by Veit on October 14, 2008
Having switched myself from Windows to the Mac around 18 months ago and being very happy about it (except for business where I switched back to XP), when my wife’s DELL notebook had to be re-purposed, it was no question that she would switch to the Mac as well.
Before the switch, she was a not overly happy, but generally satisfied Windows XP user (email in Thunderbird, browsing with IE and some Firefox, lots of Word, some Excel). As the CSO (Chief Support Officer) of our household, I was unhappy, because I hated “getting the call” and also the generally poor remote diagnosis capabilities that more often than not prevented me from fixing Windows remotely. Therefore, as an added benefit of the switch, supporting her would become much easier for me, even when I was traveling or at the office.
About two months ago, we switched and she got a sparkling new iMac. While at it, I switched her from Thunderbird to Apple’s mail.app, but left her with Firefox and Safari as her two browsers and Office 2004 for text editing and spreadsheet use.
So far, the results have been mixed. The CSO is pretty happy — support requests have been down and onsite/offsite support is much easier to provide. However, the customer is decidedly unhappy and is becoming more agitated about the shortcomings of the Mac. Poor user-friendliness of mail.app is probably the main issue, so I’m thinking about switching her back to Thunderbird (which IMHO is much better than mail.app anyway). The lack of a task bar in the Mac, window overlap, esp. in Office, disappearing Office menu bars and automatic text and window sizing in all apps (or the lack/poor implementation thereof), esp. in the Finder, are all issues that keep her getting more and more unhappy with her Mac.
So facing a situation where you have either a satisfied customer / unhappy CSO or a happy CSO / unhappy customer, I have my suspicions what the outcome of this development will be. Stay tuned as this saga unfolds…
by Veit on August 28, 2008
Around 9 months ago, the Fortune 500 company I worked for then rolled out a trial to some of its Marketing employees — switch from Lenovo Thinkpads to MacBook Pros. Almost immediately, they had to waitlist interested employees…
Within weeks, another line formed — Marketeers wanting to get their Thinkpads back. Why? Three reasons:
1. No extended battery for the Mac, thus subpar battery life. It’s not easy to go from 5+ hours unthethered back to 1.5 or 2 hours.
2. Wireless connectivity was not as robust on the MacBook Pros as they were on the Thinkpads. More dropped connections.
3. Having to run a very load-heavy corporate software environment, all the test participants mainly worked in Parallels, which was just too slow for their tastes. Boot times were horrendous, waking the thing from sleep similarly slow
Fast-forward 9 months: I’m no longer with this company. Having switched to a MacBook Pro myself for personal use around 18 months ago and being very happy about that switch (18 months with almost no problems, including my very first OS upgrade since Windows 95), I wanted to use my Mac for business as well. But pretty quickly, I learned the limitations of a MacBook Pro in today’s business environment, esp. if your co-workers, partner companies and customers are on XP. My 17″ model is just too big for a daily mobile lifestyle. Battery life is really not that great. Wireless connectivity is decent, but my favorite Wi-Fi service, iPass Connect, is not available on the Mac. Calendar incompatibilities. Email issues. MS Office 2004 just too slow (and I need extended Excel macro capabilities, so upgrading to Office 2008 is not an option). No MS Project or Visio for the Mac. Incompatibilities between the Mac equivalents for Project/Visio and the Microsoft software.
I contemplated installing Parallels or VMware Fusion in order to run Windows. But apart from a required memory upgrade, I would have had to also upgrade to a bigger disk (since my disk is already filled up with photography related files and software which I really bought the MacBook Pro for) and get a Windows license. Not something I really wanted to do, esp. since it would not have solved the battery/size issues I had already experienced.
In the end, I invested around $1000 to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 (with Windows XP pre-installed – no Vista for me). Now I have the best of both worlds – a good work-horse for business and a Mac for my personal stuff.
Most computer users do not and will not use more than two browsers on their computer. After all, what the third browser offers in additional functionality will most likely be offset by the extra effort keeping these three browsing environments synchronized.
Which browsers will they use? In short, people using only one browser will use whatever browser is pre-installed on their new computers (Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on the Mac). People in need for a second browser typically look for a highly customizable browsing environment that they can tweak to their exact liking. And that environment is Mozilla’s Firefox, mainly due to the ability of customizing it with many of the thousands of extensions that already exist.
So why is Apple releasing Safari on Windows? The obvious answer is the iPhone, since Apple hopes that iPhone developers on Windows will grow to like Safari enough to abandon Internet Explorer or Firefox. The less obvious reasons are:
- It puts pressure on Mozilla and the open source community to keep on executing. If they stumble, Apple will be there to exploit the situation and to try to unseat Firefox
- Should the next “iThing” from Apple become another smash hit, PC OEMs might start to bundle Safari on their Windows machines. In any case, they will be able to use the Safari bundling threat in their negotiations with Microsoft. Plus it would be bad news for Mozilla, since users would immediately have access to two browsers
Will any of these two options become reality? I would not count on it. But I’d keep a weary eye on the situation, if I were Mozilla!
by Veit on April 22, 2007
One of the first software products that I install when I integrate a new PC into my Windows environment is Pure Networks’ Network Magic. Its promise is very simple: Provide a graphical, mouse-driven way to set up a reliable network and then manage it day in and day out. And it does so through an intuitive and easy-to-learn interface that hides the power and complexity of networking from any of its users. It runs on all our PCs, works in the background to keep the network up, our stress levels down and does a very good job at it.
So what, you say? Yes, I can set up my own Windows XP network, share printers and mount other drives. And if it does not work or goes down occasionally, I can fix it. So why Network Magic? The answer is simple: It’s only I who can do it. If the network or a printer goes down while I’m out of the house, I’m getting “The Call”. And while I’m the CTO, CSO and CIO of our household, I’m only a one-man show, so no delegating the call to someone else! If you ever tried to fix a network problem over the phone, you know what I’m talking about. With Network Magic, my family now knows where to click to help with diagnostics of the problem before making the call or even being able to fix it on their own.
And while I cannot prove it, I’m sure that some of the credit for the painless integration of my MacBook Pro into our Windows environment was due to the clean way Network Magic configured the initial Windows network setup.
Highly recommended!
