What is Leopard Up Against in Vista?
Before too long, Vista will be released upon the world. Will it be a match for Leopard which will follow a few months later? What will Leopard be up against? What will it take for Apple to convince people a Mac running Leopard is better than a PC running Windows? Can Apple do that?
Let me present an email I got from a techie friend in the Windows world:
Well, I can actually say, I really like Vista.
Really fast, prompts with security crap all over the place which I like too.
Hmm, MS have released some good software finally
Of course, Mac users will be gagging on the coffee and it’ll be spluttering out their nose all over their pristine white/black/silver (or white & black) Macs. Especially that line about liking all those security prompts.
I wonder what those prompts say? Maybe:
Hi. Whoops. Hang on, don’t panic. I’m not a virus, this is Vista talking to you. Just a friendly reminder that I might look pretty hot but I’ve actually got more holes in me than Albert Hall. So I’ll pop up every now and again just to reassure you that installing every security program on the planet is a good thing. See you soon!
A few minutes later:
Hi, me again. Am I still running? Huh!! That’s pretty good! You must know something about computers. Anyway, just popped up to say I’ll leave you alone for a bit.
Another few minutes later:
Hi! Guess who? I hope you don’t get sick of me, coz it’s really important I keep popping up and reminding you about all the risks of using me. Next time I’ll tell you a few. Bye-ee!
Just when you’re taking a sip of coffee:
Panic! Panic! Abandon ship! BWARRP! BWARRP! BWARRP! Hey I hope I didn’t scare you. Just testing the ol’ warning system. All part of the security. I am here to serve.
And much too soon:
Hey dude. Can I call you dude? We are old friends now. What you need to know is, basically, I’m totally crap. Looks can be deceiving. But hey - you’re the one using me. Chortle, chortle. Oops, back soon, gotta give some resources to Aero - he needs all the resources he can get. Between you and me, he’s a . . .
Not much later at all:
Smart alec Aero cutting me off before. Anyway, what’s he know? Security’s what’s important. And the best prevention is lots of messages. Me popping up. Lot’s of reminders. That’s the way to go. Coz you gotta be really careful. There’s lots of viruses, infections, spyware, trojans & adware out there - let’s just call it VISTA for short, eh? I kinda like that name. Catchy, eh? Well, better go. See ya soon.
And so on.
It’s funny you know, after installing Windows on my Mac, the thing that struck me most was the pop ups. The little bubbles reminding me to do stuff. They started to drive me nuts. And it seems Vista is going to have more because Windows users like them - and even need them.
I use Growl on the Mac and it’s wonderful. Apple should buy it and integrate it. Growl tells me something has happened that I want to know about.
Windows just nags. The messages in Windows all seem to be reminders. “Don’t forget to get a virus checker” “Don’t forget to activate” “Did you put the cat out?” “Have you got that huge pimple between your shoulders checked out yet?”
So what is Leopard up against?
So okay, we had a bit of fun, but now to the main question.
The other part of that email is that he likes Vista and is impressed. Sorry Leopard. Game over. This scenario is going to be repeated all over the place. Every magazine that reviews Vista, every IT manager that sees it, everywhere you are going to hear how great Vista is. Why? Because it is better and looks much better. (Ironically, it’s better because MS cut so much out of it.)
That’ll be enough for them. I tried telling him it was all copied from OS X but it was as if I hadn’t spoken. No acknowledgment of all. To Windows users, the copying OS X issue is irrelevant. Vista users aren’t going to give a rat’s brass monkey (no I don’t know what that is but it sounds good). They don’t care who invented things first. All that matters is that their system, Windows, does it now.
It’s a good thing that Leopard is coming out after Vista, after the gushing has abated. Otherwise Leopard will be lost in Vista’s adulation.
Lastly, I got an email from him a few days later that simply said:
First bug found. Hard disk corruption for no apparent reason.
The casual acceptance is what strikes me about that. No cursing, no name calling, just an acceptance. Hey, it’s only a hard disk corruption.
