Sunday, June 13, 2010

Thought leaders with Macs?

I'm traveling this Sunday afternoon and once again in the United Airlines lounge, I notice quite a few Mac laptops.  I started to notice this about a year ago - around the time I was starting to seriously contemplate the shift back to Mac from XP.  I'd say that close to 25% of the laptops in use at any time in the club are Macs which is significantly more than the 5-10% market share usually quoted.

However, if you look at the top 20% of laptops sold by cost, the Mac share (at least according to this three year old report - I couldn't find anything newer) is almost 30%.  And this market, I suspect, is the one represented in airline club lounges throughout the world (based on observations in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and Argentina).

I'm very happy with my choice, although I wish the MacBook Pro was as light as my old Lenovo X61s.  I also have a Dell Mini 10 running OSX (paid for) for personal use which is much lighter and more compact.

However, there are a couple of things that make it tough to switch 100% and get rid of that VMware XP image:
1.  Entourage in Office for the Mac is not as good as Outlook still - supposed to be changing with Office 2010 for Mac.  Why entourage can't support CalDAV calendars is beyond me.
2.  PST support for Entourage.  Actually this is now fixed with a tool from Microsoft, although I haven't yet imported those 20,000 plus archived messages from various PST files.
3.  Visio?  Every architect needs his or her Visio - isn't a large part of what we do draw pictures?  I've read that ConceptDraw is a viable alternative, but I haven't downloaded the trial version yet.

Oops - gotta run for the flight.  more later

Update (6/14/10 9:25 CST)

The other things that keep me having to have the VM image of XP around:
4.  MS Project - is there a realistic Mac alternative for this?
5.  Photoshop - I know, something of a red herring, but I have a licensed copy of PS for windows and I don't have $1000 to buy a mac license.

And this is minor, but IMHO feed demon for windows is better than net new wire for Mac even though they are from the same place.

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