Reading through my last blog post (about Microsoft fanboys) I started to wonder if I am actually, officially, an Apple fanboy?!

Analysing the evidence (I own a Macbook Pro and a 5th Gen ipod) it seems like I’m half way there, although I have no interest in the ipod touch (I listen to music, I don’t “touch” it) and the iphone is a little large and expensive to sit in my pocket with my loose change and keys.

I love the ipod. People have said Apple products are form over function and I agree to a certain extent. The ipod does what it does very well. It does not have external SD card slots or funky things like that, it just plays music and has a nice interface. The cheap looking white earphones are actually pretty damn good and all in all I am very impressed. It is not cheap, but then again most good things aren’t.

Take my laptops for example. Dell are churning out sub £300 laptops while the cheapest Apple offering is double that, yet people still buy them. Once again I do believe a lot of this is the “fanboy effect”, and a lot of it is down to disillusionment with Microsoft, especially since the debut of Vista, but in my opinion most of it is because “it just works”.

You only need to look at the amount of security updates coming out of Microsoft. The OS is fundamentally flawed and that’s not likely to change soon.

Apple on the other hand have made two very important (and in my opinion very wise) decisions in recent years:

The building of the recent OSX versions around the *NIX platform

The switch to the Intel Core Duo processors

I believe the first of these two is the most significant. Memory and process management is so much better on *NIX and always has been. OSX maintains it’s useability to the “normal” user, yes those who know what they are doing can easily get a root shell and get down and dirty with the OS. This is a big thing!

The second point, the switch to Core Duo, is more of a marketing thing. People like to compare. Previously people had no idea of the comparitive power between the Power PC chips and the equivalent PC. Now the playing field is level and people can see what they are getting. It simply makes it easier to like Apple, and shows that they are working to bring over more of the PC crowd, rather than sitting in their ivory towers claiming to be superior.

So, looking at the evidence, am I an Apple fanboy? Not yet, would be my honest answer. I don’t take their products without seeing them, and even then I believe most of them are not useful to me. I do, however, believe I will be a lifetime user of the Apple OS’s and their fantastic laptops, even if I do need to sell a kidney to afford them!

I admit, in the early days I used to be a fan of Microsoft. I remember for my 18th birthday I was given a copy of “The road ahead - by Bill Gates”. I swallowed it whole and was genuinely excited about the way the world would turn out with Mr Gates at the helm.  I was (and still am) impressed by how Bill got where he is, how he started out and the early decisions he made.

However, things change.

MS DOS came about (don’t forget, nobody will ever need more than 640k… yeah Bill, thanks for that!), then Windows 3.x, and I was still suitably impressed with their products. Things generally worked and there was not a lot to compare, much less compete. I was really bemused by people “messing” with OS/2 (in my mind it was the mathematical definition of half an Operating System!) when Microsoft appeared to do things better.

Not to bore you with the happenings between 1997 and 2007 I will jump ahead…

Vista… the largest contentious issue since the Iraq war. Personally I don’t hate it, but I do think Microsoft are by no means the market leader in the OS arena. I admit, I am becoming a fan of Apple, despite recognising their hardware is vastly overpriced for what it is (even if it is good!). I always used to bat for the PC team, even when I was largely turning off Microsoft. In my mind Apple has made a positive move turning to the Intel platform.

But this is a Microsoft post, not Apple, so we’ll move on.

The thing that irks me more than anything has to be the way Microsoft set “standards” using the springboard of the MS Fanboys. These are the people who appear as brainwashed as lemmings and sign up to every major software release to come out of Redmond, no matter that the quality.

Take Internet Explorer for example; Version 5 was released in 1999, with IE6 following up in 2001. At this point Firefox was non existent and only geeks in University used Mozilla and Opera. Netscape were struggling and so IE dominated the browser market. When they integrated it more and more with the OS this situation was compounded.

What is the problem with this? Nothing, I suppose, if MS went onward and upward and produced a best of breed browser, but they didn’t. Once they “won” the browser war they sat on it for 5 years! It was only with the introduction of Firefox that they finally got shook up into updating their archaic browser. The major issues people had (and still have) with IE is the fact that it is blatantly non-standard. It renders a lot of pages incorrectly and is an accessibility nightmare.

I have been having this debate for years, the usual argument is “everyone uses it”. Ok, that’s ok then! Things do seem to be changing though, which has to be a good thing (IE is now less than 80% of the browser market).

I have recently had the experience of seeing a company-wide Microsoft Fanboy. This is a whole organisation signed up to the “Redmond Treaty”, taking everything Microsoft have to offer, from TFS to Live Meeting. I have no individual issues with these products, but what I find hard to believe is the way the decision seems to have been made without considering the other alternatives.  It’s people like these that mean Microsoft does not have to work at producing a quality product at a reasonable price because they know that whatever the quality and whatever the price there are people all over the world waiting to sign up!

TFS (Team Frustration Foundation server) is another product that sparks lively debate on the net. The issue with this one is the best alternative to TFS is open source solution of Subversion, which large organisations shy away from because it’s free (and free must mean crap, right??).

I have read that:

TFS = Subversion(with apache) +  TortoiseSVN + Various other products.

On one side that seems good, on the other side do we believe it is all that… do we hell? It’s Microsoft once again telling us “how it’s going to be” and once again people are sucking it up!

Is TFS cross platform?…. NO!

Is TFS source code open and free of restrictions?… err… NO!

Is TFS licensing reasonable?… ok that’s a contentious one in itself, but I just put it in there for you to think about.

With so many companies wishing to produce cross platform code it is such a shame that the Microsoft steamroller have managed to such so many people into the .NET way, thus restricting enterprise level development purely by providing a solution that fits the latest marketing buzz-words (OO, COM, DOM, or whatever the latest acronym in the board room is). I firmly believe that the best development comes from the people who care about what they are doing (basically the open source crowd) rather than the people who are out to reap the financial rewards (Microsoft) and the people who blindly do what they are told (the MS Fanboys).

I am sure Vista will prove to be the thorn in Microsoft’s side, but the Redmond steamroller will survive it and continue to swallow up vast areas of the market with products that are overpriced and could be so much better.

I ask you this question… How many companies are there in the world who could take so long to produce an OS that is so lacking in improvements, and still know that it will sell (albeit not as well as expected) and will become once again “the standard”?