What will write here it’s been on my head for about a month. I wrote four other drafts but didn’t like them. They got thrown away because:
- I made them long.
- I made them complicated adding stuff that wasn’t related.
- Simply put they were not nice to read.
What I’ll do here is just put out the heart of the post and work it a little. Basically it’s a phrase… theorem… hypothesis… whatever, but here it goes:
An average Macintosh user is better using a computer than an average Windows user.
There, I’ve said it (written it?). It’s that simple. Could be a truth, could be a fallacy, but at the end of the day it’s my opinion. Working it for a while took me to the negative and positive ends, having the original as the “center”.
Positive end:
A good Macintosh user is much better using a computer than a good Windows user.
Working as tech support is rare to have someone from this end call. When it happens it’s because it’s something they’re not able to solve themselves like resetting a password — happens to everyone — or solving issues with the DSL line itself. The classic example of these people it’s the Switcher, that person who jumped from Microsoft to Apple and never looked back. Occasionally it’s people who have always used MacOS but they know Windows by necessity; after all this is a planet dominated by Windows.
Here comes the negative end:
A bad Macintosh user is worse using a computer than a bad Windows user.
These are the people who call asking why the computer doesn’t turn on. Or why thing foo does bar when before it did baz. Those who ask for help and then say “I don’t know”, who then unwillingly grab the mouse and barely try to do something themselves. The worst example is the person who doesn’t want to admit to not knowing absolutely anything and — even though will never say it — is not interested to learn. These are people who should not use a computer without supervision.
I know I didn’t mention Linux, and for all the ongoing effort it might never be an OS for the common consumer… I hope that doesn’t happen and it gets bigger than the big two. Almost always those who begin to use it it’s because they wanted to use it out of curiosity or looking for something beyond what Microsoft or Apple had to offer them. Soon there will be kids who know Linux because it’s the operating system they grew up with; they’re not stuck in a single paradigm of doing stuff a specific way and they’re not afraid of getting their hands dirty poking configurations or — by Bog! — opening a console to see what’s there.
I’ll end with that… it’s very different from previous versions but I’m satisfied. What I wanted to say is now in the open :)