Thursday, September 20, 2007

I Just Want it to Work!

The rising chorus of folks citing their already done or impending switch to Macs (Mark Cuban recently did it and Jay Cross is about to do it) as well as my purchase of a MacBook Pro to replace my son's aging PC makes me wonder if it's the ''rising tide lifts all ships'' phenomena or something more powerful?

I'm about to mail back my to mail back my Thinkpad to have it's motherboard replaced. It's the second time for this particular computer (yes..two times within 15 months of purchase!) and it's the third time I've had to do this with a pc purchased from IBM/Lenovo. Er, did I mention I've only bought 3 pcs from IBM/Lenovo? Now, I know this is a quality issue and, by definition, i can't yet speak to the quality of the Mac yet. But everyone I mention this to suggests 'Macs just work.' Beyond the quality issue of the hardware, Windows OS is just driving me nuts with it's slow boot up time (even on a 'newly minted' pc).

Sorry to 'amble' here. I don't necessarily believe the decision about whether to use a PC or Mac is the crux of the issue. 'I just want it to work' and get me to my content, which increasingly I'm finding ways to manage and maintain on the web. I think Jay hits the nail on the head when he writes, ''today the action has moved from the desktop to the web. web connectivity may flake out, but it’s not going to disappear forever as did my PC’s hard drive. relationships (the web) trump nodes (the desktop).'' Again, this really resonates with me as I work to move 'more' and 'more' of my content onto hardware/platform (read pc/windows or mac) agnostic.

One final thing to make the point. I've recently been on two IBM internal calls (er..yeah, I work in a PC-centric place...) where people I respect (a noted and influential community / collaboration blogger and a distinguished engineer) both mentioned that they were working from their Macs.

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