Although this is just one guy, it’s a reasonably safe generalization to say it’s fairly reflective of Windows users. We know Mac users stick to Mac because of a sometimes blind devotion, but Windows users are just plain apathetic. Whether it’s a plethora of messages or a behind the times OS or bugs that crash the system or even all the possible infections, it just doesn’t bother them enough. They’ll switch when it hurts enough. And Vista is not going to hurt enough.
And that’s what Leopard is up against.
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But that’s EXPECTED in a Windows world! We have all lived with problems like that and answers like “You’ll need to re-install the OS and then install all of your applications. That should fix the problem.”
This drove me nuts for years… As a little Mac sits in the corner asking nothing but doing everything. Need to re-install OS X? No problem, takes 20 mins, then 30mins to grab the updates and walla, all my apps, documents and most importantly pics from the last 7 years all still there and fine.
When will Apple dominate or at least get the attention? When people KNOW it doesn’t have to be this way and that there is something better, well not better there is something that’s not Alpha or Beta it’s SOLID.
If I were a Windows user… (It’s been 1 year and 11 days since my last windows machine. I haven’t thought about buying one or installing it on my PCBSD machine. I’ve spoken foundly and helped convert over 30 people to the Macs…) I’d install PCBSD or Ubuntu.
For some it’s just what they deal with to get things done. It’s a comforting fealing. Speaking with a friend of mine last week, he was worried because XP hasn’t crashed in over a week and that he didn’t want to help with code because he’s afraid he’d loose everything… 5 hours later he’s got a PCBSD partition setup and is loving it! There’s hope but there’s also ALOT of machines to recycle! He’s looking at getting a Mini and using a KVM, just wants a Core2Duo in it.
Once Windows users see Aero and it’s subsequent eye-candy, which comes out of every orifice in Vista, they’ll forget there was ever a mention of some “X” thing, never mind a “Leopard”.
Vista doesn’t have to be as good as Mac OS X, it just has to be better and prettier than 98 and XP, and that’s exactly what they did for Vista.
For most Windows users a switch is expensive, especially if you have a decent working PC, expecting many to jump ship because Vista isn’t as good as OS X, is absurd.
May those who have tired of Windows will switch, but it’ll be a small number.
Besides, Windows users are used to worrying about security holes in the OS, thats why Norton and McAfee exist. Security holes are “normal” and “workable”.
I’m a long-time Mac user in a five-Mac home who uses a Powerbook at work despite the harassment of colleagues. I also live in a high-tech town where every other person is a techie. Even the most platform neutral geeks and Linux advocates I’ve met agree that Vista is a winner. Who cares what they’ve copied! If it works, people will use it. They used Windows even when it stunk! The point is, Mac users should stop snipping at MS and just tout their stuff. I’m sick of Mac whining.
“No cursing, no name calling, just an acceptance. Hey, it’s only a hard disk corruption.”
I’ve seen this attitude too ... I was in a series of meetings recently, and the guy running them was using a PC to project a Word document so we could all see it. Out of ten meetings, he had to reboot three times because Word seized up on him - even trying to kill Word from Task Manager didn’t work. But this was accepted - we just sat around and chatted while his PC rebooted, and he didn’t think about taking his PC to IT get it looked at. He had a workaround after all, rebooting his machine.
However, it might be changing - I walked past an office yesterday and was surprised to see someone (a diehard Windows user) using an iMac. I asked him how the hell did he get that, and he said his team was doing an experiment to see how well they could do Java code development on a Mac, and it was a success. While he had had to reboot his PC daily, his iMac was faster, more stable and had been running for two weeks flawlessly. That doesn’t mean we will be changing en-masse to Macs at work (even though we could all get MBPs for less than the cost of our Dell laptops even with the 20% corporate discount), but there is a small but growing number of techies at work using their own Macs or planning to buy one.
As for Vista, maybe it’ll be more stable, maybe not, but at work we won’t be moving to it any time soon. It took till late 2004 before we were all using XP.
