My lament of the possible need to learn a new skill set was intended to be interpreted a bit less seriously. I would be sorry, however, if the marketplace decides that I should earn my keep using what I know to be far less than the best tools for the job. Then again, I don't exactly have a garage full of Sony Betami (is that the plural of Betamax?). My real concern is that the marketplace is deciding by default. Others have posted here, and I agree, that this is not necessarily the result of there being a lack of choices available. Microsoft gets its software on most peoples' machines because it does the job adequately (my characterization) and it requires little effort. There is really no compelling reason for most of the marketplace to expend the resources (time and money) to go with a non-Microsoft solution on the desktop, no matter how superior it may be.
One of my current clients is a Mac shop. The G3 machines scream. This division of a huge multinational media company does lots and lots of electronic publishing and the Macs are great at this. We run Oracle front end clients on the Macs, and it runs OK, but not as well as under Windows. The databases are all on Sun Solaris, no NT DBs here. We have also been playing with the PC simulators on the Macs. It's funny, but a G3 Powerbook running Virtual PC does MS Office faster and better than a 300 MHz Pentium II system (Office 98 for Mac is faster than Windows, though). Every once and a while, someone floats the idea of standardizing with the rest of the company on PCs, but the business is too entrenched in Macland to do that without a lot of pain.
I keep thinking back to Apple's lemmings ad for the Macintosh. It just seems that now the lemmings have gone off the hardware cliff, off the OS cliff and are heading towards the applications precipice. I suppose you can't explicitly fault Microsoft for this behavior. Encouraging it is a very good business model, and they are about the best at it. The difficult question is: How do you determine which of the lemmings just follow the one in front over the edge and which of us were pushed?
-Michael |
