not moving to the Mac – can they run their Windows apps, just in case they don’t like OS X?

However, they will not support you, (maybe because the support calls alone would eat away at their billions in cash reserves in amount 10 minutes). They’ll let you to run Windows if you want, this is why they changed the name of the portables to MacBook & MacBook Pro – if you decide to run Windows, you are still reminded that you’re running Windows ON A MACINTOSH (it keeps the brand alive in their heads).

So why have they allowed this? Well in part, they couldn’t stop it, and it’s better to have a Windows user running Windows on a Mac reliably, instead of relying on a geeky hack that doesn’t work all the time. If Apple had not done this, and a Windows user installed Windows on a Mac using the geeky hack, any problems (and their would have been plenty) would be blamed on the Apple hardware, further damaging the brand in their eyes.
But Apple mainly did this because again, it’s all part of their grand plan. (More on this at the conclusion of this article).

Is Apple moving to Windows, adopting the Windows API or adopting the Windows Vista kernel – what?

This ball started rolling with Mr Dvorak. Other Mac users much more gifted than I have pointed out the flaws in this argument and pointed out that Dvorak and people like him know as much about technology as a cab driver knows about the Apple vs Apple court case, but let’s take them one by one.

Is Apple moving to Windows?

Avie (the guy who basically invented OS X) could not have left at a worse time. (Sometimes I think Apple does this because Steve gets a kick out of seeing users squirm – but it does create interest in Apple, so maybe THAT’S the point). Avie retired from active input at Apple years ago. This was just a coincidence.

Is Apple adopting the Windows API

No, nope, nein and every other way you can say something in the negative. It sounds easy – simply adopt the Windows API (call it the Red Box, Pink Box, Purple Box Environment if you like), and all Windows applications would run alongside Mac OSX, much like X11 & Classic apps do. Except it’s not easy, and although possible, it would take years of development (it took Apple 5 years to get Classic working and they own the source code), and even then most software would not work because there is no Windows API as such, most of it is hacks and undocumented hooks. So the Apple ‘it just works’ catchphrase would go out the window (no pun intended).

Is Apple adopting the Windows Vista kernel
Oh my god, somebody please shut Dvorak up! It just goes to show how little this guy understands computers, let alone why Apple has survived this long. His basic premise was that Apple could adopt Vista, and then simply run a Mac OS X ’skin’ on top. Like, yes that’s the difference between the 2 OS’s, the way they look.

Apple’s ‘reason for being’ is the tight integration between hardware and software. It’s the reason they don’t crash, why they’re stable, why they work, and yes, why they are a little bit more expensive. If Apple did this, they would basically become an EOL supplier of Microsoft’s OS, competing directly with Dell, HP and the others. Where does this leave the Apple ‘it just works’ benefit. Why would you buy from Apple? I wouldn’t, they’d be too expensive. They’d be dead in the water.

If Dvorak doesn’t even grasp this simple premise and see why his ramblings are not only wrong but embarrassing for a mainstream tech-writer then he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Anyway the only reason he writes things of this ‘calibre’ is to drive traffic to his blog. Have you heard how many times he mentions it on TWIT?

Conclusion – so what is Apple’s overall plan?

All these things are connected. Apple does NOTHING on the spur of the moment, they plan, they scheme, they anticipate. Apple are profitable and healthy, the one thing that eludes them is market share, at least big gains in market share.

So this is all about attracting people to the Mac. Which people? Well there is a saying that says that if you grab somebody while they’re young, you’ve got them for life. So that means consumers.

Aren’t Apple interested in the enterprise? Well, yes and no. They’re interested in being a ‘good citizen’ on Windows networks, and playing happy with PC’s, but the real attack is at the enterprises of the future and that future lies with consumers, they are the enterprise of tomorrow.

So how will Apple do it? This is the plan, taking into account all that’s been said above:

1) Apple moves the current customer base from PowerPC to Intel hardware, moving the software at the same time, having very good emulation software built in.

2) Apple makes this move a smoothly as possible, so as not to alienate current, loyal Mac customers.

3) In order to counteract piracy, Apple creates a stable, geek-free way of running Windows on Mac hardware. Either using BootCamp or virtualization, this satisfies 2 types of new user:

a) Bootcamp users: These are users who want to move away from Windows, but dare not. This gives them a safety blanket in case they don’t like the Mac OS. They will, and within 6 months they’ll wonder how they ever put up with Windows.

b) Virtualization users: These are users who are fed up with Windows, and want to move to Mac but cannot because there is a piece of software that they must use on Windows. Within 6 months they will find a replacement or learn to live without it and use the Mac full time.