You almost strike me as a parody on this article, Chris.
Especially that line about liking all those security prompts.
When you install software on the Mac, it asks you for your password. I’ve always regarded this as an annoyance. MS has ADDED this “feature” to Vista for security reasons. I don’t see any difference, though, why it’s considered a great security feature on OS X but a “nag” in Vista.
They don’t care who invented things first. All that matters is that their system, Windows, does it now.
Now c’mon, Chris. Again, if I assume you’re NOT being a parody here, then you know as well as I do that this applies in spades to Mac users. The difference being that Mac users KNOW what Apple ripped off and they don’t care, or they run to Daring Fireball for gymnastic explanations of why a total rip off isn’t a total rip off. Windows users, for the most part, are simply unaware.
For the record, I like cross-pollination on both sides. Stealing features ultimately leads to better products all around, whether it’s browsers or digital music players or operating systems.
The casual acceptance is what strikes me about that. No cursing, no name calling, just an acceptance. Hey, it’s only a hard disk corruption.
Now this one made me spit out my morning coffee (I don’t drink coffee, but I brewed a cup just to spit it out at this comment).
When Panther was first released, it reformatted attached firewire drives all on its own. The Mac user response? “Hey, you should reformat your drives every once in awhile anyway.” Macbooks change colors over night when they’re not bursting into flames or shutting down spontaneously because they used Elmer’s glue for their heat sinks.
In this case, there’s cursing and name-calling alright - at those who dare complain!
I agree with Deavrojn. Vista doesn’t have to be better than Leopard to succeed. It has to be better than XP, which it is.
I’m reminded of something I learned a long time ago - if you serve people wet toast long enough, you can give them burnt toast and call it steak. They’ll love it because all they’ve known about is wet toast. MS doesn’t have to set the bar high to succeed.
Ah, the dilemma of the upstart. To take on the incumbent, the upstart can’t just be a little better, but an order of magnitude better—and to expand on the thesis, the more sacrifices one must make to use the upstart, then the upstart must prove itself to be even better still. Vista does not need (and has never needed) to be better than Leopard (or Tiger, back when the comparisons were between those two). It only has to be better than XP, and worth the cost of entry—and that is the rub, everyone. The cost of entry to Vista for anyone who currently owns a Windows PC will always be lower than the cost of switching. So the question becomes “Is OS X worth the cost of a new machine, plus the cost of eventually replacing your Windows apps with OS X compatible apps, and the cost of learning a new OS?” If Vista gets you 80% of the way there without requiring you to buy a new machine and new apps, then that’s not a result that is favorable to Apple. And even if you have a computer that is not prime for Vista and you have to buy a new PC, again you’d have the cost of the other things mentioned above. Ironically, even learning how to solve those annoying problems lends itself as a reason to stay! Seriously! Learning to recover from a bug or a crash is a bit of comforting knowledge—like knowing CPR or how to clean your own wound. Switching to a Mac means losing all of that info, which is a security blanket of sorts. It doesn’t matter if you don’t need it. Has Linus gotten rid of his security blanket?
If you look at it this way, you begin to understand how Apple can do so much better with younger buyers—college aged students and young adults. Less incumbency.
But that really means that Apple has to blow the customer away in shock and awe! Even using OS X for over a year, I can’t find a “shock and awe” feature. There are nice subtleties in the OS, but if it is subtle, people don’t notice it right away. First impressions are everything.
I’m not sure I’d refer to either of these products as “upstarts” but I do agree that OS X simply isn’t the no-brainer OS that Mac partisans think it is. After my PC died a couple of months ago, I switched my wife to OS X. She knows nothing about computers and finds them frustrating, and guess what. She still finds it frustrating, just in different ways. If she suddenly were singing the praises of using computers, then I was ready to concede some ground to the Mac-tards. But that didn’t happen.
I also tried switching another non-geek friend. He used OS X for about a month when he was helping me log footage in FCP. He LIVES on his XP laptop, so I asked him what he thought about getting a Mac. “What for?” was his response.
