Innovation in Software

Disclaimer: it’s no secret I’m not a fan of Microsoft, and I know some of you are. This is just where I am at the moment, it’s not a troll but an observation. I seek constructive feedback only.

John Dvorak is possibly the crankiest man on Earth. Now he’s aiming it all at Microsoft.

Microsoft is a software company. It has been distracted too easily by the success of others in essentially unrelated fields. Here are but a few examples (and there are dozens more):

• Years ago in the pre-Internet era, AOL was the talk of the town, so Microsoft had to copy it with MSN. No money was made; no strategic advantage was gained.
• Netscape was the rage for a while, so Microsoft threw together a browser and got in that business. The browser was given away for free. No money was made; the strategy got the company in trouble with government trustbusters.
• During the early days of the Internet, new online publications appeared. Microsoft decided to become a publisher too, rolling out a slew of online properties including a computer magazine and a women’s magazine. They were all folded.

[snip another half dozen or so examples...]

This is a company that began making development tools for programmers, beginning with a programming language. Does anyone see a pattern here?

[...]

Maybe Microsoft cannot come to grips with the reason for its success. After all, Ballmer is not a computer programmer, and has never been too interested in software or computers and seems to want to run a media company.

Ballmer may get his wish by turning Microsoft into one, but I don’t think he’ll like it.

It’s true that Microsoft was taken a few twists and turns. Developing bad ideas is what Microsoft does, and have done for over 25 years. The only truly successful products they have in their stable – the products that finance the entire empire – are the Windows operating system(s) and Office. Nearly everybody expects both to take a massive hit on market share within a few years.

Hugh Macleod has, perhaps in the hope of getting Scoble’s old gig as Microsoft evangelist, tried to change the culture within from the outside with his blue monster meme. He’s had limited (but sometimes notable) success in the nearly three years since he started it, and I expect that might have been Microsoft’s last great chance: it was an excuse to change the culture into something more dynamic.

Talking to people within Microsoft there are two cultures: the old guard who want to run things as normal, and the newer breed who want to mix things up. The simple truth is senior management have seemingly let both sides down in the last decade (if not longer).

Without a fundamental culture change, and an ability to focus on core skills (rather than dancing everywhere and anywhere as Dvorak points out), means Microsoft are risking everything.

Nobody cares about Windows any more, because the applications of the future are on the web and the OS is becoming nothing more than a local file store. Nobody cares much about search beyond the engines they already use, no matter how much you try and get them to switch. Everybody hates the Zune. The development tools are over-complex, but that’s perhaps because the underlying libraries are over-complex and the bizarre insistence that an application written in Windows 3.1 should run smoothly in Vista makes developer life awkward.

So what are Microsoft’s core skills? Well, despite Visual Studio being a pig, it has a fan base. MSDN is loved by the people who love it, and as Apple realised with their ADC programme in the move to OS X, it’s those guys who are key to the future. Go and ask developers what they need to build the tools of the future and focus on it.

Apple took a gutsy move in clearing the decks with OS X and basically stopping support for System, but in the process they were able to focus the APIs to make programming for their platform much simpler, cleaner, more fun.

They targeted the very best developers on the planet, who in turn produced applications so desirable that “alpha users” wanted to buy Apple kit to run them. Go to a gathering of leading technologists, designers, writers or other alpha users today and the Windows machines will be notable by their absence (or extremely small presence). If the laptop hasn’t got an Apple logo on it, it’s odds on it’ll be running a flavour of GNU/Linux.

Microsoft need to do the same. They need to focus on the aesthetics of software, and take their base of developers and make them champions.

Then they need to think about how to help their customers become the very best customers they can be. When I sit down at a machine to work, to play, whatever, I don’t want to think about using a computer: I want to think about the job I’m doing. I want to think about how to get what I’m doing, done.

In short, Microsoft lost my business because BSD Unix and OS X allowed me to get to the pub sooner.

This needs to be the focus of the Office team: how do we make things so easy, users don’t even need to think about what they need to do for more than a few seconds before we’re helping them do it.