4) Apple’s market share starts to go up. It is irrelevant that some people who have bought a Mac just to run Windows, it will show as a Mac sale, much as in the same way that a PC user who buys a Windows PC and install Linux on it, still shows as a Windows sale.

5) Apple now has a significant number of new users who run Windows on a computer that can easily run Mac OS X AT NO EXTRA COST.

6) Apple then encourages them to switch by offering incentives that mean they must boot into the Mac, such as movie store that is tied into .Mac. (You would stream the movies from your account, to your Mac, but only if you run OS X), and by pushing the benefits of iLife, buy releasing new hardware, iPod related devices that leverage iLife, such as the iPhone. More controversially, they would either cancel iTunes for Windows, or make an enhanced version for Mac users. BootCamp users would not have a problem here, it would encourage them to boot more into the Mac.

7) Apple market share continues to climb.

8) Apple releases an update to XCode that allows you to compile the application you just wrote for the Mac, to run on Windows, (a specific hardware configuration only, probably teaming up with Dell or HP). Apple now controls Microsoft application development for all apps that have both Mac & Windows versions. Companies such as Adobe would jump at the chance because of the development cost savings, and new developers would contemplate XCode as a way of entering the new market of increasing Mac users, whilst still selling to the bread and butter market of Windows users.

9) Apple now controls a significant portion of Windows application development.

10) Apple buys Microsoft, closes it down and gives the money back to the shareholders. Windows IT managers around the world scream and hang themselves with used USB cables, their last words being, “Our pointless livelihoods have just been destroyed and we would have got away with it to, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids at Apple computer!”

Okay, those last 3 were BS, (well except the bit about USB cables maybe, I went a bit Dvorak, you know, by doing about the same amount of research), but this seems to me to be a logical process that I would take if I were running Apple, all perfectly feasible, and it would grow market share.

Keeping IT under control…

About a decade ago I made a decision that changed my working life. No, I didn’t choose the Macintosh; that decision came almost a decade earlier, and has been a choice that has richly coloured my life ever since.

No, the decision that changed my life for a second time was to move away from the more traditional feeding grounds of the Mac, such a advertising agencies, printers & imagesetting bureaux, and towards areas where the Mac was making inroads into larger, Wintel-based companies.

After the slow-down that hit the UK advertising industry in the mid-nineties, I decided that I couldn’t base my career around such a unpredictable & volatile industry, where losing one client could mean the company cutting it’s wage bill in half.

I took a job working for an ‘in-house’ studio, as part of a larger PC-based organisation, and in the following years I have worked for several companies, but all of them have followed this ethos. By and large, this working environment is much more agreeable, and has allowed me to relax and plan a future for myself and my family.

I say agreeable, but there has been one aspect of this arrangement that has proved irksome – IT departments.

I have many a horror story to tell of my dealings with stubborn Windows Managers, too many to go into here, but I must make a clear distinction of who I am talking about. By Windows Managers I am talking about people in a business setting who have had no contact with the Macintosh or Mac-people whatsoever, and whose only reference to Macintosh are the odd sarcastic article in PC magazines. I in no way refer to the countless numbers of Macintosh IT Managers who in my experience do an excellent job of managing Macintosh & Windows based networks.

I always gave Windows Managers the benefit of the doubt, thinking that the Mac-hating attitude that they’d so often dish out was simply an isolated incident, and didn’t reflect the wider opinion of IT professionals and Network Managers. However, having looked back over 3 or 4 separate companies of which I have worked for, and the opinions and attitudes of the IT staff therein, I’m beginning to see a pattern.

When a particular company first decides that it makes business-sense to bring their design & repro in-house, they are at a loss as how to approach it. What tends to happen is they bypass the usual avenues for buying IT equipment, i.e. they don’t approach their IT department. They ask their current provider for advice, be it a design house, printer or consultant. They will recommend the industry-standard – the Apple Macintosh. Then recruitment begins, and it’s usually these recruits that set the whole studio up. As you know, the Mac’s so straightforward, this is just a matter of a couple of days.

Then the problems start. Usually you need some information from IT, in order for the Mac to integrate into the PC-network. IP addresses, SMB printer file-paths, email, internet, proxy settings, the list goes on and on, and it’s here where I usually hit a brick wall, (with a Windows logo on it).

