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Newsflash: Mac Users Love Apple, Hate Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "An article on wired.com talks about how Mac users helped Apple through the dark years of the 90s." It goes on to discuss how a psychologist was hired to figure out how to woo Mac users away from Apple, with some (to him) surprising results.
The technical name is cognitive dissonance.
If you are going to be blindly loyal, atleast have the decency to KNOW what you are talking about as opposed to 'it just works' and 'its prettier than PC'
.Mac thing. They're still getting what they paid for--a computer that just works, no questions asked.
That's exactly why I am loyal. I got a product that is useful to me as well as aesthetically pleasing. Who cares how or why it works as long as it does.
Coming from a PC background I can understand having to know how to partition or reformat; or move NICs to PCI slots without shared IRQs; or diagnose DLL and registry problems introduced by 3rd party software products. I did learn a lot, but that's a lot of lost productivity.
Some people like to use computers without having to be amateur computer scientists. That's why people love Macs. That's why people still buy them, despite the good rodgering some people think we got from them over the whole 10.2 and
Actually, it does, because he knows what he's talking about.
If you want a MacOS based computer, you buy from Apple. End of story. If you want a Windows based computer, you buy from a plethora (tell me, do you know what a ple-thor-a is? No, El Guappo...) of dealers; one shafts you, you go to another.
To extend to the car analogy, if you want a *high end car* you might go to BMW, you might go to somebody else. If you want a *work pickup* you might go Ford, you might go Chevrolet.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What so many programmers don't realize is that to have a successful software company, marketing is the most important factor.
For every dollar you spend on engineering, you should spend at least 2 on marketing. I've heard up to 5 mentioned. It depends on the market, of course.
It's funny to think of all the clueless programmers who constantly whine about "stupid" marketing people on Slashdot, while they in fact owe their jobs to them!
I remember those dark days. Sporting goods manufacturer AMF bought Harley-Davidson in the early 1980s and set about "saving money". The bikes produced at that time were crap. It got so bad that the employees or Harley-Davidson bought the company back from AMF. Harley-Davidson was within a heartbeat of dying.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
First, I admit, I use Windows XP on my main PC. It is a Dell laptop, and XP supports every function of it terribly well. Linux does just as well on most counts, but with a laptop I don't want to concede any features just to run my OS of choice.
That aside, I don't think cognitive dissonance plays into it all that much, at least not in the case of most Linux users I know. The ferociously loyal can be overzealous at times, but there is good cause to be. Just comparing the kernels of Windows 2K/XP and Linux, it is obvious to me that Linux is superior. The TCP/IP stack in Linux is very fast, very stable, and very flexible, though Windows has gotten much, much better of late. The VM system in Linux I find to work much better now as well. It really bugs me that Windows is swapping applications to disk when I still have 300 MB of physical memory left.
As the popularity of Linux has surged I have seen it improve that much more in recent months. I remember when it seemed like 2.4 would never come, now we are discussing what 2.6 is going to offer? =)
Regardless of the technical merits of Linux, there is a lot to be said about an OS and software that is "by the people, for the people". Stallman et. al. make a lot of noise to this end, and piss off a lot of people in the process, but we really have something to be proud of. This little kernel has found its way into all sorts of niche markets, from the lowliest embedded boards to big iron like the S/390, NUMA supercomputers, and more. There is a lot to be said for a piece of software so versatile.
As for making concessions to run Linux, if it means that much to someone to not be dependent on MS, more power to em! I get sick of Microsoft's business practices, subpar software, absurd licensing schemes, dancing monkey execs, and more too. If their products are the best fit for the application, though, there isn't much more to debate.
- User Interface: Invented by amiga
- 3.25" floppy: Invented by amiga
- Multitasking: Invented by amiga
- Multiprocessing: Invented by amiga
I've got nothing against Amiga. But I do take umbrage with people who claim Amiga invented things they didn't.Sorry. Xerox invented the GUI. Apple AND Atari had GUI systems in the market before Amiga did.
Wrong again. Invented by Sony.
I thought Unix had been doing that for decades before teh Amiga showed up.
See previous point.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The idea is that a sort of tension or "pressure" builds up -- the cognitive dissonance -- until at some point you have a moment of head-slapping realization and revise your beliefs to match up with what you're seeing or doing.
I can see where it bears on brand loyalty in the face of adversity, but the term isn't an attempt to explain how the loyalty got there to start with.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
But on the same hand, if you want a car with Northstar ( i think thats the name) you go with cadillac.
