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03.01.07
Microsoft's Owen Disappointed In My Switch To Mac
 By
Thomas Hawk
My friend Charlie Owen, who works on the Media Center team over at Microsoft, is out with a post saying he's disappointed with my post where I suggest to Chris Pirillo that it's time for him to ditch Windows and move on over to a Mac.
I don't think Chris is going to take my advice... but if he hears it enough over time at some point it might kick in (that's how the conversion worked for me).
From Charlie: "I've remained silent about Thomas moving most of his computing to the Mac simply because I was so very disappointed to lose him as a resource to make Windows Media Center a better experience. I was pretty amazed to see him so quickly jump on the 'Get a Mac' bandwagon with Chris' latest post given (1) a majority of his problems with Windows at the time he 'switched' seemed to stem from his chosen OEM and (2) as far as I know he doesn't have a ton of experience with Windows Vista to objectively compare it to MacOS. In his defense, he might have a ton of experience with Windows Vista but hasn't posted about it (yet)."
So I wanted to address a couple of Charlie's points.
First off, nobody wanted Microsoft to be the best operating system in the world more than me. I still think Microsoft's vision for the Media Center PC as an entertainment hub in the home (especially with the XBox 360 as an extender) is brilliant. I've invested thousands of hours into Microsoft Windows and really think it has potential.
What's more, unrelated to their OS, Microsoft has done a lot of things right in the past few years with regards to the blogosphere. Some of this was started by Scoble when he was there, but a lot of it has just grown organically as the outgrowth of a company who believes in blogging. People like Charlie and Sean Alexander and now Michael Gartenberg (among many, many others), understand the forum of blogging and it's an important way to communicate and share ideas in an open forum. By contrast I don't know a single Apple blogger. I'm sure they are out there I just have never met one.
The fact that I've got blogging friends and believe in a vision though are simply not enough.
The immediate temptation is to begin rattling off yet another list of the many, many specific problems that I've had with my PCs over the years, peripherals not being recognized, sticking things into USB slots and getting no response, meta data not taking, I/O device errors, authentication not working, things freezing up, applications not quiting, not being able to delete a folder or file because it's "in use" even when it's not in use by me, etc. etc. etc.). I could probably list 300 specific problems that I've had in the past few years if I really wanted to. At one point I started a blog post where I was going to document all of the problems I was having on my PCs and then see if people could give me advice on how to fix them. Kind of an interesting community based tech support experiment. But there were just too many problems to keep up with and follow up on and it turned out to be a lot more work than I originally thought.
Continue reading this article
About the Author:
Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco based photographer and technology writer.
He publishes the web site Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection and is also
the Evangelist and CEO of the photo sharing site Zooomr.
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