What follows are endless arguments, one-sided discussions and vitriol on their opinion of the Macintosh, which I try my best to avoid getting involved in. This exact scenario has happened on more than one occasion, and it begs me to ask the question, ‘why?’, and I think I have an answer.

The reasons for this are quite simple, and in the UK at least (which has to be the anti-Mac world-capital) it seems to be hard-wired into these people. They have spent their entire working lives keeping Windows stable and operational. They know nothing else. Most don’t even know that the Macintosh exists, and of those that do, they would never contemplate recommending them, and thought that in their working lives at least, they’d never have to go near one.

IT underpins businesses of all kinds; the bigger the business, the more powerful they become. Company Directors become slaves to their IT departments, and they slowly begin to lose control of the company that they run. All business decisions at some point must be run through IT, if IT thinks it’s a bad idea then it won’t happen.

Slowly but surely, this power starts to go to their heads. When Windows decides that it’s not going to work, whole companies grind to a halt. Then a multitude of IT staff crawl out of the woodwork like ants, swarming over each computer, re-setting it all up, while the company is paralysed, losing money every second. On asking what has gone wrong, or how long will it take until things start working again, you at worst get a mumbled grunt, or at best get a cacophony of gibberish of what has happened. They feel powerful, wanted and they are in control. How many times has this occurred in your company?

Occasionally, amongst all of this chaos sits a lone Macintosh studio. A simple set-up, just four or five Mac’s, monitors (colour managed), fast colour laser printer, slower colour accurate proofer, scanners, tape-back up and maybe a small server, with a smattering of external hard drives & digital cameras. It works, all the time. No down-time, no glitches, no errors (at least none that cost money). When the Windows server goes down, the Mac-studio continues without a hiccup. You even get other people in the office coming to you to print their Word, Excel or Powerpoint files for them, because the Windows network isn’t working or their printer keeps eating their jobs. To make matters worse for IT, Mac staff (horror of horrors!) also know how to install applications, they know how to troubleshoot printing problems, manage their fonts and their systems, and what’s worse; they are allowed to!

IT staff feel impotent, unwanted and not in control in Mac-situations. They just don’t ‘get’ the Mac, and why should they? If they did they’d realise they’d be out of work. Had they
been involved at the out-set, Mac’s wouldn’t have been allowed in the company. A standard Wintel-box would be recommended, just like the accounts department. They might not understand reprographics, but they do know what’s best for the company that they control. They make the fatal mistake of assuming because they know computers in a business setting, this somehow gives them an insight into computing for specialised industries. They don’t like the idea that somebody in the company knows more about computers than they do, or has a more powerful computer than the Windows Manager – this gives them cold sweats in the middle of the night.

‘Colour-management’, they’d say ‘what do you need that for?’

‘Back-up?’ they’d retort, ‘you don’t have to worry about it.’ (Until you need a file that you’ve accidentally deleted, and you have to wait days to get it back because they’re too busy).

‘Colour-proofing? Use the companies colour-laser like the other 400 staff have to.’

‘Server? What do you need that for? use this soulless Wintel box like everyone else.’
I once even had a Windows Manager state that the studio shouldn’t be allowed to accept files from outside the company, in case they contained a virus! Having then pointed out that this was the way the department made money, by printing clients files, he quickly relented.

It all boils down to one word, ‘CONTROL’. They control the company, anything that jeopardises this cannot be allowed to happen. The Macintosh suddenly introduces a variable in the company they have no jurisdiction over.

All of this may sound extreme, and I expect a lot of you, even Mac users, & especially in the US, will say that this diatribe is a load of biased rubbish. But things are very different here in the UK. Getting an Apple Mac into a company that isn’t graphics oriented is near impossible. Anti-Mac bias is all around you, on the TV, (the BBC is the worst), newspapers, (IT specials regularly trash the Mac), in computer stores, (PC-World staff have to be seen to be believed), banks, (try online-banking and you’ll be amazed at how you’re treated as a paying customer), and even the government, (try to fill out on-line tax forms).

If Apple want to succeed in the UK, they need to approach things very differently here. My experience is to bypass IT completely, you haven’t a hope in selling to them. Concentrate on the real people who run the company, the Directors. In my experience they just want the best solution to the problem, and in the area of reprographics that will always be the Macintosh.