I have been using Windows now for nearly 20 years and PCs for over 25. This October my Dell refused to come out of standby mode, which forces me to reboot every single time I leave the building with my laptop. After all those years of blue screens, hanging on large PowerPoint presentations, hanging on network connections, waiting for the laptop to come up when I press the On button, I finally gave up. I ordered a Mac.
I would say half of Alfresco now have Macs. Matt Asay must own Apple shares as he has been the key sales person for all those Macs. The sales organization in the US all have Macs and a lot of the developers are now transitioning to Macs. A lot of our customers are also using Macs. When you look at the pain of transitioning to Vista versus just leaving Microsoft behind, it becomes a much easier decision.
I must say the transition hasn't been too difficult. The first thing you notice is how much faster the Mac is for doing all sorts of things. Coming out of sleep is so instantaneous that it seems like it was on all the time. The user interface takes a little getting use to, but it doesn't look as bad as moving to Vista. Transferring files is much faster. Upgrading to Firefox 3 beta at the same time has made web browsing much faster than before. I am using ChronoSync for synchronizing backups and Vienna for RSS reader. I haven't decided yet between MS Office for Mac, Apple’s iWork or NeoOffice (Open Office). This is my first blog using my new Mac.
During the last 25 odd years, I used Macs and Unix systems in addition to my PCs and laptops. I have been using Unix for over 30 years now and still can use Vi and write amazing shell scripts. When we started Documentum, my desktop machine was a Mac for writing and formatting the business plan and I owned a Mac SE for home use. I have also used Unix systems, mainly Suns and HP, side by side with my PCs and Macs for a very long time. Before that, we all multitasked on Vaxes and even PDP-11s while I was at Berkeley. I still find that I can do more with c-shell, sed, grep and awk for managing and finding information than I ever could with a drag / drop interface. It's nice to get some of that back.
I actually heard the CIO of a major US government agency say they were considering moving to Macs or Linux. The lock-in of new file formats and features in Office Vista were a concern for them. Between that and the user interface and file format issues of the new Microsoft systems, won’t a lot of people be looking back at the last couple of decades and saying "Why?"
