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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Monday, July 22, 2002
17:43 - The cult thing again
http://draginol.stardock.com/Articles/AreMacuserspartofacult.html

(top) link
Brad Wardell has an article in which he explores the ever-so-original observation that Mac users fit every definition of "cult".

He uses OS/2 as the historical parallel for what course the Mac will inevitably follow. I've mostly tended to use Amiga in my own explorations of this very selfsame topic, but the meat of the matter is here:

The phases these OS cults go through from an outsider’s point of view is something like this:
  1. Infuriating.  These people just won’t accept that they’ve fallen behind. There’s enough of them out there that you have to deal with them.  This is where I’d say where the Mac users as MacWorld fit in.
  2. Amusing. This is where OS/2 users were shortly after Windows 2000 shipped (2 years ago). There aren’t that many of them and they continue to hold out that things may change or that the new features found in other operating systems don’t matter.
  3. Creepy. This is where the OS/2 users are today. Now you just feel sorry for them. These are people who have essentially wasted years of their lives holding on to a futile dream that is completely pointless in the first place (it’s just software! Not the cure for cancer!). Reading their posts just becomes unnerving because you get an idea that mental illness must not be lurking too far away.

Now, see, I'm not even going to try to argue against this sort of thing, because it's impossible to do so without playing perfectly into the profile of the cultist. If I refute the accusation that the Mac is irrelevant, then I'm in phase 1. If I do comparative analysis and point out what things on the Mac are superior to the same sorts of features on Windows, that the Mac is taking strides for usability where Microsoft is working only to solidify the status quo-- then I'm in phase 2. If I say "You're all fools!" and blather about engineering elegance and idealism of design and wonder how any conscious geek can fail to have his pulse quickened by the technological beauty underlying the Mac, then I'm in phase 3.

The trouble is that there are two ways to argue about this sort of stuff. One school of thought is to disallow evidence like societal momentum, the path of least resistance, the irresistible flow of AOL CDs and corporate Windows standardizations, and to compare the Mac and the PC upon their own merits. And the other perspective is to treat those things as all there is-- momentum is everything. There's no fighting it, and to try is not just silly, but lunatic.

It's so very easy to do it the latter way. There are so many ways to write off Apple. Where does one begin? The market share figure is a common favorite. How can anyone be anything but deluded to choose a platform that only 3% of the world uses? Then there's the slower CPUs, the lack of software, the cultish fans-- each of these claims has mitigating factors and is not baldly true, but they're not deniable either. By this time, the impression of a life with a Mac is one of constant coping, settling, futzing, compromising, tweaking, cajoling, and paying more and more for the privilege to do so.

Momentum is so powerful a force that it's impossible to argue with and not appear a fool. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft, so goes the quip-- and it's true. Windows may get in your way, but it'll get the job done. It's the default; it's the standard; it's what people assume you have. Why consciously invite more stress into your life by using what (in today's world) is an emulation of Windows?

I said I wasn't going to try to argue against this viewpoint, because those who make it are sure the argument is over. It would bring no joy to either side to continue it further. I'm not going to change anybody's mind who has written-off the Mac, and to such a person I would appear to be a zealot and a cultist anyway. So it's not worth the effort. It would just bolster the thesis.

But I just wonder... at what point did Apple stop innovating? At what point did it become clear that Mac OS X was as stillborn a project as OS/2 was in the year 2000? At what point did all those UNIX-loving geeks, who had been Linux fanboys for most of their adult lives until rapturously discovering OS X, realize that buying those TiBooks was actually a bad move and a waste of time and money? At what point did Apple run out of cash, its last competitive acquisition in the long-distant past, and sell itself to some German investor group who planned to sell off the patents and license the logo to make a Web portal service? At what point did Apple become Amiga?

At what point does an engineer who has discovered a fresh, vibrant, richly funded, innovative, idealistic, user-committed, and cutting-edge computing environment full of unique opportunities for creating new abilities and bringing them concretely to market... become a pitiful, propeller-beanie-wearing, muttering greybeard locked in a basement, fiddling with a Rubik's Cube and cackling through his scraggly teeth about the glorious return to power that some day surely must be?

Here's a hint: in the observer's mind.

It's a matter of perspective; that's all it is. It's all about what you want to see. If you don your bifocals and peer at Apple with words like "cult" and "MacWorld" and "Amiga" floating through your head, you're going to see a company that by all rights should be long dead already-- why it isn't is anybody's frickin' guess.

But Apple has lasted a whole lot longer than Amiga and OS/2. Mac OS X is still being developed, faster than ever, with more major new features in a shorter period of time than anywhere else in operating system history. (Really.) Apple has more money than it's had in years. They're opening more retail stores, moving into new buildings, rolling out new products. They're running prime-time TV ads. They're getting unsolicited celebrity endorsements (from people like Shaquille O'Neill). They're buying up the entire digital-film industry left and right. They have their potential problems, ranging from CPU uncertainty to application availability to user price-gouging concerns, but these are pretty goddamned small nits to pick if you come right down to it. If, that is, your perspective is one that hasn't written Apple out of the picture before consideration began.

Apple is an extremely easy target, if one is interested in attacking it. The very same Apple we know today is an innovative market leader in some eyes, and a ridiculous pariah in others. There's not a single difference between the Apple of Earth and the Apple of Bizarro World except the contact lens of the beholder, and that will not cease to be the case until Apple does go out of business.

When that happens, we'll talk.

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© Brian Tiemann