BLOGNAME: LOUDER THAN WORDS

An informal, stream-of-consciousness reflection on business ideas, events and issues in modern business, modern life and with some specifics to the web-software industry by Paul Tomori, Internet Entrepreneur

Taking Our Own Medicine A round of iMacs for the troops! By Paul Tomori Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 20:18:41 (EDT) Before I got hooked on Macs, we outfitted our office with then state-of-the-art Dell PCs... this is about 5 years ago. My experience with Dell had been really good. Their hardware always just worked and worked well together. We didn't have any of the tiresome hardware configurations that one used to have in the olden days. Remember having to get the jumpers right on a new video card? Remember having to download drivers for that quirky new modem? The problem with the Dell computers was never the hardware. It was always the software. Windows. Windows was never smashing. Windows was just worthy of a good smashing. Just when you thought you had a stable PC working environment, out of the blue would come the blue screen of death. Or, programs would just start hanging for no apparent reason. It's like a big memory blackhole was sucking up all the available RAM in order to deprive you of just checking your mail. And remember searching for messages in Outlook Express. Sheesh. It wouldn't work half the time and when it did, it would take forever. Then there are the viruses and those irritating programs that slow down your computer while they try to protect you from 10,000 known viruses, Trojans, hackers, etc... Talk about completely annoying! Then, Microsoft came out with the brilliant idea of adding even more features to their already-bloated Word and Excel programs. It got to the point where I could not find the various tools I was used to using and I had to sift through a whole bunch of irrelevant new tools and features that were not organized very intuitively and were not very user-friendly anyway. For the last 3 years, I have been a Mac convert, but I only bit the bullet for my laptop and for a desktop iMac for myself, plus a few Macbooks for staff. This past week, 3 of our PCs had "issues". Two of them had just recently been professionally re-installed and re-configured too! So, I concluded that either we needed to upgrade our PCs with new Dells and the latest Windows (expensive and just more of the same old same old moving forward), or we could dispense with all 3 of them instead of trying to fix them and to start taking Paul's medicine. That's right - we got a round of iMacs. Seriously, it took me about 30 seconds to make this decision. I called on Monday morning and picked them up yesterday. Then I left. My staff plugged them in and turned them on and resumed their work using strictly web-based, cloud-based software. Read: we installed NO software whatsoever. None of these people are even technical. With Macs, technical know-how is not needed. Kudos to Steve Jobs for re-defining his competitor labels. They said Macs are closed systems while Androids (by Google) are open systems. He re-stated it as: "Macs are integrated. Androids are fragmented". Yep. Well put, Mr. Jobs. But, even if Macs can be said to be "closed" systems, I'll take them any day over the alternative. They just work. Intuitively. Easily. Smilingly. Return To Blog Index