Apple vs. PC

In the past, we Apple folk have heaped scorn and derision on PC and his followers. I think this is wrong. PC users deserve our pity, not our scorn.

Over the past couple of days, I've had to use a couple of different PCs, and it's a different world.

• Booting up a PC at Ashland and opening Firefox so I can display a PowerPoint show takes more than ten minutes. If I walk into the classroom later than 15 minutes early, I simply don't have time for PC and should set up the Apple (including plugging in all the cables) instead.
• My office PC at Akron got a new printer—it's a printer I share with the rest of the department. But I couldn't find it. No problem. All I have to do, said my office manager, is follow this handy set-up sheet. But none of the screenshots on the setup sheet match things my PC shows.
• OK. Now that the printer is set up, all I want to do is print out four short Word documents from a flash drive. Silly me. I didn't realize that I shouldn't open one, then close it, then open the next. That means that every time I close a document, I'll have to restart Microsoft Word for the next one.
• And of course, to the amusement of my Ashland students, I played the "where the Hell did they put that?" game with Word the other day.

I have seen through Word's strategy, though. It was risky, but I think it will work for them. The not-so-new-now interface that is totally different from all other word processors might have driven off some customers, but now there's a generation of users who think a standard-looking interface (Open Office, NeoOffice, Word Perfect, etc.) is weird and confusing. Microsoft has a generation of captive customers.

And the uncooperative formatting helps too. Formerly, any academic paper formatted pretty much like any other academic paper, no matter what software made it. By locking in an idiosyncratic appearance and making it well-nigh impossible to do anything different, they now have a trademark appearance. People look at a student paper and say, "That was made with Word." It's the same reason a Freightliner schoolbus nose looks different from a Navstar. Each instance is a rolling advertisement.