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Why I love Arguments
One of these days, and I’ll try this eventually, I’m going to write an article called “Apple” which will contain just a single word, that word will again be “Apple”. What will the reason be for doing this? Simply because I know full well that some Apple fans will be up in arms and probably accuse me of being deliberately inflammatory about the company.
This is brilliant and it’s just like being back in school in the heady days of the home computing revolution. Then I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and those of us who preferred squidgy keys and colour clash got terrible batterings, in more ways than just figuratively sometimes, from those people with Commodore 64s.
It was brilliant that technology got people so hot under the collar, but then we hit the late 80′s and everything became really dull and quiet. In fact for a long period there was nothing to get excited about at all as the console revolution th! at we have today hadn’t started, and PCs were still far too expensive for people to have in their homes. If you had an ageing Commodore Amiga or Atari ST you’d use that. If not you were in a non-technical wilderness.
When technology became more affordable again, which began with consoles, it was Sony that not only ruled the roost, but that had the entire market to itself and so far as PCs went, nobody dared get all excited about the horrible beige box they were forced to keep hidden away.
Now though things are much more exciting. We’ve got all types of smartphones with competing operating systems, tablet computers with even more competition when it comes to operating systems, and home PCs that are finally funky enough, and with an operating system good enough, that their owners can start shouting at the Mac people again saying they got ripped off.
I’m a PC guy, I have a media centre PC under my TV, a Windows Phone and two Wind! ows-based computers. I also now have a Windows 7 tablet on the way to me as well. Why do I have exclusively Windows-branded stuff? It’s certainly not for my job, as an author I could write perfectly well using Linux, as a tech blogger I could comment on all things Windows from a Mac and for my leisure I could be quite happy with an Android phone or an iPad.
We’re back in the same situation were were in during the mid-1980′s though when you find yourself, by hook or by crook, locked into a particular eco-system. The reason I have all Windows stuff is that I need connectivity and for everything to work together in harmony. It just so happens that this is the best way to achieve that. This is in the same way that all my wireless networking kit is all from the same range and from the same company, it helps take the pain out of configuring it.
I have a good friend in London who has gone the other way. He has a PC that I built for him but he never uses it. He instead uses a Mac. He’s also had an! iPhone for a while and has bought an Apple TV and an iPad recently. It’s all exactly the same kit that I have myself but, well, just different. It will all work in exactly the same way as the kit I have here too. Now I don’t believe for a single moment that his choices were anything to do with brand loyalty. I know him well enough to say with confidence that his primary concern was that everything worked well together and that each device didn’t present him with a new, steep, learning curve.
It’s interesting the way this has panned out because we’re in a position now where the customers are once again doing much of the marketing and promotion work for the companies they buy from, just as my friends and I did in school singing the praises of Sinclair, Commodore and Acorn and even, once in a while, swinging someone else away from their own choice.
So occasionally I write things about Apple or Google but because people know ! me as a Windows guy I’ll get flamed for it. I have to write this stuff though because it’s my job. I love Apple and Google because, while I may not always agree with their business practices and products, they, like Microsoft have inspired a new generation of people to feel passionately about the technology that they buy and use.
What could be better then than a really good argument.
© Mike Halsey (MVP) for gHacks Technology News, 2011. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us, digg, facebook, reddit, twitter
Post tags: apple, commodore, flaming, Google, microsoft, sinclair
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