Jack Stoner
From:
Kansas City, MO
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Posted 5 Aug 2010 3:04 am |
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This was the lead commentary in this week's Win 7 newsletter. Obviously it's a newsletter on Microsoft Windows 7 but the author writes for many publications.
Editor's Corner
The Ugly Duckling: PC Guy Gets a Makeover
Remember those Apple commercials, the ones that pitted the oh-so-cool Mac Guy against the fumbling, bumbling PC Guy, with Mac always coming out ahead? Who could forget them? For a while, they seemed to be on every time I turned on the TV. Now they've faded away, along with Vista; finally Apple's ads are focusing on their own products, as they should, and Mac Guy isn't showing his face much recently.
An interesting bit of statistical trivia was reported this week by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet: According to NetMarketShare (which gathers and publishes the numbers on usage share for Internet technologies), Windows 7 is rapidly gaining market share, and Mac OS X usage has dropped for the fourth month in a row.
http://www.win7news.net/IWRY1T/100805-Windows7-Up
Perhaps the Mac Guy is losing his charm - something that seems to happen a lot to those adolescent superstars whose popularity is based primarily on their good looks and clever pickup lines. As they age, the arrogance and acerbic wit that seemed so attractive before get old, too. And while their less popular classmates mature and grow into something more, the young charmsters tend to stay the same and wonder why it's not working for them anymore.
Applying this analogy to the software itself, take a look at Snow Leopard, the latest iteration of OS X. Even Mac fans have acknowledged that there just wasn't much new and exciting there, and those features that were new were things that good old Windows has had for a long time: 64 bit support, better Exchange support, the ability to restore deleted files from the Trash, automatic updates for printer drivers, the ability to have the date appear alongside the time in the menu bar ... all of these are features touted as "new" on the Apple web site. It also includes a built-in anti-malware program, although Apple doesn't advertise that much since they want to perpetuate the myth that Macs don't get malware.
Then there's the PC Guy. He was well-meaning, but awkward. He was comfortable in the business world, but didn't have a lot of social skills. He really, really wanted to please you, but he often didn't go about it in the right way. When you said you were nervous about being attacked and asked for more protection, he surrounded you with armed guards and wouldn't let you leave the house (UAC). When you wished he was a little more "fancy," he loaded himself down with so much "bling" that he could barely move (Aero on low powered systems). He was like the quintessential "nice guy," whom all the girls felt sorry for but didn't want to be seen with out on a date. When I was young and stupid, I was always falling for the Mac types - and it always ended up badly.
But something happened to our PC Guy when Windows 7 came along. Maybe suffering the slings and arrows that came at him in response to Vista was a little like serving a couple of years in the military. It whipped him into shape. He came out stronger and more confident in himself. He was slimmed down (fewer built-in applications) and buffed up (better memory management and processor utilization). He got a good haircut and ditched the glasses for contacts (more sophisticated interface). He's lost his earlier flakiness; now he's more stable and more reliable. In short, he grew up.
While P.C was off at boot camp and then fighting in the war, Mac was sitting around listening to iTunes and playing in his Garage Band. While P.C. has been loading up on vitamins and pumping iron and building up his immune system, Mac - who hadn't been sick a day in his life and wasn't prepared for illness to strike - suddenly discovered that he, too, could get a virus. His cute face is starting to look a little haggard and a few gray streaks are appearing in his tousled hair. Oh, he can still fool some of the ladies some of the time, but after going through a few rocky relationships with attractive bad boys who conned them out of all their money, most women are now looking for someone who's a little less, well, expensive.
Sadly, Mac can't even run back home to live in his parents' basement when his latest girlfriend boots him out. It's not that his dad doesn't love him anymore, but the old man has moved on and started a new family. Now most of dad's attention goes to the younger kids: iPhone and iPad. Poor old Mac never even gets his picture in the family photo album anymore; it's all about his siblings now. And those golden children may get their "come-uppance" at an earlier age, since there are some new kids on the block (Android and Windows Phone 7) set to challenge their positions at the top of the class.
At this point, some of you might be wondering: What about Lin, the Linux Guy? He's undisputedly brilliant - his scores on the Stanford-Binet are off the scale - but nobody can understand anything he says because it's all in Geek Speak. And, like all mad geniuses, he's hard to live with. It's not that he's lazy like Mac; it's just that he's so busy being a genius and so focused on perfecting his algorithms and recompiling his kernel that he doesn't pay a lot of attention to your needs. If you marry him, you'll end up fending for yourself a lot; he writes his own drivers and thinks you should be perfectly capable of doing the same. Despite his intelligence, he's not a good provider like P.C. because he just doesn't care about money - he's happy to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for free.
When you look at it that way, it is any wonder that smart girls today do Windows?
Today's editorial was meant to be entertaining, and I hope it served as a fun break from all the serious news. But we do want you to tell us what you think. Why is Mac now steadily losing market share when it had been gaining before? Is it because Steve Jobs, et al, have abandoned OS X in favor of their new darling, iOS? Is it because Windows 7 is just the "better man?" Did Apple hurt its reputation in the desktop market with the increasingly mean-spirited "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials? Is this only a temporary reversal, with a Mac comeback on the horizon? Will all desktop operating systems soon be obsolete, given the rise of mobile devices and the encroaching approach of The Cloud? We invite you to discuss this topic in our forum at
http://www.win7news.net/IWRY1T/100805-Forum-Discussion |
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