Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Striving to see the free world through smudged-up Windows...



Cathy's taking an enneagram class at a local monastery (no kidding). I happened to pick up the book they distribute with the class, idly reading the descriptions of the various personality types. I stopped at #3, The Achiever. I stopped because I knew it was me, but also because, as an Achiever, I knew that reading further would be a waste of my time.

Richard Nikoley is giving me gas about my remarks below about my new Macintosh G5. My dad is a big-time Windows geek, and he does this all the time, too. It's no big challenge to find fierce defenders of Windows--just as it's not hard to find fierce defenders of Communist countries. But the analogy holds: The traffic at the border is all one way. When people convert from Windows to the Mac, they never go back. No one converts from the Macintosh to Windows. No one. Never.

(I had fun today thinking about the Windows counterpart to the "Think Different" ad Campaign: "I can almost always find my files." "You hardly ever have to reinstall the operating system." "Downtime is donut time!" "Eh... Windows?!")

Windows users can be stuck, either with legacy investments or in vertical market cul-de-sacs. They might be true sackcloth and ashes masochists, loving the surprise torture Windows is likely to inflict upon them at any moment. They might be proud troubleshooters, blissfully unaware that they got so good at troubleshooting because Windows is so damn much trouble. What they are not, I think, is enneagram Achievers, focused entirely on the goal and frustrated-when-not-enraged at things that do not work.

Nothing in Windows or a Communist state works properly--but you have to live a while in the free world to understand that this is so. A very small example: On every Windows machine, when the caps-lock is down (without any feedback or indication), if you hold down the shift key, the characters you type will be lower-case. Why? Because an idiot programmer didn't stop to think what it would mean if someone typed shift when the caps key was already down. What would it mean? It would mean the typist had actually been trained in the art of typing and typed shift from habit, not to invert the pre-established selection. This is the way idiot programmers think, not real people. The Macintosh has always gotten this right, not by accident or just to be different but because the people who designed the Macintosh think about everything--and get it right.

It happens that I got to spend two hours tonight wrestling with my son's Windows XP machine because it spontaneously stopped communicating with our LAN. This is not an uncommon kind of occurrence, it's a built-in after-market cost to buying this crap. So is throwing it away periodically. I can't count the Windows machines we've thrown away in the seven plus years my Macintosh G3 has been plugging away. Until just lately, Cameron had a fully-functioning Macintosh CI that we bought before he was born--in 1991. The fact is, Apple is building a business around the peripherals left over from the predictably premature demise of WinTel machines, the Mac Mini product line.

Over the weekend I had to rebuild all of the BloodhoundRealty.com web sites. For most of the weekend, I ran with all these applications open all the time: Adobe Illustrator, QuarkXPress, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe GoLive, Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Acrobat, The Finder, Mail and Safari, of course, Fetch (an FTP client), and TextWrangler (a text editor). TextWrangler routinely had 240 PHP files open for editing all at the same time. This is a level of software power that cannot even be seen through Windows.

It goes on and on. There are seven complete software development paradigms built into Mac OS X, and all of them can be used--for free--from any machine that can run the OS. My G5 is not top-of-the-line, it's right at the top-of-the-middle. It cost me $1,799, with no added hardware costs. Yet it is a full development system--with free development software--where the equivalent Windows development system might cost $3000-$4000--before software. Worse, a Windows developer has to own a huge number of other Windows configurations, because absolutely nothing is standardized. Everything is built with the quality and thoughtful attention to detail of a Yugo. And, it goes without saying, the software produced by Mac developers will be worlds better than Windows products, in no small part because the Mac OS is built to promote excellent software design practices, where Windows is built to replicate Yugos.

(I just spelled-checked this entry, as I write it in TextWrangler, using the spelling checker that is built into the OS and is made available to every application--with no extra overhead and with a consistent look-and-feel.)

It happens that the worst shrink-wrapped software you'll find in the Mac world is published by Microsoft. And yet the Mac versions of MS products are invariably much more logically designed than the files-compatible Windows counterparts. As a development environment, Windows starts with crap and stays with crap.

Half a lifetime ago, Apple sued Microsoft for ripping off the look-and-feel of the Macintosh when it produced--none dare say created--Windows. My complaint has always been that they copied the Mac so badly. Windows is a Soviet Cargo Cult of an operating system. It's looks vaguely like Mac OS from a distance, but no true Mac-hack is fooled. It is the subtle instances of extremely deep thoughtfulness that Microsoft missed entirely. The WinTel mantra has always been that Windows machines are cheap. This was never true--not in training costs, after-market costs or useful life. But it is completely true in look-and-feel, fit-and-finish and usability.

Windows is cheap shit. Cheaply crafted by cheap minds, cheaping it out for buyers who have no idea what they're missing. It's a design ethic devised by Bill Gates himself, a cheap little man who grubs for nickels while pissing away dollars--a perfect fit for an economy that works the same insane way. Everything about the Windows world is a reflection of Gates and his cheap little soul.

And in the same way, everything about the Macintosh, and about all Apple products, and about Apple as a corporate culture, is a reflection of Steve Jobs. Whatever the man's character defects, he is an Achiever, and he does not ever do anything half-assed. My Macintosh G5 is a tour de force in every possible respect, but , like the iPod Nano, you don't even have to power it up to understand the genius of the design: Apple products are works of art as such.

This is what I said last week: "There is no one who has worked any time at all with Mac hardware and software who would ever voluntarily go back to the Windows gulag." There is no rational way to challenge that statement. The one argument the Windows cadre has left is market-share. But, of course, the Red Chinese have market share, too. And in both instances, the traffic at the border is all one way...
posted by Greg Swann at 11:02 PM

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