Switching Back to Windows after 3 Years with Mac OS X

Anyone who has read my previous articles knows that I am a Mac user who uses Windows - or a Windows user who uses Macs, depending on which computer I'm sitting in front of at a given moment.

I'll come right out and say it, I like both OS X and Windows for different reasons and for different tasks. Both are easy (for me) to use, both are stable when properly configured (easier to do in OS X), and both do some things well that the other does poorly (or not at all).

Which brings me to my topic for this go-around: switching.

Switching

Apple had a large ad campaign not too many years ago about "Switchers", PC users who grew so frustrated with the state of PC malware and other Windows problems that they ditched Windows, bought a Mac, and are now all smiles.

I was and remain a frequent switcher, switching platforms whenever it suits the work (or play) that I'm doing at the time. In 1986, I switched from a proprietary (PASCAL-based) HP computer to Windows 386. In 1993, I switched from Windows 3.1 to Macintosh System 7. In 1998, I switched to Windows 98 and then immediately to Windows NT, and in 2003, I switched to Mac OS X. And 2006 saw me switch yet again, this time to Windows XP.

Now when I say switch, I refer only to my primary computer, as I always have more than one, and since 1993 I have always maintained at least one Mac and one PC. My primary computer is defined (by me) as the one that has my master email archive and documents folder, but it's not necessarily the computer I spend the most time with or use for the most challenging projects.

Since I started practicing law, my primary computer is the one that I take with me to court, where I want access to the latest versions of all documents and files.

History

Here is a brief history of my switches in primary OS and the reasons behind them. These reasons will likely be very different for you or anyone else you might ask, with some things that are important to me meaningless to you, and of course vice-versa.

Let's start from the beginning. My Hewlett Packard Series 80 personal computer was given to me in 1981 by my father, who bought it for work and never touched it at home. It used a modified system that was either a dumbed down PASCAL or a souped-up BASIC, depending on how you look at such things. It came with a book of programs, and I actually was fairly decent at writing little applications to automate many of the things I liked to do. It had a word processor called Word 80, a version of VisiCalc, and a database that I never played with.

When college came around and I started doing more advanced writing, not to mention had a need to share my writing with others, it was time to retire the HP and get something semi-standard. I went to my university bookstore and was all ready to buy a Mac, as that was what everyone in academia used back then, but the IBM PS/2 with its 15" monitor and 256 colors was more than I could resist, especially compared to the 9" monochrome screens on the Macs I could afford. It was a bad choice, but I was young and wanted to play games.

1993 saw me get married and land an overseas teaching job. My IBM desktop couldn't make the trip on account of important restrictions and duties in Korea, so I bought my first laptop and made my first switch to Macintosh. That PowerBook 145b was already outdated in 1993 - it was a severely crippled design with its 8 MB RAM ceiling and it had no video output and a monochrome display. I didn't care; it was an ergonomic masterpiece that set the standard for all modern laptops, and despite its limitations, Mac software was so well written back then that it lasted for three years as my primary computer and another two years as a secondary. I wish I still had it.

1998 saw me working for the government and doing a lot of travel. As a movie lover, my new laptop had to be DVD capable and have an active matrix color screen. Sadly, my budget was $2,000, and Apple just didn't offer anything near my price that had what I needed. Only the passive-matrix "MainStreet" version of the popular WallStreet PowerBook came in under my price limit, and the cheapest active matrix model was a full $800 over, meaning at that time it was simply out-of-reach. Windows 98 was horrible, and I quickly moved to Windows NT, which while slightly user-unfriendly, was at least very stable - and far more robust than the Mac OS of the time (8.5 if I remember correctly).

1999 saw Windows 2000 released, and I was a very happy camper for the next four years, using various versions of the Mac OS only for digital photography and Web content creation. Laptop PCs with their wimpy video chipsets just didn't handle Photoshop well, while my old Power Macintosh 7200 was still a terrific Photoshop machine with its two fast SCSI drives and 256 MB of RAM, which with Photoshop 3 running under Mac OS 8.1 was quite a hot system.

I moved up to a Power Mac G4 running at 400 MHz with a whopping 768 MB of RAM and OS 9 for image work and still have that machine today running the latest Mac OS X 10.4.8 with dual video cards and a 1.0 GHz processor upgrade.

2003 was the year that the viruses took over Windows. I was in law school, and I kept getting infected despite my best efforts. I bought a 12" PowerBook G4 as my antivirus solution. I used 12" PowerBooks (and for a little while a MacBook) as my primary computers until just two months ago, when I switched back to Windows on my primary machine, this time to get tablet hardware that is unavailable on the Mac platform. (See Tablet Computing Can Improve Productivity and Why Microsoft OneNote is the Best Digital Scrapbook.)

I'm still a huge fan of the 12" PowerBook and still prefer OS X over Windows for portable computers, but where judges don't get upset over writing on a Tablet PC, they do object to typing on a conventional laptop.

2006 was the year that I started my own law firm, and as I started from scratch, I made a lot of mistakes in my implementation of technology. As a Mac enthusiast, I thought that going with all Macs would be the easy way to go, but I was wrong. Finding appropriate software was more difficult, implementing collaborative computing services was more difficult, and I finally hit one roadblock too many.

