Experienced Mac users may not have the perspective that it takes to see what makes Windows users stay with Microsoft, and let’s face it, some Mac users (not you or me, of course) are just downright zealots.

4. Price
The perception by Windows users is that Macs are more expensive than Windows PCs. This may have been true in the past, but the new Macs are very comparably priced to similarly equipped PCs. Unfortunately, the perception remains.

5. Lies
Let’s face it: Apple tends to bend the truth once in a while, especially about Microsoft and Windows.

I remember watching the 20 or 30 minute Vista-bashing session at the WWDC conference and wondering why Steve Jobs is so insecure that he has to berate the opposition. Can you imagine shopping for a car and having the salesman only talk about what’s wrong with the competition’s cars?

8. Mac Users
Okay, I’m not talking about you or me here, but there are some Mac users out there who have just a little too much love for Apple. When they are shouting (or typing in all caps) about how much better Macs are, they’re not convincing anyone to switch, they are scaring them away.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, iPod, Mac, PC, Vista

Microsoft had their chance at defining a market. They pushed for the creation of the Ultramobile PCs (“UMPCs”). The Windows-based mini-tablets have not found their market. However, the Apple iPhone (and now the iPod touch) is actually the UMPC done right.

Labels: Apple, Internet, iPhone, Mac, PC

I blame Steve Jobs [for] seduced me into buying his sleek machines, even if their delicate organs seem to fail with alarming regularity, like the beautiful consumptive heroines in Victorian novels.

Steve--we'll call him Steve because he seems like a first-name-basis kind of guy--is the human incarnation of the average Apple product: He's good-looking, he overpromises, and he's notoriously temperamental. He evokes the feel-good indie populism synonymous with the company's brand and manages to retain a solid reputation as a creative person while managing a $118 billion business.

The image is, of course, a facade. The dollar-a-year salaryman has been rewarded with at least one corporate jet.

We forgive Steve in a way that we won't [Bill] Gates. We do this because outward appearances are important to us, and the products are a reflection of how we think of ourselves. Apple products are stylish and innovative. (We're stylish and innovative!) We love Steve for the same reason. He's creative and he seems appealingly antiestablishment. (We're creative and antiestablishment!)

Labels: Apple, iPhone, Mac, PC

Vista share is up to about 4.5 percent of Web users from virtually nothing in February, while Mac OS share has slipped from 6.38 percent in February to 6 percent in June, with the implication that Vista is eating into Mac OS sales.

This seems in stark contrast to what others are saying. Both the NPD Group and IDC have recently reported that Apple's Mac shipments have outpaced the overall market in the first half of the year.

Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing for Net Applications, said his company's network of 400,000 Web sites mostly includes small and medium-size businesses, but also a few consumer-oriented powerhouses like Best Buy. Net Applications makes software called Hitslink that lets those sites track what types of computer users are coming to their sites, and reports the aggregate data amassed by all of its clients.

Vizzaccaro thinks his company's data is more immediate than market share data, in that in can show trends more quickly than shipment data.

Labels: Mac, market share, PC

Microsoft's OS should pass Apple's next month

Windows Vista's share of online users has increased every month this year, while rival Mac OS X -- to which Vista has often been compared -- has shown little, if any, growth, a metrics company reports.

According to Net Applications, in June Windows Vista accounted for 4.52% of all systems that browsed the Web, up from January's 0.18%. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93% in February, 2.04% in March, 3.02% in April and 3.74% in May. Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22% in January and hit its high point of 6.46% in May, but it slipped back to 6% in June.

If Vista's uptake trend continues, it should pass Mac OS X in Web usage share by the end of August.

According to Net Applications' data, the computer maker is not making new Mac converts ... Net Applications' 6% share for Mac OS X jibes with recent IDC sales estimates, which put Apple's portion at 5.6% of all personal computer sales in the U.S.

Labels: Apple, Mac, market share, PC, Vista

Labels: Apple, Mac, market share, PC

Labels: market share, PC

In certain circles, it’s become fashionable of late to refer to Windows Vista as Windows Me2. It’s the second-worst insult you can hurl at a Microsoft program (the worst is to compare it to Microsoft Bob, neatly summarized as “7th place in PC World Magazine’s list of the 25 worst products of all time and [named] worst product of the decade by CNET.com” in 2005.).

Windows Vista is no Bob, as Steve Ballmer has said publicly, on the record. But if you believe the comparison, Vista is heading down a path roughly the same as Windows Millennium Edition (aka Windows Me).

So does Windows Vista deserve the Me2 label? After a careful look back at my Windows history books, I see Vista heading down a different path. In fact, I’m struck by how similar Vista’s path so far has been to the one that Windows 95 traveled.

Labels: Microsoft, PC, Vista

There's only one problem -- Safari sucks. A lot of Mac users won't run the browser (I'm one of them), so why would anyone run it on Windows?

On my Mac, Safari is buggy and unreliable. It's always crashing, and it doesn't offer basic features like remembering all the tabs you have open after you quit (or more likely, after it crashes). Until now, it didn't even warn you before closing multiple tabs, although the new version of Safari fixes this.

Labels: Apple, Internet, Mac, PC

At its upcoming World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple is expected to finally divulge the full feature set for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard." But Apple has an additional and unexpected surprise for this year's show. For the first time ever, Apple is specifically targeting Windows developers who are interested in moving their applications to the Mac.

