Form and Function

It has been almost a week now after my transition off a wintel machine onto my new heavily loaded Mac Pro.  Like so many others before me, and the millions who will follow after me, it has been an epiphany.

I have been a hard-core windows guy for the past 15 years, just devouring everything Microsoft.  I am/was deeply intimate with almost all of Microsoft's software offerings from their (anti)productivity suites in their Office Tools to their back end server stacks like Exchange, SQL Server, Biz-Talk, Commerce Server, IIS, GreatPlains/Dynamics, Sharepoint and more.  I also exclusively developed in MS frameworks like VB (from years ago), C# etc..  all designing and developing business applications.    I was one of three Principals at a medium sized local MS Gold Partner consulting shop in charge of delivering multi-million dollar custom MS applications leveraging technologies in the above mentioned stacks.   A few years ago I slowly started to drift away from MS, the first material separation occurred when I adopted Adobe Flex as the primary development technology for my new startup and was just shocked with the refreshing change of the "open" community nature that Adobe adopted in its beta.

Now a couple of years later, with Apple making it almost impossible to ignore their presence with their adoption on Intel chipsets and the ability to run Windows side-by-side with OS X I made the leap.  What is amazing, is that leap is a more like a short step, the effort involved to make the switch is getting smaller and smaller.   I can't say enough good things about the quality of the Apple hardware itself, the 8-core is a dream, and even more importantly OS X feels like what a computer is supposed to feel like in 2008.   Spotlight (OS X's universal search tool) is just so easy... you have a thought like "where is file XXX" and you just type "XXX" into spotlight and there it is.   No more waiting several minutes while Windows search agonizingly moves through your non-indexed files at a snails pace (although  I am not sure how fair that is since I was not using an 8-core processor with 14GB of RAM on my wintel box.)    Lots and lots of little things are just so much more seamless and intuitive with OS X.   

This is not to say it is all roses, there are little things here and there that I miss from Windows, but overall the experience is such that you feel like you can forgive OS X for its shortcomings, while you want to blame Windows for theirs.  To Microsoft's credit they still have a few amazing products that I have mentioned before, like Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005.  Microsoft also has the very unenviable challenge of trying to support an OS that is 20+ years old and has successfully maintained backward compatibility on a ever shifting hardware platform that has to support billions of permutations of hardware configurations.   Apple on the other hand got a fresh start with OS X and they completely control the hardware platform, which is a much easier proposition.  It will be interesting to see how Apple is able to successfully avoid the bloat that will come with time as their adoption rates increase and the need to support backward compatibility becomes more prevalent.

So my message to any windows users considering the switch to Apple is to go for it, you will not regret it in the slightest.  The only issues I have found thus far is that GoToMeeting requires Windows to host meetings, and QuickBooks online has tied themselves to ActiveX technology via Internet Explorer.  For both of these I simply run VMWare fusion, although I will probably migrate to Adobe Connect for meetings, and I am hopeful Inuit will release a Flex client for QuickBooks sometime in the near future with their QuickBase announcement.