Applelust.com: Skewed Mac: Doctor, there's a problem with Windows- Stat!

Skewed Mac

Doctor, there's a problem with Windows- Stat!

Isn't it funny that for the thousands and thousands of software products Windows users have (and hold over us Mac users heads) that they essentially only have one browser? That for all the thousands, there's one they can't de-install, can't hide, can't avoid using in some fashion? For all that choice- they're trapped. Frankly, with the exception of the gaming market, I've never been impressed by the Windows software library. The Windows PC market is one of the only ones where you could see both the newest and the oldest version of a software still on the shelf at a major retailer; Why should the oldest or even second-most-recent even be a choice?

Wrongly thinking I couldn't find a decent statistics package, I used Virtual PC at work and tried out handfuls of Windows software on the matter. Yes, Windows had more choices than the ones available for the Mac. But oddly enough only 3 out of the 30 or so I had to comb through had even a small percentage of the features I wanted, and they all seemed to have different combinations of my features. Not only that, even after weeks of surfing and asking around, I don't feel like I saw it all- there were honestly too many choices to simply buy one and feel satisfied with the decision. It took me forever to settle on one that I wasn't even sure was better than the top 3 on the Macintosh side; I felt like I was settling, and I was- a purchase had to eventually be made. So we picked one up on the Windows side and I used it for exactly a year.

In that year we ran SurfStats on Virtual PC. It worked well enough compared to how un-well Windows seemed to work around it, constantly telling me I'd made "illegal errors" as if Microsoft has any concept of the legal system. Eventually I upgraded the Windows 98 I was using to Windows 2000. The process was horrible and the end result relatively transparent. It didn't really work any better or faster, and neither did SurfStats within it. Then came Windows XP. I thought to myself, "If this is supposed to be the next best thing, than I should upgrade, right?" It's only natural. This is supposed to be an upgrade, an improvement. No one expects Playstation 2 to only be as powerful as the first one- or less so. My debacle with installing Windows XP was already chronicled here. But needless to say it was a far worse experience than the Win 98-2000 jump, with far worse overall results.

For one, SurfStats never worked the same again. Ever. Even after a full re-install and many hours fiddling and adjusting trying to make the OS bed comfortable again. I don't know enough about the code and the cogs of compatibility to point the blame at SurfStats or Windows XP, but the point is, it just stopped working. Period. Still doesn't.

So I started looking again for a Stats package, just a year later, and I feel like a complete idiot. Because in just a week of occasionally surfing around, I found 4 wonderful stats packages for Mac OS X (something I wasn't even looking at before) that blew SurfStats out of the water. To be fair, I also looked at a few on the PC side and tried demo versions- all but one failed to work in Windows XP through a full report, much less offered the features that a few of the Mac-side applications did.

So, I got to pick the best of the pack; That's instead of settling for one mediocre one out of thousands that would crap out after a year and not live through upgrades to the latest system (or maybe the upgrades couldn't live through a life spent with it, who knows). I chose Sawmill for OS X, and it has been an absolute dream. The time saved not fiddling with Virtual PC aside, the time just not waiting for Windows 9X or XP to restart after all the crashes, the time not wasted when a whole log file crunching session that lasted all night didn't crap out because of a sudden, seeming irredeemable gray box popped up and told me that my effort was fruitless for reasons they won't tell me. No wonder people tinker with their Windows machines and the code that runs them: they're desperate for control of the horrible regime that governs their computer and does not naturally want them in control.

So, is life sunny and bright over in Mac-land? Well, a good part of the time, yes. Of course, like any electronics there are occasional issues, and like any software there are issues on that end as well- but rarely with the ambiguous and terrible consequences from the Windows XP side. Did I have fewer choices? Well, not really. When I really got down to it, there were 5-6 programs I would have been very happy with on the Mac side to choose from, and after parsing through tons of applications (many of which I realized came from defunct companies) 2 programs were only on the PC side that were different enough that I'd be missing something in picking one over the other. In fact, Sawmill actually runs on Windows as well- but by running it on OS X I get a much more potent and reliable application, which uses the built-in Apache server in my Mac in a very valuable and neat way.

I'm not so naive to make a blanket statement like, "More choice sucks!" but let me at least suggest that the idea that Mac's don't provide choice is silly. The fact that everyone wants a piece of the Windows market and therefore has made umpteen software titles also does not guarantee good quality. In fact, by the time you realize you won't be happy, you've already paid for the software and now need to shop for a new title, far sooner than your budget allows. I'd be curious to see if any studies research how often Windows users buy new software, for tasks existing software already supposedly fulfills. That might start revealing that while we have fewer options, we're happier and more confident with our choices.

- Dean Browell

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