There is a growing feeling that Apple's strategy is paying off. The company has millions of eager customers, and it seems like many Mac users, like iPod customers, have little compunction about upgrading to the latest and greatest hardware every time Apple ships an upgrade. I'm a numbers guy, but I can't help but shake the feeling that Apple is on to something. And while I like to see hard cold facts, my conversation with Apple revealed a subtle change that I think is quite important and does, in fact, point to an increasing presence on Apple's part in the wider PC market.

Here's what I found out.

Labels: Mac, PC

Now I'm back on the Mac.

The most wonderful thing about the Mac in 2007 is that it has what Bill Joy refers to as the "it works" feature.

The second most wonderful thing about the Mac in 2007 is that it is all three of the major operating systems in one: you get the Mac user interface and applications; you get Unix underneath the covers...

...And by running Parallels or VMWare Fusion you also get Windows XP.

Virtualization is the biggest thing to hit the operating system world since protected memory.

Labels: Mac, PC

Hewlett-Packard Co. is riding high today as the world's undisputed leader of personal-computer sales, but that's not how Todd Bradley found things when he joined the company in 2005.

Dell Inc. was the top PC maker that year, when H-P Chief Executive Mark Hurd hired Mr. Bradley to run the company's PC business. H-P's PC operations were barely profitable, morale was foundering and some investors were suggesting H-P get out of PCs altogether.

H-P owes that remarkable turnabout to something Mr. Bradley concluded within weeks of arriving at the Palo Alto, Calif., company: H-P was fighting on the wrong battlefield. H-P was concentrating its resources to fight Dell where Dell was strong, in direct sales over the Internet and phone. Instead, he decided, H-P should focus on its strength, retail stores, where Dell had no presence at all. H-P was neglecting that advantage, Mr. Bradley found as he visited retailers and H-P factories, hearing complaints about late or incomplete deliveries. He worked hard to fix the logistical snafus and build better relations with the retailers, helping H-P surpass Dell in world sales late last year for the first time since 2003.

Labels: PC

1. Cobol
2. Nonrelational DBMS
3. Non-IP networks
4. cc:Mail
5. ColdFusion
6. C programming
7. PowerBuilder
8. Certified NetWare Engineers
9. PC network administrators
10. OS/2

Labels: PC

Steam, an online distribution platform for videogame content, has signed up more than 13 million users, the system's owners Valve has said.

More than 150 PC games can be downloaded via Steam and the system has also been used to automate more than 2,500 updates to existing games.

Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve, said: "In Steam's case, we have millions of customers who are gamers and dozens of customers who are developers and publishers.

"In the past year, we've added over 100 new titles from third parties, grown to over 13 million active accounts."

Steam was developed as a way to auto-update Valve's multiplayer games but now has evolved into a platform used by many leading publishers and developers.

Labels: PC, Video games

Today, Dell will launch three Linux-based consumer-oriented PCs in the US market only, fulfilling its promise to offer the open source solution on a limited basis by the end of May. The PCs include both notebook and desktop models and run the Ubuntu 7.04 distribution of Linux. Additionally, Dell announced that retailing giant Wal-Mart will begin selling its Windows-based PCs, the first time the company's products would be made widely available through a mass market retailer.

Labels: Linux, PC

Desperate to revive growth, Dell is getting ready to hit the store shelves.

It's a risky move for Dell, which pioneered the direct-sales PC business and has made the strategy its hallmark. But as the onetime PC king's business has soured, the company has been signaling that it intends to make peace with the middlemen it has long competed against.

Dell has little choice. When the company reports preliminary first-quarter results next week, the former growth machine is expected to report a 24.4% drop in net income for the quarter ending in April; sales are expected to drop to $14 billion from $14.2 million during the year-ago quarter.

Labels: PC

Google and Dell have teamed up to install some software on Dell computers that borders on being spyware. I say spyware because it’s hard to figure out what it is and is even harder to remove.

About a year ago Google and Dell announced a partnership to include the Google Toolbar on new Dell computers. At the same time, Google was trying to convince the Department of Justice that changing the default search engine in the (then) new IE7 was too difficult (when in reality it’s really simple). Installing the toolbar meant that users would have Google as their default search engine in IE7. It also meant that Dell and Google would share some of the revenue from the advertising clicks that resulted from these installations, much like The Mozilla Foundation does with its Firefox browser.

The computer hardware business has razor-thin margins which means making a profit is tough. So the opportunity for Dell to get a recurring revenue stream from an existing customer long after the sale of the computer is more than just enticing, it’s huge. It also means a couple other things:

1. Dell and Google have an incentive to make it very hard for users to turn this off.

2. Because users can’t get rid of it, Dell and Google can get away with putting more ads on the page and pushing user-relevant content off the page.

They’re now doing both of these things.

Labels: Google, Internet, PC

On the whole, most people would rather spend the money on Windows (or Mac) than take the time to experiment with Linux.

Why?

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user, and that these five things are slowing down the adoption of Linux onto desktop systems in the home and office.

1 - On the whole, users aren’t all that dissatisfied with Windows

2 - Too many distros

3 - People want certainty that hardware and software will work

4 - As far as most people are concerned, the command line has gone the way of the dinosaur

5 - Linux is still too geeky

Labels: Linux, PC, Vista

Labels: PC, Personal