[OT] Market Share

Dan Shafer revolutionary.dan at gmail.com
Sun Jul 9 19:23:26 EDT 2006


Wow, this latest round of messages constitutes one of the nicest, most
informative and useful threads on this subject I've read in a while.
Congratulations to all of you who have participated recently.

I am certainly a Mac bigot. But I no longer see Mac and OS X as inherently
vastly superior to Windows technology. I occasionally have need to run
Windows (XP Pro) and I must say that although I find bits of the user
experience clunky (probably only because they are different from what I am
used to on OS X), by and large, the platform is stable and relatively
pleasant to use. And I know I pay a premium in price and other intangible
ways for remaining an OS X loyalist.

But there are three programs on OS X that are not special-purpose
applications but without which I cannot imagine my day, and they all run
only on OS X and, as far as I can tell at least, have no real functional
quality equivalents on Windows:

* NoteTaker/NoteShare from AquaMinds Software (an OS X only shop)
* iListen (voice dictation and command software from MacSpeech)
* Pages (Apple's thoroughly brilliang word processor cum page layout
application)

There are *rough* equivalents of these on Win XP, but I've looked at them
and they all pale in comparison; I suspect anyone who knew the above
programs well and compared them to their Win counterparts would agree.

But, like Rob Cozens, I tell people now when they ask me what kind of
computer to buy, to take into account:

FIRST, the softwrare they want or need to run
SECOND, whether they need to be file or app-level compatible with computers
at work or school
THIRD, whether they expect me to help them if they run into problems.

Because like my wife's housekeeper, I don't do Windows! But I also no longer
bash them.

Dan



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