Product Loyalty
I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, but I’ll give them this, their fans are really, really loyal.
Someone I e-mail on an almost daily basis recently suggested I change my e-mail client to MS Outlook from Mozilla Thunderbird. Their reasoning? All of the e-mails she received from me were being flagged as spam and filtered by Outlook.
I suggested she should change her filter settings so that it didn’t filter people in her address book: done. Make sure I’m in the address book: done. No change, I’m still being filtered. I suggested that her Outlook seemed to be having a problem: Can you change to Outlook to stop it from doing this?
Hmm… You software isn’t functioning properly, so you want to alleviate your problem by having me install the same software that’s not working for you on my computer. Let me think… No!
Sad maybe, but very loyal.
Hmmmm. I wouldn’t call it loyalty. Apple customers are loyal. Hell, they hang onto all kinds of myths that haven’t been true for over ten years, and pay ridiculously high prices for computers just because they won’t own anything else. I’ve never met anybody who said, “I’ll never own anything but a Wintel.”
I use Thunderbird, but I don’t much like it for about forty different reasons. It’s a vasty inferior product to Firefox. I won’t use Outlook.
About the only Microsoft software I can actually say I really love is Excel. Word’s fine. I have no reason to switch from Word (and open office sucks out loud and always has). Access is a poor excuse for a RDBMS, but it’s been getting better over the last few releases. And VBA makes it highly customizable.
MS won the market because they had the applications, and they had the applications because they didn’t keep a stranglehold on the software developers like Apple did. MS didn’t target geeks. They targetted you know, normal people. And normal people don’t care about stability, or operating systems. They buy computers for what they’ll do. Applications.
Comment by rightwingprof — October 20, 2006 @ 9:26 am
That does sound a little silly!
I don’t use Outlook or Thunderbird, all my email is web based. I do use Firefox, but it’s a little annoying in some ways (like the cursor keys to scroll up/down don’t work for some sites, apparently at random) and really annoying for other reasons (the Java uploader at my gallery site is very very slllllloooooowwwwww), but I love the tabs and the popup blocker is better. I’m not exactly a power user in case you haven’t noticed… :)
Comment by jan — October 20, 2006 @ 11:17 pm