switching is hard

Hot on the heels of the previous post, I discovered an unpublished draft from a while ago... quoting Warren Ellis again!

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Warren Ellis | And Back: Sometimes I think about buying a Mac laptop, on the basis that it would be such a counterintuitive alien piece of Fischer Price fuckware that I would only be able to write manuscripts on it and would be damned lucky to get on to the internet at all (I don’t think I even have Mac software for my cranky router). I’m sure I would be very productive.

A while back I switched to Windows 7 both at home and work - work after a brief experiment with XP64, from which I can confidently say don't use Windows XP 64 (it always felt like 64 bit support badly bolted on to a 32 bit OS).

Given my company's "choice of platforms", the majority of people are on Macs; so I periodically find myself pair programming and swearing as I try to use Macs. Honestly, those little flat keyboards are really nice to use except none of the fucking command/modifier keys are in the Right Place™. People try to use mine and discover a similar problem with my ergonomic keyboard.

Before my current job I worked at a strictly-Windows shop and watched Mac user coworkers struggle to learn Windows. It didn't help their suffering that the boxes were underpowered crap, desperately short of RAM for the tasks they had to do.

All of this just confirms some things I've thought for a while...

• Switching is hard. It doesn't matter what you used to use and what you're using now. That switch will suck. That includes switching to OSX. No OS is intuitive and feel free to tell people to get fucked sideways if they say one or other choice is inTOO-a-TIV! All OSes are essentially random and you just have to bloody learn their weirdness.
• Switching input hardware can be as big a hassle as switching OS. I keep a mouse on my machine to avoid the near-total stoppage caused by people trying to use my input tablet for the first time.
• Switching OS when you don't have to is essentially pointless. If you employ people, you should understand it makes no business sense whatsoever to force a Mac user onto a PC or vice versa. You pay them to get shit done, give them the tools they want and need. Otherwise you're just paying them to re-learn what they could have been doing already.
• Switching from XP to Win7 was a huge change. What strikes me is at first I felt a bit like I do on occasions where I'm forced to use OSX. Partly because it was a big change and partly because MacOS and Windows are very slowly converging. Seriously, whether you like to admit it not, there is cross-pollination and parallel evolution going on.
• For me, learning Win7 is still easier than learning OSX fresh - so sticking to a product line seems to help alittle bit. Really though, imagine going straight from OS8 to the latest OSX - that's what a lot of PC users are doing. We skipped Vista, it was crap. Which meant we were on XP for a long time. I suppose some people did suffer along with Vista, but most tech-savvy PC users just put XP back on their machines. After all those service packs, XP's pretty bloody solid - goes a long way to explaining how it can be holding on to nearly half the market.

At least if you want to switch, it's easier. If you don't want to switch it's hell. Slowly learning the new OS in parallel to your usual OS is probably the least destructive path.