If you want a car based on bmw engine, you dont get a mercedes or a VW. you get a BMW.
so like the poster above you said, "BMW has a monopoly in the BMW market. GM has a monopoly in the GM market. And yet, they both sell cars and compete against each other.
I can assure you Dell has 0% market penetration in the cow-logo computer market. Therefore, gateway has their own monopoly on cow logo computers.
if you want a Mac, you get an apple computer.
simple as that.
they all have a monopoly on the products they sell, if you define it close enough
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
You do know the code name for Windows 2000 was Windows NT 5.0 right?
.1 upgrade, but guess what? The word XP and the eye candy fools most of them.
It's more interesting that Windows XP is called NT 5.1 internally. Windows users get to pay for an
"As a creative workstation, Windows makes a shitty typewriter."
It's probably true that particular applications are more stable or have more options on one platform or another, but this blanket statement is complete crap. I work for a major game publisher and all of our design work is done on a mix of both PC's and Macs running the same software (Photoshop, Fontographer, Homesite, Dreamweaver, etc.). They talk to each other fine, the files all transfer back and forth fine, and nobody ever complains about something not being available for whatever platform they've chosen to use.
It's a myth that designers always choose Macs. The reason our work is done on a mix of machines is that about half of our designers have *chosen* to use PC's. We give our designers the tools they ask for; we don't force them to use one platform or other (many firms automatically assume designers want Macs, which is why Apple has a stranglehold on that market - the truth is, many designers *don't*). Designers are often just as interested in customizable hardware as techno geeks are, as it directly affects the speed and quality of their work.
Modern Macs are a great product and the marketing is obviously at least fairly successful (at least as far as creating a "boutique" brand). But these blanket statements about Windows being crap for design work are crap themselves. There's nothing inherent about Windows that makes it less useful for design work, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms. In the end, like anything else, it comes down to the specific work you need to do and your own personal preferences. It's certainly not true that all designers prefer the Mac platform.
It turns out that the chemistry research lab I work at uses Macs exclusively and gets new boxes rather frequently. I was hooked on OSX this summer and recently purchased an iBook (that I use more than any of my other plethora of computers).
The Management Team did a LBO (Leverged Buyout) in 1981.
y 19 80.asp?bmLocale=en_US
http://www.harley-davidson.com/CO/HIS/en/histor
Unfortunately the peculiar design of the Amiga, coupled with its lack of processing power (both of which being what made it inexpensive) were a problem because people were forced to customize their software to a particular operating system and machine combination (remember, this is in the early days) to get the most out of the machine, and this led to incompatibility with future releases. Since it didn't have memory protection, this generally meant that when your OS version incremented significantly, things started stepping on each other and exploding left and right.
The Amiga had a fantastic multitasking OS with all the usual features at the time (though again everyone else was exploring memory protection at the time... well okay, not Apple either) which fit on one floppy plus 512k of ROM. They also had the best autoconfiguration around, bar none, because all drivers were user-mode and you could put the drivers in ROM on an expansion card. When the card was initialized, the driver was executed at which point it was mapped onto or copied into memory. Of course this led to needing to upgrade driver ROMs on various expansion cards but no plan is perfect, I guess. In the modern age of flash ROM this would be a non-issue.
Anyway if Amiga invented anything it would be the mindless Zealot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Forever suck?
Mac OS has not *always* been inferior.
Until Windows 95, you really had no choice except a Mac to do desktop graphics and printing.
Macs had high color
Macs had multiple monitors
Macs had TrueType and PostScript
Macs had color management
So it took until 1995 for a PC to catch up for that (you use Photoshop in Classic Mode, so there's your history for you). So if it was the year 1994 and you had to do graphics, there was no alternative except a Mac... Oh, sure, you could use Windows NT 3.51, actually, but... people didn't.
So until 1995, realistically, Adobe had to survive on Macs and Windows NT. You couldn't have your Photoshop on your Windows 2000 computer without Adobe thriving on the Mac. So say thank you to all the Mac users who kept Adobe alive long enough for Windows to catch up enough for a Windows port to be possible.
What else... Mac OS released without any truly innovative ideas? At the time a mouse, a windowing system, and a desktop metaphor was pretty innovative. Photoshop, released in 1990, couldn't have existed on the PC since Windows 3.0 wasn't available until 1990! The first graphical Mac was unleashed in 1984... of course Windows 1.0 was available the very next year in 1985...
