Win To Mac – Why move from Windows to a Mac?
Why would a business user move from the Windows platform on a PC to the OS X platform on a Mac, what would the problems be, and how would such a move go? We attempt to answer these questions in a few short installments.
The computer desktop is perhaps the piece of business software with which the business user is most familiar. There is not a lot of choice in desktops, really. There are just three: Windows (the most popular by far), Mac OS X (a distant second), and Linux (or some other *nix variant with desktop software included, which comes in third). Major corporate IT departments have a big investment in the hardware and software they use.
Some of that investment is in the form of the computers themselves, and in the programs they run. Part of the investment is in training employees to use those computers and that software. Some of it is in the peripheral hardware with which the business desktop interacts: printers, scanners, networks, and so on. Another big part is the investment in the IT experts employed by the company to keep all of this running smoothly. We are talking big bucks.
But there are indeed reasons to move from the most popular to one of the other two desktops. Some of them are purely philosophical and ethical. Others are fairly practical. How much such a move affects your organization depends on how big you are, how flexible you are, and how badly you want to do it. Much of the movement away from Windows is driven by frustration with Microsoft, their software, and their business ethics. There are some famous cases of such moves.
Lately, a few corporations have decided that Macs are not much more trouble for them to use and maintain than Windows machines. Personally, I wanted to make the move for primarily philosophical reasons. I do not like what Microsoft has become and did not want to send them any more money. I looked at both choices that were available to me and decided that I would start with the Mac and see how it worked for me and how it dealt with the Windows PCs that are spread across my admittedly small venture. In future installments, I will be looking at the reasons that I made the change, why I made the change that I did, and how it went.
Next time, why I did not move to *nix.
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