If the culture internally wakes up to the reality off campus that they need to change, and get senior management backing to focus on those changes, they can build a platform for the future that keeps Microsoft in the top flight for another generation. If instead they continue to stick their heads in the sand and think they can be any company they want to be, well…

Trying to shift to a monetisation strategy based on advertising in this economic climate is just pure foolishness, just as building a strategy on your competitor’s leading product is going to make you forget about making your own products the very best they can be. Microsoft’s current strategy is akin to Adobe announcing they’re going to launch a search engine: most of their base are going to ask very loudly “WTF?”

I suspect though that Ballmer will be allowed to continue playing in the sandpit that is Microsoft, the cultures will continue to clash, and nothing useful will be produced as a result. Potentially they’re going to find themselves in the same position as GM within a few years.

Shame. Who will I moan about when Microsoft goes under?

It seems I’m not the only person slightly bemused by the reaction to Steve Jobs’ revelation he had a liver transplant.

Other people’s reactions include:

• He owes me more work because I’m a fan of his work
• My share portfolio is at risk because of this
• I want more shiny plastic things from Apple. This worries me they won’t be as shiny.
• He didn’t tell us something personal that we deserve to know

My reaction:

• You just had a fricking liver transplant? Wow, get well soon and don’t listen to those guys baying for your attention, you need rest, ‘k?

This isn’t about shares or gadgets or what he owes you. It’s about somebody who is seriously ill taking some time out to make sure they can live a little longer. You know “life”, that thing you take for granted? The thing that isn’t really about accumulating possessions but being able to breathe, eat, love, dream? The mob doesn’t get that – perhaps because it isn’t available to download in the App Store or listed on the Nasdaq…

And yet, somehow, this reaction is predictable. Much in the same way that sexism is alive and well in the industry, selfishness – in particular consumerist self-absorption – is rife. We are the pinnacle of consumerism. We thrive on early adopters, so we grow them. And what we grow, we reap – this is another problem we need to think about.

As a collective the consumers seem no longer to see the humanity behind technology, choosing instead to become voyeuristic onanists viewing technology almost in the form of a fetish they are addicted to. In fact, porn is a good metaphor for where we are right now: dehumanise and objectify humanity to serve a selfish need. It doesn’t matter if the lens the fetish is viewed through is that of a camera or the blogosphere, providing it’s possible to sit at screens satisfying our cravings in private.

Maybe that’s just the Catholic in me talking. The Agnostic in me thinks we can do better too, though.

Some will argue this is just the fruit of modern capitalism. All advertising in a capitalist free-market society relies on a principle of false idolatry, designed to invoke a sense of inferiority in our subconsciousness. Apple does it better than anybody else on Earth, taking their marketing cues from designer label brands.

I think we might have gone a step too far. We might need to dial it back a notch or three and re-imagine what we’re here to do. There is something pure about what we do that is beyond the gadget and the price tag, the plastic or the electronics. As Dijkstra said (and is quoted as saying on my business cards): Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Yet here we are complaining about the telescope manufacturer needing a liver transplant because all we want is more telescopes. Good. Grief.

We should be grateful for the genius behind every design decision that comes out of our great technology companies, and they should rightly be rewarded with praise – they advance society one little increment at a time. But when somebody takes time out to have a life-saving operation, there is something distasteful about a swarm of self-interested parties demanding to know where their share of the grief is going to come from.

I don’t know the answer, I don’t have the solution. All I know is that I don’t want to be part of the problem.

P.S. writing this story I was reminded of the most human thing I ever read by Jobs’: his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 which I highly recommend taking the time to read.

Last Sunday I trundled up to the local Apple store with company debit card in hand to grab a copy of OS X Leopard. I installed it that afternoon and have spent the last week on the road and at home living with it. I’ve now come to a conclusion:

Leopard is an excellent advertisement for switching to Ubuntu.

Seriously, it sucks. I’m not talking suckiness on a Windows Vista level, but compared to Tiger, it’s awful. Here’s some reasons.

Firstly, perhaps reasonably for a dot-zero release (but still annoyingly), it crashes and/or locks up quite often. In several years of using Panther and then Tiger, I don’t think I had to power-cycle my machine more than twice. I’ve done it five times this week. Sometimes when using an external keyboard on my Macbook Pro, the system “just forgets” it’s there and I’ll have to unplug the keyboard from USB and plug it in again, but sometimes nothing happens even then: Finder stops responding, the mouse stops moving, and then it’s time to hold down the power button for a few seconds and bring it back up.