So what else does that show us? Word 1.0 for DOS was available 1983, Word 1.0 for Mac was available in 1985, and it wasn't until 1993 that Word 6.0 (for Windows) was released. Word for DOS had or Word for Mac had only been available up to that point.
Then there's Quicktime...
Okay, so all that is OLD hat. Microsoft (eventually) will catch up, history is showing us.
So what did Apple do new with OS X that is innovative, you ask?
How about security? Of course security is a nasty beast to define, because it is only visible through the lack of exploits. No exploits, no news. Do I think OS X is more secure than Windows XP? Yes. Why? Partially because the core OS is open source, partially because the core OS is heavily related to BSD, and partially because the core OS has been in use since 1989 with the release of the first NeXT workstations. Windows, while similarly old, is not similarly aged, with IE exploits, IIS exploits, ActiveX exploits, and other exploits. OS X gets around IE exploits by not integrating IE, though there is an HTML library available. It gets around IIS exploits by relying on tried and true OSS servers such as Apache, BSD-telnetd, BSD-sshd, and BSD-ftpd. It gets around ActiveX exploits by relying on a scripting technology, AppleScript, that has been used successfully since 1993 to automate prepress, print, publishing, and graphics businesses. Oh, and they don't integrate AppleScript into the html rendering engine, though there is a third party AppleScript plugin available. Yes, there have been AppleScript viruses, just like there are VisualBasic viruses...
But Apple doesn't suffer nearly as badly because Mail doesn't auto execute AppleScript viruses which aren't embedded into the HTML that s rendered by the preview pane.
Alright, so this is sorta cheap, innovation by not being as *bad* as Microsoft.
There's legitimate innovation as well.
OS X 10.0 had it's compositing engine. Vector based, PDF based, output independent. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a continuation of NeXT's PostScript based DisplayPS. Windows already has something called GDI+ and WMF, but I do not believe they are currently used.
OS X 10.0 introduced iDVD, to match the earlier release of iTunes and iMovie, allowing the sufficiently well of Mac owner the capabillity to make DVDs within 20 minutes, though burning them probably took an hour or so.
OS X 10.2 upped the stakes with *hardware* accelerated display technology. Big deal, you say? It's 3d hardware accelerated. Microsoft is hoping to catch up next year with Longhorn.
OS X 10.2 also added new networking technology that doesn't yet exist on Windows, though UPnP is close. Rendevous, otherwise known as ZeroConf, is a peer to peer network discovery protocol.
OS X 10.2 added bluetooth support, which Windows XP adds later this year.
OS X 10.2 added full tablet and handwriting recognition, which doesn't appear until . Also, you will probably need a new PC, where OS X only requires a tablet, such as a Wacom tablet, instead of a new computer.
Anyway, it's really only your loss, not mine, if Apple OS X doesn't somehow suit your needs, and likewise your gain if Windows XP can suit yours (but not mine)
GPL Deconstructed
The GUI forces you to use click-to-focus and an auto-raise window behaviour even if you've not used machines with that behaviour for all of your 17 years in the computing industry. I'm told that even MS Windows allows you to change that behaviour, if you want.
I tried to use auto focus once. I just found it so horrible, I couldn't just move my mouse anywhere without thinking. it the kind of feature that you use, then realise why Linux will never be good for the desktop. I think that you will find very very few users who acctualy prefer it, given they had not gotten used to either.
And that single menu thing sucks too. For example, right now I am using Mozilla on a second monitor attached to my Powerbook. If I want to access the menu for mozilla, I have to move the mouse over to the other screen to do so. How brain dead is that? If I had 20 monitors attached to it (if it could handle that, which I don't think any Apple can), then it would be impossible - not a bright policy for the future.
I see your point. But they did this for usability reasons, of course, they obviously didn't take into a count people using the secondary monitor as the main one, maybe a few options would be better (which monitor the bar will apear on), but I don't think they need to consider the future, I doubt people will be hooking up 20 monitores to their computer. Less if anything.
Then there's the fact that they made Aqua incompatible with X windows, when there are plenty of window managers out there which work just fine, thank you. Why didn't they use one like that?
Because they're not tying to make a linux or unix distro? They want to make their own OS, they just happen to use unix under the hood. Plus the X window managers were probably lacking a few things that they wanted.