On Sep 15, 2008, at 4:35 PM, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
On Mon, 2008-09-15 at 16:27 -0500, Philip Thompson wrote:
On Sep 15, 2008, at 2:53 PM, tedd wrote:
At 12:36 PM -0500 9/15/08, Philip Thompson wrote:
On Sep 15, 2008, at 7:47 AM, tedd wrote:
There's more to expense than the just original purchase price.
tedd, I just love your storytelling. ;) If you hadn't said this, I
was going to make the same argument. Initial purchase price doesn't
always mean that Macs are more expensive. Just look at all the time
(a huge emphasis here) and money spent dealing with windoze-based
machines and software. Granted, each person will have their own
experiences - some good, some not so good - but from my experience,
I know that I am more efficient (and let's not forget less
frustrated) when using my Mac.
If time is money, I'm losing money each time I have to deal with
the inconveniences of M$ windoze.
~Philip
~Philip:
You are absolutely right. People often don't consider the time they
waste as cost.
If you like my stories, here's another -- I interviewed with the HR
department at Michigan State University some years back. They were
wanting to upgrade the way their HR department handled all the
University's HR data.
In one part of my interview they asked what I would recommend for
long term storage -- I recommended both buying more hard drives for
back-ups and burning DVD's for their long storage. They replied that
they couldn't do CD/DVD's because they wanted something that had a
longer shelf-life than just a few years. After I said "Huh?!" --
they explained that they were told that CD's and DVD's were a short-
lived medium and they had to use "tape drives" which were better.
That was strike one.
Later in another part of my interview, I attended a PeopleSoft
presentation where PeopleSoft employees were demonstrating a new
high cost HR software program that ran on windoes machines. Some 18+
high level MSU HR people were in attendance.
In the middle of the presentation, the PeopleSoft program locked the
windoze machine up so tight that they had to literally pull the plug
out of the wall and reboot it -- while losing all the data they had
just entered. Everyone laughed and said that they all knew that such
lock-ups happen every once in a while -- it goes with the territory.
I didn't agree -- that was strike two.
When they finally asked me what I would recommend for their
department, I said they should seriously consider replacing their
aging windoze machines with something that wouldn't crash, like
Macs. After all, many of the departments on campus were Mac based.
That was strike three.
I was politely told that this was THE HR department of MSU and they
needed serious computing power -- no way could Macs cut it.
Sometimes, you just can't beat misconceptions.
Speaking of misconceptions...
Has anyone seen the new M$ commercial where they are asking these
people to review the next version of their OS. Some of the responses
of the people were that they really thought this new OS was cool/
neat/
whatever. Then afterwards, M$ told them it was Vista.
Society, in general, has a pre-conceived notion about how much Vista
sucks. I'm not here to argue its accuracy, but it does give you a
good
idea about misconceptions.
Kids, the lesson of the day is: Don't knock it before you try it.
=D
~Philip
Ah I'd heard of this story. What you've forgotten to mention was that
the computers were all set up on hardware chosen by Microsoft, and all
running software especially picked by Microsoft. Now, I'd hazard a
guess
that even Microsoft is smart enough to pick a combination that is
extremely unlikely to crash on the end user. I'd love to see the same
test on the same people set up by Mac people and Linux gurus. I think
that as this is not really a fair test, you can pretty much get any
answer you want.
Oh, I have no doubt they only showed the people in the commercial that
had good things to say about it. I don't know the details about the
software/hardware, but it's about how people perceived Vista without
really having used it before. I'm sure if I were one of those people
that was testing it, I would have said, "Hey, this looks a lot like
Vista. Are you sure this isn't Vista?" And then I would've got up,
left, and then played on my iPhone until I got home to play on my MB
Pro. =P
~Phil
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