The Latest Switch

That roadblock was shared calendaring that would be accessible on every employee's computer and on my portable, with the copy on my portable available and editable even when not on the network. This sounds like it should be easy, and if everybody in the company uses one platform, it is. On Macs, there is the .mac calendar synchronization using Apple's iCal. The program is very easy to use and was our shared calendar for the first few months I was in business when we all used Macs.

The problem was that many of the judges I appear in front of got angry when I looked up dates on a conventional laptop (12" PowerBook) in their courtrooms. I started playing with Tablet PCs and found that rather than judicial animosity, I got judicial curiosity, with many judges taking an interest in the technology and actually wanting demonstrations of it after the hearing. In court, looking through a local calendar (Microsoft Outlook) was every bit as easy as it was in iCal or Entourage on a Mac, but since it was a tablet and had no screen sticking up, it was no more intrusive to the court than a pad and paper.

Other benefits of the Tablet soon had me hooked, as I no longer had to copy my handwritten notes into Word documents after court to keep organized as my handwriting was now digital.

iCal and .mac don't share with PCs except for in a browser, which just doesn't work in court where I have no Internet access. Even if I did have access, I don't want to work with a slow Web-based application when a judge is giving me the date of the next hearing and I need to tell him right now if it is in conflict. Needless to say, other web-based solutions, such as those provided by Yahoo and Google, weren't valid options either, and I just couldn't find anything that would synchronize with both Outlook on Windows and iCal or Entourage on the Mac.

Finally, I bought a server to handle that function.

My choices were a Mac running OS X Server or a PC running Windows 2003 Small Business Server (SBS). OS X Server is an amazing product for sharing files and printers, hosting websites, and even for functioning as the boot drive for networked Macs. It does not, however (at least to my knowledge) have an integrated collaboration and scheduling package.

SBS includes a full version of Microsoft Exchange Server, which is exactly the type of functionality that I wanted. It has email and calendaring with capabilities far beyond the standard POP or even IMAP email accounts and calendar synchronization that is far faster and more reliable than a hosted system like .mac, which had four outages in the five months that I used it. Most important, Exchange lets everyone in my office have their own calendars which are shared, visible to others in the office if permissions are assigned, or even multiple calendars.

Macs Less Than Fully Exchange Compatible

My calendar is shared, and it's visible on my staff's computers so that they can add and delete appointments as they answer the phones. My plan was that I would use Outlook on my Tablet PC, and since Microsoft Entourage is Exchange compatible, that I would be able to keep on using Macs in the office for their simplicity and ease of maintenance. I was wrong. Entourage is Exchange compliant and works great with your own email and calendars. It just doesn't like to share.

At a PC running Outlook, accessing another user's shared calendar is as easy as a single click. On a Mac running Entourage, you have to schedule the appointment in your own calendar and then invite the shared user (me), and let Exchange tell you if the shared calendar is in conflict with the appointment. If there's no conflict, it's easy, but if there is, you just have to keep trying to get a free block of time. This is very cumbersome, especially when a potential client is on the phone trying to schedule an appointment and the secretary just wants to see if I have an open half-hour on Tuesday afternoon.

I even called Microsoft's Mac Business Unit technical support and found to my delight that their workaround for this limitation in Entourage is to set up the Entourage program of my secretary for my Exchange account. This is not acceptable, as much of my email is confidential and Entourage cannot be set to calendar-only.

Even more baffling are Apple's own built-in applications. Apple's Mail is Exchange compliant for email, but it leaves out calendars and contacts, as it is strictly an email client. Address Book is Exchange compliant, but only for contacts, as it is, you guessed it, a single purpose application only for contacts.

iCal, Apple's calendar program, is the only part of Apple's bundled office application package that is not Exchange compliant. iCal is a terrific application with tremendous versatility, much like the calendar in Outlook for Windows, allowing multiple calendars to be viewed and shared. Sadly, Exchange calendars are not on that list.

Perhaps Apple will add Exchange compliance to iCal in Leopard (OS X 10.5) - and perhaps they won't.

Maybe Microsoft will bring Entourage up to true groupware standards in the next version of Mac Office, but for now Entourage 2004 is a single user application, not a groupware application like Outlook for Windows.

There may well be a workaround like creating a dummy user account on my Exchange Server and using that account on all of our computers including my Tablet PC. I just got tired of trying to make a cross-platform solution work when the Windows half of my network was already sharing easily without a hitch.

And so I have switched yet again, and in what most readers will consider the wrong direction. My office is now entirely PC with the exception a single Mac that is used for image work (evidence) and financial applications. As it always has, it plays nice with our Windows network in every way except calendar sharing, which (as described above) is clumsy. The G4 Mac mini was sold, fetching enough to pay for a pair of cheap PCs (both used).

My employees miss features like Dashboard and the prettier interface of OS X, but the core applications we use - Firefox, Word, Outlook, and Adobe Acrobat Professional and Photoshop - are about the same regardless of platform. The big difference is Outlook backed by Exchange, which finally gives me the scheduling features I've wanted since I opened last March.

In my next installment, I plan on looking at the two platforms a bit more in depth, focusing on the merits of the systems themselves, rather than on the specific applications or broad reasons why I switched back and forth when I did.