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What to do when upgrade fever strikes
MICHAEL BYWATER is tired of the Mac versus Windows debate. For him the matter was settled some time agoHAVE you ever thought how nice it would be to be taken seriously? I have. People from big companies would ring me up and ask to consult me, and I would tell them I cost £5 000 (about R50 000) a day. And they would smile, because £5 000 a day would mean they were making a sage business decision. If I charged only £50 (R500) a day (plus my bus fare) they would have to confront the fact that they were morons who could be out-thought by a 50-quid-a-day loser who used a bus.I bet Nicholas Negroponte gets taken seriously. In the August issue of Wired magazine he described how he changed from Macintosh to Windows, and how horrible Windows was. But what really annoys me is that I have been intending to write that very column for 18 months, and now I have missed the boat, so I will never be taken seriously. One of the reasons is that I haven't actually changed over from Macintosh to Windows. I said I would, but I didn't. A man from Apple rang up and said: "Don't be silly - you'd hate it; anyway, we've got this really wonderful PowerBook coming out and everything is going to be fine . . ." He did not, of course, say anything about giving me one. So I hung fire and I never got around to changing to Windows. Not like Negroponte. He said that "no entrepreneur can feel confident basing his or her work on the Mac"; that "people concerned about tomorrow just cannot settle for the tools of yesterday" and that the latest "leading-edge" Macs are "far too late, if not too little". I do not know what Negroponte does with his computer, but I do know that, for most people, there's not a hair's breadth of difference between what you can do on a Mac or with Windows. In every area of everyday endeavour, users of both systems are equally well served. The only difference is that the Macintosh is better designed, easier to use and involves the user in infinitely less clunking around in the aesthetically disgusting technological rust-belt that surrounds each Windows application. Unpack Negroponte's argument and you find, at root, nothing but marketing-speak. Both the Mac and Windows are "tools of yesterday", whatever that means; and his ventilations about "leading edge" and "too late if not too little" are the sort of hot air used by marketers to keep us "upgrading". I think we need to be clear that most personal computing happens in the mind - the computer itself is merely a transcription device. We need to understand that much of what drives us to upgrade and expand is simple illusion, foisted on us by corporations whose only concern is increasing sales. When upgrade fever strikes, we must ask ourselves: "What can I not do with my present system?" Anything else is just rolling over and allowing ourselves to be raped by the upgrade-pushers. I suggest a moratorium. We should all band together and simply refuse to upgrade anything for at least 12 months. The industry may collapse, but that's a small price to pay for the recovery of our human dignity. - © The Telegraph, London
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