Mac vs PC Reloaded – really?
It is the silly season aka as the “Sommerloch”, or the “morte-saison”, so there is time for this post. We all know the legendary “Mac vs. PC” spots, which Apple aired between 2006 and 2009. The underlying idea was the smart newcomer Mac attacking the bold and not always very smart acting established PC.
So far, everything matches the system. If you are in a weaker market position, with an apparently smarter product, you need to attack.
Well, now the still 10:1 outselling market leader Microsoft seems to strike back – although it is hard to understand why – given the 10:1 share for Microsoft is still true? Microsoft’s campaign seems to be quite odd. Among other surprising things, MS claims that “Macs can take time to learn” and qualify their claim with “Things just don’t work the same way on Macs if you’re used to a PC”.
And now we are getting to the point, which I notice frequently. Developers of ill designed software (and I am really only relating to the user interface here) managed to completely screw up the user’s expectation of how things should work. Computer users who are exposed to quirky interfaces for years (if not generations) do not expect the obvious any more. Being trained to look for the work-around in the first place, one seems to be unable to expect the straight solution.
Given this situation, MS strange claim seems to sell: “Things just don’t work the same way on Macs if you’re used to a PC”, but it does not say at all that PCs do a good job in helping us solving our problems – no, they only meet people’s degraded expectations … sad.