Whilst we’re talking about peripherals, I grabbed myself a replacement Mighty Mouse whilst buying Leopard (note: the scroll ball clogs and breaks within months, you’ll be buying a lot of replacements for the improved productivity I accept it provides), this time a wireless version. This helped me discover that bluetooth support for mice in Leopard is rubbish. Whether’s it blued taking up 50%-60% of CPU for long stretches of time, to not being able to see the mouse at all on resume, it’s so bad it’s basically useless. I don’t think it’s reasonable load average should be > 0.7 just because I am moving my mouse around.

Then there’s the RAM issue. Sure, with each release of an OS you expect to see more RAM being gobbled up, but I swear, I’ve never seen an OS have a problem with 2Gb of RAM and six applications open, not even Windows. With Tiger I used to be able to do a lot more and have a lot more free space to move around in. Leopard swaps so hard in the same usage scenario that it reminds me of when I was using an iBook G4 with half a gig of RAM.

Let’s now move to the extra features Apple provide in Leopard.

I don’t care what people say, Safari 3.0 is not faster than Firefox – anybody who is saying so just isn’t doing any meaningful measurement. What’s more, Safari still doesn’t “get” the plugin thing, and on my system at least rendered pages like it was spitting out HTML in vomit-like chunks.

The other big upgrade, Mail, is more of a mixed bag. Whilst Mail.app version 3.0 fixes several bugs I had learned to “work around” in 2.0, it introduces a few more niggles. That’s not the big problem though. Quite frankly Mail.app 3.0 needs a stake driving through it’s cold dead heart for producing HTML e-mail that cruddy, insisting all “notes” have yellow ruled-line backgrounds and integrating with iCal as more of an after-thought than as a reasonable feature.

Spaces is worse than 3rd-party solutions I used wth Tiger in my opinion, and gobbles even more RAM – a scarce commodity as it is in Leopard-land.

I’ve not actually tried the new integrated back-up system, because I’ve heard that Time Machine breaks Leopard even more than Leopard does on its own time and you end up fighting reboot screens constantly. I’ll stick with SuperDuper and the odd s3sync

Meanwhile they’ve managed to make sure the Dock is harder to make sense of thanks to little, tiny, blue-ish orbs on a reflective background indicating app state instead of clear arrows. Whilst we’re down there, can somebody please tell me what good are Stacks given that they’re slow, only make sense in ‘grid mode’ and don’t help you find anything you don’t already roughly know the location of.

At least though, that’s a relatively sane way of finding files. Cover-flow in Finder is just slow and silly, although Finder in general is much better. I daren’t even go near Spotlight, fearing that I might accidentally send share prices in CPU fan and RAM manufacturers soaring.

Whilst we’re at it, can I just mention the integrated firewall isn’t a firewall apparently, so unless you’re comfortable with ipfw, you’re about as open as it’s possible to be.

I am not however a typical OS X user. I am a developer who approaches OS X as a Unix with a better GUI than X + your choice of window manager. Some people will be happy with Leopard, and won’t want the stability or flexibility I need. Many switching from Windows will find the random, sporadic instability perfectly normal behaviour. I do not.

For all my problems with Unix as a desktop in the past, after nearly 3 years away from that flock, Leopard has convinced me to start moving back to Open Source. This weekend I’m going to Bootcamp up and put a “proper” Unix on like FreeBSD or a GNU/Linux distro like Ubuntu. That will allow me to slowly transition my data and working environment over and keep OS X (and Windows w/parallels) available for development and testing work.

I’m sorry Apple, this time you blew it, and you blew it hard. I hoped Leopard was meant to be more than an eye-candy release, but ultimately it’s just worse than any other version of OS X. I’d recommend Panther over Leopard right now, never mind Tiger.

My good friend and ex-colleague from way, way back, Andy Stothard, is currently on holiday in Vancouver. He loves the place and last time he came back he raved about it.

