Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Monday, July 1, 2002
13:28 - The Opposite of the Dell Dude http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/Editorials/Archives/carsona_dell.shtml	(top)
Andrew E. Carson at AppleLust shares the letter that he'd written to Apple in hopes of being chosen for the "Switchers" campaign. He's right-- the experience he describes is too personal, too detailed and technical for Apple to have been able to turn it into a 15-second sound bite. But it's the kind of letter that a lot of us would have written; and if you can, try to picture what the ad campaign would have looked like if it were letters like these that were chosen. Would the Switchers have come across as brainwashed and deluded simpletons? Or would they have appeared as obsessive tree-hugging theorists, babbling endlessly about things like "intuitiveness" and "design" and "style" and "happiness"? Convincing die-hard Windows people of the Mac's viability is a long process with lots of steps. First you have to prove that you're someone worth listening to-- your first hurdle is to demonstrate that using a Mac does not instantly imply that you're a crazed zealot that you'd better hurry away from, or a computer-illiterate AOL zombie who thinks that the guy who says "You've got mail!" has a "really cool voice". And only then do you get to move on to the next step: convincing the person that Windows has problems that shouldn't be there. But OS X was immediately different. If I were to take my psychology (minus the bouts of irrationality and neuroticism) and impress it on a motherboard, the result would be something startlingly similar to OS X. And I told Apple so. Okay, chix aside for a moment. How did you get inside my head? I mean, that's the only explanation. When I use OS X, it's like an extension of my own mind. When I save a file, it is stored exactly where I think it should be stored. No more saving a file and then having to search my entire HD to find it again -- only to discover it in a folder that a) I have never seen before, and b) whose name makes zero sense. But astonishingly, most Windows users not only see this kind of ludicrous workflow as "the way things are", but become downright hostile to the notion that there's a better way. It still surprises the hell out of me that this is the case, but this-- getting the person to accept that Microsoft's way of making you do things is broken-- is the most difficult of all the steps. Afterwards comes the demonstration that Apple's solutions are superior. This is the easy part. Once you have someone who is willing to look, willing to give your side-by-side demos a fair shake, then the game is yours. If he's open-minded, you've already won, because the software is so easily demonstrated to be superior. Just show them how iTunes can keep track of files no matter where you move them on your system, because of unique file IDs, which WinAmp can't do because Windows doesn't have a good enough filesystem; or show them how to rip an entire CD with one click, and burn a CD with another, which makes Windows Media Player look like a DOS utility by comparison. It's as compelling as a demonstration of gravity. It's open-and-shut. The big hurdles are in getting those minds open in the first place. And that's why the Dvorak-esque reaction to the Switch ads has been so hard for me to take. Thousands and thousands of people are being forced to think about their computers not being the only solution out there; they're being challenged with the notion that there's a better choice available than the one they made. And so out come their antibodies, their defenses against having to take that challenge seriously. To a man, they've never used a Mac, or at least not recently. They've never played with OS X, with iTunes or iPhoto or iMovie. They've never used Watson or experimented with column view or made custom icons. They don't have to. They know they're right. They know Windows is better. They know Macs suck. Almost nobody who's demonstrably open-minded and willing to give Apple a fair shot is anti-Apple. That really ought to tell us something. Microsoft certainly can't boast that. If the Switch campaign keeps up the pressure, those antibodies will have to run out eventually.