These are non-geeks, the kind of people that OS X is supposedly made for. And they couldn’t care less about it.
Funniest comment ever:
Now this one made me spit out my morning coffee (I don’t drink coffee, but I brewed a cup just to spit it out at this comment).
Still laughing at that one, Beeb.
Now, as you noticed, I didn’t parallel how Windows *and* Mac users both are terribly forgiving of their platform. Altho there was a gentle nudge at it in the last paragraph.
But left it out deliberately as I knew you’d make mention of it anyways, and if I highlighted in the article, the comments would just end up as a big bun fight over what the article was not about.
But I did hope that without mentioning it, that the parallel might sublimely get through anyway.
Hmm? After that last statement, I expect you’ll go make another coffee, Beeb.
Vista doesn’t have to be as good as Mac OS X, it just has to be better and prettier than 98 and XP, and that’s exactly what they did for Vista.
Well said, Daevrojn. You said better in a few words what I tried to in 900.
I switched my wife to OS X. She knows nothing about computers and finds them frustrating, and guess what. She still finds it frustrating, just in different ways
I had the exact same experience with my wife. She curses sometimes about some things she finds difficult on the Mac. And I just want to yell, “Well, just be glad you’re not on Windows!”
More often than not it’s simply because she hasn’t learned how to do it. Things too that I thought should have been reasonably intuitive or at least with an ounce of bravery, should have been discovered by trying stuff. But OS X is not intuitive for everyone and not do those types of users experiment.
Things too that I thought should have been reasonably intuitive or at least with an ounce of bravery, should have been discovered by trying stuff.
The problem for Apple, if they are indeed trying to compete with Windows, is that our respective better halves represent the vast majority of computer users. And it’s the Mac faithful who constantly refer to their own grandmothers as Apple’s intended demo for the Mac.
Is it or isn’t it intended for the total novice who just wants to get things done intuitively without worrying about confusing interfaces or right-clicking? Because that’s why wife and you can color her unimpressed.
My wife is from a south east Asian country where Mac’a are only the province of the rich. She had vaguely heard of Apple but new nothing about the company or it’s products.
The first time my wife ever used my Mac I did’nt even tell her what it was, just let her sit down in front of it & ask questions.
After a couple of the usual “how do I open my email…” etc questions I heard no more from her.
After a week or so I asked if she wanted to keep using that machine but she declined with the comment “no, i like Mac better”.
After a couple of weeks of use & a few more questions answered there was no way she would touch the sole windows pc left in our posession.
She had no preconceptions about Mac’s & I deliberately did’nt try to influence her.
Quite a few of my family have recently bought Mac’s not becase I evangelised them (on the contrary, I’m way past that at my age) but because they were fed up to the eye teeth with constantly crashing Windows PC’s & losing work.
When they turned to me for my advice in exasperation on “what’s a good computer to get” I just sighed & said “for god’s sakes, buy a Mac, so you won’t be ringing me all the time to retrieve lost work/ fix corrupted Windows”.
Natural attrition will redue the Windows monopoly, slowly but staedily.
constantly crashing Windows PC’s & losing work
Maybe that’s the difference. I don’t know where you guys are buying your junk, but constantly crashing? Word crashing 3 times a day?
I had three PCs in my house, two of them eMachines, and they rarely if ever crashed, and never a BSOD. I’ve had a couple of hardware issues over the years, which I’ve not yet experienced yet on my Macs (although I did have to repair my main drive with the boot disc), but that hardly accounts for the disparate experiences between myself and die-hard Mac users.
I wonder why that is.
I recently introduced my Dad, a *complete* computer novice who’s used to using a windows computer at work for some routine tasks he’s memorised, to some basic functions on our new iMac. i.e. How to check email, use the internet, move around create delete files etcetera. A man with not a drop of technological appreciation in him. Who knows no techo-love whatever. A man who rejected climate control in his car because he’s afraid of screens.
Who said after using a Mac for the first time ever: “I can really see how you could love this machine.”