He’s just posted an article that struck me as an interesting take on file sharing. He’s sat down in front of his laptop, found a nearby computer sharing iTunes and decided to have a listen. It may be that “Gareth” didn’t intend for that to happen, or maybe he did.

What fascinates me about this is that there is an added context to the file sharing given by geography. It’s only people on the same immediate network you can see, and if Andy had really wanted to, he could have found Gareth and had a chat about his music collection (and maybe IT security) whilst he was there. What if it was “Gillian” instead of “Gareth” and Andy had really liked her taste in music. And she had found his iTunes collection to be interesting as well. And they’d made an effort to find each other?

File sharing has been criticised because it allows for an anonymous, amorphous mass on opposite sides of the planet to steal copies of music easily. What Andy was engaged in there didn’t take anything away from the publishers (he didn’t have a copy of the music, if he wants a copy he’ll need to buy one himself), added to his sense of the people around him in a foreign city, and potentially could have allowed for interesting conversation to break out between two previously unconnected people.

There is a lot to think about in the future with relation to the economics of creative works and the rise of ubiquitous digital access, but we need to realise that it’s not “File Sharing” that is the problem but “File Copying”.

Yesterday I ordered a copy of iWork ‘08 from the Apple website. I got an order confirmation in my inbox by 12:23 estimating delivery sometime ‘on or before the 13th’. When I got shipping notification late last night it had become ‘on or before the 10th’. I had it in my hand, delivered by UPS, in time to play with it whilst eating my Cornflakes this morning.

First impressions are never really very useful, but some of the things they’ve done in Numbers are quite nice.

For example, whilst in Excel you have multiple sheets and each sheet has one huge grid/table, with Numbers you can have multiple tables per sheet. That means that you can move inter-acting grids around and keep them self-contained, put bar charts and graphics next to data, and so on. It’s subtle, but makes more sense than one ‘big grid’.

You also don’t need to remember that the C column is Quantity and the D column is Unit Price and you’re on row 6 – if the header of the columns are set to the right titles, you can simply type ‘Quantity*Unit Price’ in a cell and it “just works”.

They’ve realised that most people use spreadsheets as single-table databases and have made it as simple as possible to do that. They don’t expect it to be a fully-functional Excel replacement for the kind of person who uses Excel because they don’t know how to use SQL, but for 99% of use cases out there, Numbers shapes up to be a fair bit easier to use than Excel and for the SME is good fit. More templates might be nice, but not a deal-breaker.

Keynote has features for interactive presentations that mean it becomes much simpler to provide interactive brochures – basically, you can embed hyperlinks to slides, web pages or e-mail addresses within the presentation itself. It has also borrowed some of the image editing functionality from iPhoto so that within Keynote you can muck around with graphics: given the trend within the Apple and Web Design community for much more visual presentations (no bullet points allowed) this seems like a great direction to take it. I’m not quite convinced by the ability to add Web 2.0-style reflections, but time will tell…

Within Pages, the interface has had a tweak to make it feel more compact and they’ve supposedly made it easier to separate word processing from page layout, but at first glance I can’t see the major difference just yet. Change tracking and Address Book mail merge are items I don’t recall from previous versions and they might be quite useful in some contexts.

I intend to play with it all over the next week and update my invoices, proposal templates and presentation templates to the newer versions and work out what I can do with the new features that is of any real value. If I find anything uber-cool and innovative that hasn’t been mentioned yet, I’m sure I’ll be updating stuff here.

In the meantime, if you want to see what you can get up to, Apple have placed all their iWork tutorials online

I don’t normally blog Apple product releases, as people get tired of them so quickly, but I was mildly intrigued by mentions in yesterday’s announcements around their software products.

Firstly, Apple seem to be claiming that they “invented” the lifestyle application. Whilst iPhoto and iMovie are definitely a lot better than their predecessors, they weren’t the first and I think this is a tad disingenuous. However, it’s the attitude that intrigues me:

Jobs says, somebody asked him, you guys are so far ahead of everyone else, why do you keep obsoleting your own products? He says it’s for the same reason they made them in the first place – because Apple really cares about this stuff.

Caring about doing things better is where software should be at right now, but as an industry we seem so obsessed about doing things more profitably. Not enough people have worked out that we’ve got it the wrong way around.

