On IT and beyond

Delicious Monster is a product I’d really like to have on my business computer. Too bad it’s Mac only.
Like ecto or NetNewswire it’s a compelling argument in favor of OS X.
Working on the PC is more like “you have to do it because the software you NEED is there”. Working on the Mac is “I love working on the Mac because all the software I like is there”.
Oh yes, and forget about the Finder. That’s just overhyped. Compared to some years ago I notice I’m less and less actually using it. Moving files around virtually doesn’t happen that often any more.

Perhaps you know how it feels coming back in the office after a longer time of absence, without internet access.

You are instantly overwhelmed by tons of new mail, your mailing lists show incredibly high numbers of new posts and the same is true for your subscribed weblogs.

Although there is always that feeling to “miss” something important I decided to ditch several weblogs I’ve subscribed to in order to reduce the amount of unread entries. I know that I actually didn’t unsubscribe to some of the most productive writers but, hey, you have to start somewhere.

So, Rusell Beattie, kottke, Steve Rubel, Lyssa, Steve Gillmor and China Herald, you are gone. And no, I don’t link you here because I simply think that the information presented in your blogs can be found elsewhere or is simply not really worth the time.

Which doesn’t mean that I deem my blog even a bit more relevant. Definitely not. Vote with your feed, ahem, feet

… until the first patches appear, allowing to run Windows XP on the new MacBooks?

It’s always interesting listening to or reading Clayton Christensen. He definitely has a point and it will be interesting to see how things evolve. I really wonder whether the MP3 player market will behave in the same way as the PC market. Currently, no example comes to my mind where a proprietary architecture had this kind of market share in a consumer market like the iPod actually has.

To stay in Russell’s picture, although there may be less diversity on the Mac side of the world, life there is definitely easier. I just had to install a Mac and a PC. Both computers had to replace older models and the task at hand was to migrate all programs, data and stuff from the older to the newer computer.

The Mac beat the PC hands down. Using the migration assistant I was able to have the new Mac up and running in 30 minutes after the copy process was complete. I just followed the suggested steps after the first boot of the new iMAC G5.
On the PC side it took me several hours (say, 2 to 3) plus my expertise to get the data plus a reasonable amount of software (by far not everything) moved to the new machine. And that was only stuff from one of the 2 PC accounts on that Windows machine.
Subsequently, the Mac had all email accounts, printer settings, network settings etc. ready to go. The PC of course did find available printers but of course network settings and email had to bet set up manually. Yes, I do know that Dell has something similar to Apple’s migration assistant in its portfolio when you configure your PC. But I’m not quite sure how that software performs when moving data from a Windows XP Home machine from Medion to a brand new MT 380 workstation. I’ve made to many bad experiences to do these stunts…
While it is true that there is definitely more software available for the PC – for most of the business-type John Does out there this is absolutely of no significance. They use a browser, some office software and that’s it. Of course there are markets where every supplier does provide Windows-only software. But even this software isn’t needed on every computer in a company. And my recent experiences show that a mixed environment does not automatically increase administration cost. More likely, Macs just sit there and work. PCs will cause more trouble, more fiddling around, more maintenance. Which is OK for expert users but not for non-geeks.

So, all thoughts about UI wackinesses and specific software flaws set aside: The end-to-end solutions Apple provides are not only superior, they are also sufficiently compatible to the rest of the world. It’s a sad aside that in my opinion not more than 5 percent of all computer users really need a Windows PC because of the wider range of software available while actually 95% percent are using it.

Chris Messina put an end to it, obviously. It could have ended more gracefully.

Germany has launched a large-scale marketing campaign promoting the country during 2006. Of course, the soccer world cup will attract lots of visitors so this is an obvious idea. They started by bringing online a website called “Land der Ideen” which features many of Germany’s main virtues, inventors or special places. The site is available in English as well. Take a look at it – once: There’s no RSS feed for the different feature sections…