I was just surfing by. The article and conversation that follows was a good read. Thank you.

I’ve been in IT since the early 80’s and a PC user all these years. Though I can’t drop MS altogether due to my skill set, and the requirements of food, clothing and shelter; I find myself more & more disillusioned with the computing world Microsoft has wrought upon us.

At it’s beginning as an underdog to IBM’s incompetence, to breaking Novell’s stranglehold in PC networking, it was a pleasure to watch it grow. Somewhere along the line, alarm bells started to go off, as MS became a juggernaut more interested in crushing innovation than bringing it about.

Aside from the convoluted underpinnings of the Windows franchise, the DRM initiative in Vista, which only benefits MS and the media conglomerates is the final straw for me. I don’t like the world MS has fashioned and I’ll be voting with my wallet shortly.

I’m on the fence between Ubuntu and Mac, leaning towards Mac due to applications. Oh, I’ll still use MS cruft as I still make a living wallowing in it, but the winds of change are coming. What Gates evangelized, to bring legions of corporate minions to his side, Ballmer’s bug-eyed rants and collusion will destroy.

I hope Apple continues to innovate, as it had to, in order to stay alive. My concern is for the future and vendor lock-in (and the only reason for my fence-sitting). Microsoft too, had a better take on things than IBM or Novell, yet the current OS and application stranglehold it has world-wide, feels no less a burden these days.

The ray of hope I see is Steve’s rally-cry against DRM (while still providing it), and the move away from a dead-end processor to Intel. I’d feel better if Apple embraced AMD as a second-source to Intel in its hardware designs. Intel’s self-absorbed malaise went nowhere in the last decade, until AMD provided a wake-up call.

It’s all about choice, competition, and innovation. If Apple embraces alternate vendors (AMD), and drops AT&T as a single-source provider for the iPhone, it may find a watershed moment when all of us fence-sitting minions of Microsoft move towards the light.

Thanks again for the article… best of luck.

Ed

Let’s talk soon,
JS

- G

@Matthew - I think the misunderstanding on vendor lock-in was my comment regarding Vista. I was simply adding to my analysis on my situation in that if I wanted to upgrade my computing experience (Vista, Mac, or Ubuntu), a move to Vista would involve a new hardware purchase just like the Mac would. Thus, I could justify new hardware purchase when comparing those two options. I initially was hopeful that I could skip buying new hardware and go straight to Ubuntu on my Dell laptop. While I found no issues running Ubuntu on my laptop, I did not find the applications and overall experience to be what I was looking for. I was however very impressed with Ubuntu. Having tried other Linux distros in the past, Ubuntu was a pleasant surprise and will only get better. So, while vendor lock-in is an issue, I wasn\’t one I was considering .

@Raul - I still feel FeedDemon is head and shoulders the best feed reader out there regardless of platform (I have honestly tried every one I could find on each of the major platforms including web-based). I hope the next version of NetNewsWire can compare with FeedDemon. Until then, I\’m using Parallels w/Coherence mode to use FeedDemon on my Mac. And it works wonderfully.

With respect to my Ruby dev environment, I looked at both rolling my own and Locomotive. Since I went the full install route when I was on Windows, I did the same with the Mac. I followed a tutorial (http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx) as recommended by the AWDWR book.

So far it\’s working fine, I\’m just still trying to get used to some of the permission issues I never had to deal with on Windows.

@Bill - Thanks. BTW, nice recent post on your switch to Ubuntu (http://billboebel.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/ive_switched_to.html) as well.