I was also intrigued by some of the notes John Fortt wrote up when he got to play with some of the iWork suite – particularly Numbers, the new spreadsheet application.

Microsoft (MSFT) has always seemed to resent the fact that everyday Excel users use spreadsheets to make lists and do presentations as often (or more often) than they use them to make calculations; in the last few years, Microsoft has built in just a few list features. Apple seems to embrace these everyday uses for spreadsheets, making it convenient to put multiple lists on a page, and choose from a pre-populated list of options when it’s time to do a calculation.

Numbers looked so good, in fact, that it made me wonder what Microsoft thinks.

Embracing how the user really works is ridiculously hard. It’s the hardest skill I’ve ever had to acquire: knowing I’m probably wrong. It’s like learning to count from zero, but harder. Starting with how a user wants to think about and use data is something that takes time, patience, and several releases. I’ve bought every version of iWork to date (the newest edition is in the post to me now) and the iteration in regard to user experience has been patchy, but at least moving.

And what do Microsoft think? Well, Fortt has an interesting thought:

Which brings me to my hunch: The reason Microsoft delayed the release of the next version of Office? Apple showed Numbers to the Microsoft crew a week or so ago as a courtesy, and the MacBU folks realized they had a lot of work to do if they want to look decent next to Apple’s new iWork lineup.

That would be astonishing if true. If after all the years of adding back-end features to Excel, somebody, somewhere at Microsoft has had the realisation that it’s user experience that counts, we’re going to see some interesting developments in the years ahead.

This will be all over the blogosphere already, but can I just point out I called the interface on this back on September the 8th and got virtually all the details right?

I’m just saying, that’s all…

Last night, a story on MacRumors.com grabbed my interest. It was grabbed for two reasons:

1. I could land a booty of 10 apps from MacHeist for the iBook that would normally cost me $400, but for just $49
2. This, apparently, is highly controversial

Now, most of the apps are OK, but not the type you would run out and buy as if your life depended on it. I already have and use Textmate, so that didn’t add value. I’d been meaning to grab copies of DEVONthink and RapidWeaver for a few months now and $49 for those two alone is a saving. The fact I was able to get Delicious Library, FotoMagico, ShapeShifter, Disco, iClip, a Pangea game (I chose Enigmo 2, which is already sucking me in), and NewsFire as bonuses and for no extra money, just made it a bit more interesting for me.

Now, here’s the thing. The blogosphere is on fire about this, not because of the remarkable value, but because the developers providing the software are apparently being ‘ripped off’ by MacHeist and despite going into this with both eyes wide open, are obviously being conned. Here’s some examples:

for MacHeist to call it “The Week of the Independent Mac Developer” and to practically give away the software… well, that’s just a fucking insult to me and all the other hard working developers out there.
– Gus Mueller

My understanding is that the developers taking part in the bundle are getting a flat rate for participating. That means that the more bundles MacHeist sells, the more money MacHeist makes, while the developers will get no additional money. Each new user adds support costs, so the more bundles they sell, the worse off each developer may be.
– Paul @ Rogue Amoeba

The argument is not that MacHeist are being underhand. Rather it is that the developers are only making a fixed fee and MH are making a bundle on the back of them.

So are the developers idiots? Have they been conned? If you read Gus Mueller’s fiscal breakdown, you see that MacHeist are canny businessmen if nothing else. Here’s some of the comments from the developers who got involved:

Gus has strong opinions and I love him for that, but none of us who are bundled with MacHeist were forced to do so; we knew ahead of time what the price would be and how much we’d get, and we decided it was worth it for us.

I think events like this get a lot of publicity, so they bring in new customers that I wouldn’t reach on my own. So I’m not really sabotaging my sales; I’m supplementing them. Seriously, if you came to me and said, “I’m going to resell Delicious Library to customers on the moon, who you’ve never met and can’t reach, for $1 a copy,” I’d say, “Go for it!” I don’t care if I only get a penny if it’s a penny more than I would have gotten on my own.
– Wil Shipley of Delicious Library

Let

Busy, busy week this last week. Insanely busy, especially as my company’s year end is coming up December 31st, and I want to close my 2006 books and file my accounts very early in 2007.

