Women in Technology

Article:		Jaguar: Time to Stop Pussyfooting Around
Subject:		What is causing the "Switch"... But Why?
Date:		2002-08-04 01:22:48
From:		derrick
Response to: What is causing the "Switch"...
My personal observations are consistent with your comment. Most of the people I know who have moved to Mac OS X lately have come from Windows, not earlier versions of Mac OS. So what's going on here? As you can tell from these talkbacks many traditional Mac users are really quite upset over the whole Mac OS X thing, yet new users from Windows seem to be having a pretty good time.

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• What is causing the "Switch"... But Why?
  2002-08-04 17:23:54  dogzilla [View]
  
  
  Derrick - I think you're misinterpreting the tone of the responses. After reading through all the posts here, I certainly don't feel that the Mac users here are "really quite upset"...rather many of them aren't convinced that the benefits of OSX outweigh the disadvantages of upgrading. Those disadvantages can be something as serious as the expense associated with updating (and even $130 forJaguar, $60 for RAM, and the time and hassle of installing both *are* quite significant for many, never mind the added cost of updating Photoshop, Illustrator, MMX Studio, BBEdit, etc. etc.)
  
  This doesn't mean that they're upset - it just means that OSX isn't that important. And many of these people take the (appropriate) view that there's no need to spend upgrade money if your current tool works very well and there's no personally perceivable advantage to the replacement.
  
  Personally, I use OSX full-time on my 300mhz G3 WallStreet. It's plenty fast for me - I've never inderstood the ppl who complain about speed. But OSX makes sense for me, since I'm a web developer. I have MS Office to do my business work, and Studio MX, Photoshop, and BBEdit for development. My big advantage is that I can replicate my production environment (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.) on my laptop and not be tied to the office anymore.
  
  However, for most other people, the advantages are less clear. And to argue that it is our duty to upgrade to support Apple...well, to say I disagree is to put it mildly. If Apple can't deliver what the market wants at a reasonable price, then it will (and should) fail. Their failure will open a niche and a smart competitor will step in and deliver a better product. Apple is an inhteresting company, but it's just a company like any other, and their products are tools like any others. Being religiious about your tools is to put your focus and effort in the worng place: it's what you create with the tools that's important, not the tool sitself.