[Ti] [OT] what to say to Windows users:

[b]

Tarik paused, thought it over, and spoke thusly:

>On Thursday, August 28, 2003, at 08:16  pm, b wrote:
>
>>Everything? Obviously?
>>
>>Like:
>>
>
>1) It's what everyone else uses and/or  they don't want to risk any 
>incompatibility ( for example did you know that the VBA scripting 
>language is not truly cross platform as MS claims)

I didn't know that. I'm working my way through an Excel 800-pager 
these days, and was under the impression that scrips generated in VBA 
would be compatible. Although, to be honest, I don't care, 
personally, as I do all of my serious work on the Mac.

>
>2) They are gamers and want the latest greatest games and also to be 
>able to readily upgrade/mod their machine to make use of the latest 
>hardware

Yup. I lived with a PC gamer, a real diehard.  One of my most 
easily-recalled visual memories of troy, was his coming into the 
living room (where my office was, bleary-eyed, mumbling about "the 
BIOS this", "the BIOS that". And of course he was on one nice IBM box 
with fans blowing at it from every which way, with another box 'under 
construction'. Running 98. And RPG fan.

I have no gripe whatsoever with the gamers, or PC gamers. At least 
they believe in *something*. But I have a feeling that when they get 
a load of the Radeon 9600, or what is it..9700, running on a fast G5, 
with all that front-side bus, independent dual CPUs... well, who 
knows?

>
>3) They are cheap. (most fall in this camp) You can explain to be 
>people about total cost of ownership until you are blue in the face, 
>but for some people cash spent is the most important factor. It's a 
>psychological thing... (I'm talking about middle class people in 
>developed service economies here by the way).

Tarik, as people 'grow up', or, more accurately, get older, it 
becomes harder and harder to explain anything to them that has to do 
with money and the concepts of PV vs. FV.  when my daughter was 8 I 
answered her query re: "Why do you read a paper with all numbers in 
it?". [Wall St. Journal]. I opened up the Money & Investing section 
and explained price point determination via supply & demand, the best 
way I could... Six months later she asked if we could "go to that 
little lace in Chinatown that sells ten Sailor Moon cards for $3?", I 
said sure, and she continued, "there's always only a few cards in 
ten, that I don't have already, so I sell the doubles at school for a 
dollar each, and I can buy 2 more packs of ten." ...she was, 
apparently, the last person to actually grasp economics, as explained 
by me.

Computer (IT) people aren't money people, and money people 
(purchasing/Planning) aren't computer people. Microsoft sees the 
reality of this every time they look at their margins. Do you think 
MS 'accidentally' created the y2k 'bug'? It generated over $12 
Billion US for MS and MS-certified 'consultants'. But enough. A child 
in 1995 would know that "2000 was coming", as did Apple

Despite Mr. Jobs' sophistication re: marketing, and the need for hard 
business decisions and profits, Jobs, Apple employees, and the Mac 
and its software, have all retained a 'childlike' sense of "wonder", 
and "Why not?", that the other companies in their related fields, as 
a rule, lack.
>
>as far as i am concerned Apple are doing the right thing at the 
>moment, chipping away with better and better software, most of which 
>is bundled free. Most PC users will admit that MS have done anything 
>even vaguely innovative or useful in their OS since the first 
>release of Windows 2000 (I still run 2k in preference to XP) . Can't 
>wait to see that distributed compile feature working in 10.3 :)

Before a catastrophic meltdown over here, which I will address in an 
on-topic thread, later, I was running Win2kPro in VirtualPC, for 
basically the same reason. I still run XP Pro to check things, but 
very rarely. VPC 6 is fine-tuned for NT-based systems, so win2k is it.

I'm somewhat concerned about the fact (due to little-endian vs. 
big-endian incompatibilities that I don't want to go into here) that 
VirtualPC will not run on the G5. Building a PC, on the side, is out 
of the question, as, as far as i know, the Macintosh, running VPC, is 
the only machine that will run large numbers of 
independently-configured Windows and Linux operating systems on one 
machine, with drag-and-drop, shared folder/drives/volumes,  common 
access to internet connections, and the MacOS, itself, 
simultaneously. Too bad, that.

>--
>Tarik
~flipper

PS. I, too, will cease my part of this thread now.