The Windows Mystery
Mac users are often criticized for their smug, superior attitudes, and for their zealotry. I’m no fan of zealotry myself, but am nonetheless guilty of these attitudes from time to time. I’d like to explain why, in as humble and balanced a manner as I can.
Suppose you own a car. Any car will do…let’s say a Honda Civic. Like any car, it’s not perfect. From time to time, it needs maintenance or repair. The vast majority of the time, it works: You can get into it and drive places at reasonable speed. You expect as much from your car.
Now, you look around and realize other people’s cars are different. They break a lot: Instead of monthly maintenance, they need daily maintenance. Instead of breaking down every year or two, they break down every week or two. Bugs get into the engine periodically and they can’t go over 30 on the highway. They’re hard to drive, too: Tasks that are easy in your car seem complicated, and simple maintenance that you can do yourself requires a lot of mechanical knowhow on these other cars and risks destroying the engine.
Yet 95% of the population owns these cars. It’s a mystery. They’re not much cheaper than your car, and there isn’t anything they can do that your car can’t. So you’re baffled. You start asking around: Why put up with these awful cars? Why not get a Honda Civic? These other car owners aren’t able to come up with a clear answer, but nonetheless they’re convinced that somehow, they don’t have a choice. You explain that they do: They could get a car just like yours and drive all the places they drive now, but without breaking down all the time. You show them all the other great stuff your car does. They’re interested, envious: It’s as though you’ve won the lottery and built a fantasy life they could only dream of. It’s weird and disturbing, all these people putting up with these horrible machines for no apparent reason.
That’s how Mac users feel, looking at the rest of the population. Sure, it makes us smug sometimes, but I think for many of us that smugness is born of a deep confusion. We have all the tools they have: Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Quicken, Web browsers and email tools, instant messaging, games, etc. We have tools they don’t have like OmniGraffle (which does Visio better than Visio does) and Keynote (which does Powerpoint better than Powerpoint does). We see Windows users struggling with administrative tasks that are simple for us. We hear about spyware, and adware, and viruses, things we just don’t have to deal with, and we look on in horror as Windows users shrug and accept these completely unnecessary evils, as their computers slow to a crawl and become infested with porn-filled popups.
We try to explain: We have everything they have without the drawbacks. In response we get talking points about supported applications or compatibility issues. We explain that we have all the applications they use. We explain that Macs read and write the same file formats as Windows. We explain that Macs can connect to Windows office networks, print to Windows printers, and operate well in a Windows-centric world. But by then their eyes have glazed over: Just another Mac nut evangelizing. Get out of the conversation and move on.
It doesn’t make sense. And it won’t change unless people take action. If your computer is unpleasant to use, if you’re tired of weird crashes, if you wish you didn’t have to scan for spyware and viruses all the time, if you wish you could administer your computer effectively without becoming an IT expert, if you want all those flashy things that those Mac guys on their iBooks in Starbucks have, then do something about it. Microsoft has no reason to make things better if consumers accept the product as it is.
The choice is yours to make; please stop telling us it isn’t.