Thankfully, things are on track for me to be able to pretty much shut down from the 17th December through to the 15th January, during which time I won’t be dealing with client work but will instead be retiring to my laboratory and tinkering on the mad, wonderful new inventions I have planned for release in 2007. If I get my planning right, by the end of 2007 I should be able to drop my client work entirely and move over to supporting my own products, which is where I wanted to be this time last year.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy client work, it’s just not what the company is about – I have absolutely no desire to work as a freelancer for the next 40 years, and I enjoy owning my own projects to take where I want. Client work doesn’t give me the freedom, challenge or the level of profitability that my own projects hopefully will.

Anyway, until I have some products to talk about here, it’s business as usual. Here’s some Sunday afternoon/Monday morning links:

I’ll find the time to post a full review next week, but I got an early copy of Designing the Obvious a few weeks back, and am very impressed with it. For somebody like me who needs to work at understanding design from a usability perspective it was a welcome dose, just in time for some major projects in the New Year. Like I say, next week there will be a full review with a run-down of what it covers but in essence, it’s all about making sure that we remember the humans who will be using the applications we make, and building interfaces around them.

For those of you unlucky enough to be working with Windows machines, you may want to know that Vista won’t be too bad once you get rid of all the cruft Microsoft was too busy ignoring to remove for you.

Whilst they only seem to be shipping the Nokia N73 right now, Three have announced x-series pricing which is very, very reasonable. I shall be grabbing one of these before Christmas, just as soon as a Sony Ericsson phone becomes available on those tarrifs. The only downside is that although they describe it as ‘unlimited internet usage’ what they mean by that is 1Gb/month data transfer, 10,000 MSN messages a month, 80 hours/month of Slingbox/Orb and 5,000 Skype minutes/month. Even so, that’s still a lot better than existing tariffs and when O2 and Vodafone step in with better offers, the deals will get better.

I owe Andy at Liquid Bronze a thank you for the heads up on this, but it would seem that if you know where to look and you’re in the market for an Apple this Christmas but want to spread the payments out, you can get 0% APR over 6-months on Apple hardware between £500 and £10,000. Unfortunately it’s individual customers only, and I need to splurge my money through the business so I’ll be taking a hit in January on my new hardware, but I noticed that their refurb products list has some pretty good deals going – slightly out-of-date Macbook Pros at 40% off, for starters.

When I get a few spare hours of free time in the coming weeks, I intend to spend a lot more time playing online chess. For those new, the comments section to this post on Feld Thoughts offers some good options. Feld himself settled on a site called Red Hot Pawn the name of which indicates just how young and cheeky the chess crowd is getting these days.

More ‘normal’ articles due up next week, until then comrades…

I found this rather entertaining ‘review’ of sorts earlier today, and it made me think about my own relationship with Apple. There’s no doubt they’ve raised expectations of what consumers are expecting from their computers these days, but I have had a love/hate relationship with their machines going back over a decade.

It all change a couple of years back however, when I was running FreeBSD on all my machines at home, and where I could, at work. A lot of people involved in FreeBSD at the time were switching to Apple, and it became clear that a lot of them weren’t coming back. See, under the skin of OS X – Apple’s newest operating system – is a Unix that is based in large part on FreeBSD. One of the first to move over was Jordan Hubbard, who started the FreeBSD project and is, to my knowledge, still head of release engineering at Apple on the OS X product. He has been followed professionally by many people, and in terms of users, I don’t know of any local BSD guys who were knocking around a few years ago who don’t own Apple hardware yet.

My reaction to this at first, was somewhat… well… judge for yourself. On a FreeBSD mailing list, somebody asked if anybody had any tips for a BSD’er starting on OS X. My reply, below, aptly represents my attitude at the time (and yes, I did used to be this aggressive nearly all the time, jerk that I was):

My advice is that you sell your over-priced fashion-victim toy with it’s Fisher Price Unix installed, and use the money instead to buy yourself a top of the range Thinkpad. It will outperform it, run FreeBSD, not look out of fashion next season, has been built by a company that is truly committed to the open source movement and whose execs don’t patronise you by assuming you travel to work on a skateboard in cargo pants or worse, pander to your girlfriend’s idea of what a computer should be.

