| Friday, January 25, 2002 |
10:45 - ZDNet Columnist Checks Out the Dark Side
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2842290,00.html
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In an article titled "How living on a Mac nearly made me change careers", ZDNet executive editor David Coursey talks about his first few days on a self-imposed walk on the wild side: he's using Macs for a month.
Why is it that whenever I read articles like this, my heart races like I'm listening to an awards ceremony for something I think I might have a chance at winning? Come on, I tell myself. It's not like I can affect the outcome one way or the other, not even if I paint my body Bondi Blue and dance around in the bleachers somewhere where it's twelve degrees and sleeting.
But more than that-- why do I take these things so personally? Why am I so desperate to hear that this guy has had a good experience? Why has it become so internalized to my sense of well-being?
I can't answer that. Not yet, anyway.
It's like having a friend from New York come and visit California-- and I want the weather to be clear and spectacular. I want to show him the expensive restaurants, the rich part of town, the gorgeous views; I want to avoid the slums and the places where he might get mugged. Anything to avoid him getting a bad first impression.
Well, good news: Coursey has already ventured into the slums; he's even been mugged a couple of times. But he's still happy with the place, and he's still raring for more.
The article focuses primarily on how Mac OS X, with its suite of best-of-breed iSoftware, beats the pants off of what Windows XP brings to the table. He's willing to put up with a little bit of roughness in interoperability and software availability in order to use iMovie and Final Cut Pro on his TiBook. But that's actually an interesting point, something I'd like to address: It's not only just now that the Mac has suddenly BECOME better than Windows. At just about any point in computing history, Mac users will have said the same thing.
To take just one small example: You know how Windows 2000 finally got it so you could change TCP/IP and networking settings without having to reboot the machine afterwards (well, unless you changed the machine name, in which case you would have to)? Well, the Mac had been able to do that since about 1994.
And another seemingly minor one: In Windows XP, you can finally associate an individual file with a particular application, so that it will open in that app when you double-click on it, rather than simply opening in whatever app is globally set to handle all files of that type (with the file type still derived from the extension tacked onto the end of the filename-- an ugly, ugly hack). But ever since Day 1, the Mac has had an almost indescribably more elegant solution: each file has Type and Creator codes that are set by the application that creates it. That way, the file will always open in the application it was created in if you double-click on it; but every application advertises a list of file types that it will open. So if you have a JPEG created by Photoshop, double-click it and it opens in Photoshop-- but drag it over Preview, GraphicConverter, SimpleImage, or any other app that claims to be able to open JPEG files, and it will darken to show that it will launch and open it if you release the button. With Windows, you have to just try it and hope.
(Meanwhile, what has Windows done first? They've been first to the table with a number of things. Windows 95's themes allowed for custom icons and pointers and full-size desktop images, something the Mac couldn't do at the time. True to Microsoft's form, this is a BIG and FLASHY and COLORFUL feature that looks major, but technologically it's just a hack. Swapping bitmaps in and out of memory? Big whoop. But take a couple of comparative screenshots, and it looks like a much bigger feature than, say, the Mac's ability to change TCP/IP settings on the fly or to apply custom icons to any and all of your files.
And Microsoft is still at it, loading up Pocket PC devices with colorful, advanced-looking, gee-whiz do-everything features purely because it photographs better than the more austere but much more flexible and useful Palm platform. And Windows XP looks more advanced than its predecessors because the Start button is now a throbbing green gangrenous pustulent blob for you to prod, and every single form element and button and control glows or something when you mouse-over it. If you can't do genuinely useful innovation, just do stuff that looks hard but isn't, and people will drool and start flinging money. Some things never change.)
So the iSoftware suite is just Apple's latest angle on why the Mac is the superior platform. Mac-heads will be able to pick any point in the past twenty years and explain why the Mac was better than Windows at that time; and that's the historical context that Coursey is missing from his little experiment. Not that I'm complaining, mind you-- he seems to be enjoying himself regardless, and that's fine. It just seems that this could be that much more of a slam-dunk.
And I guess the answer to why I take all this so seriously and personally is this: I want genius to be recognized. This old world can be so discouraging, what with sports stars bringing home quarter-billion-dollar contracts and physicists being forced to live on Ramen. I came to the Mac camp because it's a fountain of genius, and unlike the academic community where genius is a ticket to a lifetime of grad student work and teaching and patches on the sleeves, at least here it has the potential to change the average person's world... if only we aren't so prejudiced as to shut the door on it. I just want to make sure that door stays the hell open. I've seen enough genius die in the gutter.
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