“How Many Do I Need Anyway?”
I found myself asking this question this morning.
I also discovered that there are a lot of people out there debating the issue; PC or MAC? With 95% of the business world using PC, I though it was all over for MAC, but then came the iPhone.
Judging from the e-mail I got this morning, I am not the only one out there that has been lured to MAC as a result of getting an iPhone. If you are caught up in that debate, be sure to read the two posts prior to this one.
It may also be enlightening for you to read this e-mail exchange I had this morning from a person I have as much respect for as anyone. In this exhange I refer to him as XXX, but he is very real.

Dateline Wednesday 7/16/08:

From: XXX
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 2:41 AM
To: itseasy@hawaii.rr.com
Subject: RE: Big Gamble… Follow up…

Bummer.  I was so excited about my iphone that I bought my wife a MacBook for Christmas thinking that I’d give it a try myself and then convert myself to a mac once I got the hang of it. In the end though, I decided that for business purposes the operating system and software simply wasn’t as good as windows. It works, but it hangs up sometimes (just like a PC) and is not as easy for me to “tinker” with when something isn’t going right (at least it wasn’t for me).

Three guys in my office use them too and here’s what I’ve observed….

One of the guys is an artist and photographer, uses only mac hardware, and loves it. It seems to work great for him.

Another guy is virtually computer illiterate and uses his mac primarily for email and loves it. He doesn’t do any scheduling, spreadsheets, Word documents, or much of anything else with it, yet he does seem to have plenty of technical problems. However, he still swears by it. I think he really just enjoys the form factor and “street cred” of the hardware.

The third guy switched to a mac after getting excited by his iphone, and it has been all but a disaster for him. He uses his computer pretty hard with business apps (Microsoft Office, etc.) and is always having difficulty. He creates complicated Word documents that don’t always translate nicely into the PC version of Word, which is a pain when he is collaborating with others in our office, our law office, or just about anyone else in the business world. He can’t get Entourage to work well (that’s microsoft’s version of Outlook for the mac) and is extremely frustrated by its lack of features. And mac’s mail program simply doesn’t cut it for him. It’s not nearly as useful in the business environment as Outlook and doesn’t do a nice integration with Microsoft Exchange, the email server most businesses use. It seems that every week he comes up with some new shortcoming that we can’t figure out a good solution for. My guess is that if we had a mac expert in the office he’d be doing better, but since 95% of the business world uses PC’s, true mac experts in the office are hard to come by.

So in the end, even though I love the hardware (except for the touchpad), and even though I love the idea of an easier to use, better set of software, I’m staying with the PC. I started as an Apple guy in college and would love to be able to make the switch, but in my opinion the overhead is simply too much.

That said, in a one computer office like yours, if you can get the right expert help, you may end up loving it. I’ll be interested to hear how the experiment turns out.

My Reply:

Aloha XXX,
This is very enlightening. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember the VHS – Beta War; but I am reminded of the great Yogi Berra quote: “This is like déjà vu all over again.”
I have two clients that have PC’s in their office and travel with the MacBook Air; both are happy campers. Since I already own this puppy, love the look and weight, I think I will go that way.
The e-mail is working. Now I just need to get my beloved iPhone back! I have a “Super Geek” coming over here tomorrow that is supposedly expert on all three; PC, iPhone and MAC; we’ll see.
It was the installation of “mobileme” that shut things down. When working, it “supposedly” will synch my e-mail, calendars, photos, contacts and more automatically and wirelessly on the iPhone, PC and AirBook Mac whenever, and wherever I do anything on any one of them. Sounds good, but… as I said, we’ll see.
Ron

Then…

From: XXX
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 9:37 AM
To: itseasy@hawaii.rr.com
Subject: RE: Big Gamble… Follow up…

Ron,
I don’t blame you for wanting that awesome form factor. I’ll bet if you’ve really got a true expert, you can make it work. Let me know what you think in a month or so. I’m still a little tempted myself…

My Reply:

XXX,
You know that you can count on that!
Ron

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Customer Experiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.