Lonnie R. West

It’s interesting, as a newbie Mac user I feel like I have defected from my team and am now trying to walk nonchalantly back into the base camp as if nothing had happened.

For those of you who do not know, Microsoft TechEd is a conference held yearly to promote new products and services, and is a great way for people in the IT world to network and keep their education up to date.

I expected some level of mocking rivalry like one would experience in middle school when they decided to go against the common trend, but it has not been like that at all.

To wit: There are actually a LOT of Mac users here. There is even more discussion about Apple and Macs among the attendees, and particularly the staff. I think the influence and intrusion is being felt very strongly and Apple is no longer considered as some small company that can be ignored.

I learned this today: the number of viruses affecting Windows PC’s number in the tens of thousands, and anti-virus software for the Windows community is a major cottage industry.

There are 3 virus that affect the Mac, and non of those are able in infect a machine unless you intentionally install them. There are a couple companies that sell anti-virus software for the Mac, but they rely on fear held over from Windows. There is no real market for anti-virus software for the Mac! Cool, huh?

Aside from all the discussions I hear about Apple and Mac PCs, I notice a very interesting trend in every Microsoft presentation I have listened to this week.

A few years ago when I attended some of these events, Microsoft had the “we are king of the hill” attitude, and all of their events made a point of showing how superior their products were to their competitors. If you were using a competing product, the message was that you need to “get on the bus” and migrate to Microsoft immediately.

It was plain that they wanted users to have their entire business running on Microsoft systems and software, and putting anything else into the mix only meant trouble.

The shift now is subtle, but it is there if you read in between the words. The message now is that Microsoft is the best inter-operability solution.

This is a big change! They acknowledge and support that businesses are typically running other operating systems, servers, virtualization products, and business tools than just their own. So instead of forcing users to use Microsoft or risk isolating themselves, they are working very hard on creating solutions that tie seamlessly into all their competitor’s products.

Interesting move, and a brilliant one. It is easy to see that Microsoft, as a monolithic corporation, cannot be as agile and develop innovative new solutions as quickly as dozens of independent smaller companies.

If they were to maintain their old stance, I fear that they would end up going the way that the major computer companies of the 70’s did: they thought they were king of the mountain until all the peasants gathered to build their own mountain, and collectively it surpassed the king’s.