In addition, you’ll be able to easily and cheaply upgrade parts of your laptop, built as it is on commodity hardware with 3rd-party suppliers being plentiful. You’ll find either the manufacturer’s support much better than Apple’s, alternatively you won’t have to travel 300 miles to find your “local” dealer as pretty much any computer store in the country will be able to carry out any repairs you need. Spares will be cheaper, labour will be cheaper, and you will not be without your laptop for 3 months whilst a replacement TFT screen sits on a boat from Korea slowly plodding it’s way to you, thanks to a ridiculous spares and repairs policy.

In addition, you won’t be contributing to the “brain drain” that Apple has caused on the Open Source movement, will understand more about how your computer works as a result, and won’t spend half your working day fighting bouncing icons, “helpful” software that constantly tries to break into every WAP point within range and a user interface that was specifically designed to be helpful to 5-year olds and your technophobic mother. You’ll instead get to use an OS and an interface designed for somebody who understands computers, not have to put up with one that assumes you are a 6th-grader with learning difficulties.

Plus, brilliantly, people won’t point at you and laugh when you get your laptop out on a plane or in a cybercafe for spending thousands of dollars on a laptop that isn’t as powerful as Intel-based competitors just because you think it “looks neat”. You will be considered by your peers to be a man instead of a boy, a leader instead of a follower, and you won’t get any more snide e-mails like this when you post to a FreeBSD list for help with your hardware.

Hope that helps. Sorry it was you that suffered my rant on Apple kit, but you are, to my knowledge, the first in a while.

I will now don the fireproof suit.

You know what the really ironic thing about that is? Two weeks later I needed to buy a new laptop. I didn’t want to go through the pain of configuring a load of drivers and just wanted a laptop with supported bluetooth and WiFi out of the box, with some reasonably familiar BSD-style Unix. At the time I was working for a University and qualified for Apple’s educational discount. Price wise, I couldn’t get a similar spec Thinkpad – or indeed any other laptop – to compete with the iBook G4 I’m typing this article on right now. Yes, I switched. I am a hypocrite. After blasting a guy with all that, I went out and bought an Apple.

I am now at a point where within a few weeks I will need to buy some new hardware, and once again I am considering the value proposition of an Apple box. They aren’t cheap, but given that it’s a FreeBSD userland under the skin, and they now have a decent processor inside, it’s starting to look tempting to drop a couple of thousand quid on a Macbook Pro.

The problem is, when I bought the iBook it made me a bit of a radical. Now, it just makes me the same, but a different kind of sameness. When I had a coffee in my usual place in town this afternoon, I noticed 4 people using laptops – all of them Apple’s of one flavour or another. They all looked like they should be using Apple machines: they didn’t look Unix types to me, more “I don’t know how to use my mobile phone properly” types.

Whilst Apple were able to leverage the fact that Toshiba, Dell, Sony Vaio and Acer laptops were all a bit ‘samey’, the problem they might now face is that Macbook and Macbook Pro hardware now signals to the nearby people in the know that the buyer doesn’t really know what to buy so just bought something ‘easy’. There is much more variety in the non-Apple laptop market than there is within Apple’s range, and its starting to feel like a severe and horrible weakness on Apple’s part.

What’s more, whilst Apple produces a pretty decent operating system, it’s not perfect. I do prefer the power and adaptive configurations you can push a ‘real’ Unix into, even if that means I don’t get to run various commercial applications. I can now get a cheap laptop with similar high-speed Intel hardware inside to a Macbook Pro from a variety of other manufacturers and roll out Ubuntu, OpenSolaris or even my old ally in times of war, FreeBSD, with relative ease: driver configuration has improved leaps and bounds.

Oddly, by buying a Sony, or even a Dell, I would now actually mark myself out as being a little bit different once more. I’d save money, and get all the advantages of cheap servicing I mentioned in my post above. The one thing that might make me stick with Apple? I think I might have subconsciously become an Apple Fanboy. It’s not that I want to lick my Apple hardware, but I like not thinking about it, and maybe the kids in the coffee shop are onto something: who wants the pain of thinking about hardware when all you want to do is write, produce videos, mix music, write software, whatever?