Weblogger and web standards expert Dave Winer can be forgiven for feeling a little fragile right, while he is convalescing from his recent heart surgery. But he might want to re-engage his brain just a bit.
      The evidence? Winer has just commented on Paolo Valdemarin commenting on Windows-to-Mac and Mac-to-Windows switchers, whom both webloggers are referring to as immigrants.
      Paolo is suggesting that those few Windows-to-Mac switchers who did it during the era before Steve Jobs came back to run the company he co-founded, when Apple was being run into the ground by bad managers, should seriously consider switching back to Mac now that Apple is innovating so powerfully once again. Paolo’s case is easily supported by Apple’s new computers and operating system.
      Winer switched from Mac to Windows for a number of reasons, one of them to do with software he created not being accepted by Apple management. Having tried to use that product, Frontier, as a scripting environment I understand why Apple passed on it and opted for its own AppleScript as the Mac’s native scripting language. Frontier is great, but you have to be a fully committed nerd to even begin to get to grips with it. That just was not me. I can and have made good use of AppleScript however.
     
“I resigned as a Mac user, not over Amelio, as Paolo says, but over the religion. I like using a computer just as a computer,” Winer says. In all my years using computers of all types—Mac, Linux, Unix, Windows and Amiga— I have never come across any hint of ‘religion’ amongst the members of the Macintosh-using community in the UK, the US and Australia.
     
On the other hand, I have encountered very large numbers of Linux and Windows users who have a cultish devotion to their operating system of choice and the figureheads of those movements attached to them, and still do. One comes across dedicated Windows users every day whose devotion to their OS, their machines, and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer is remarkable in its intensity, despite all the shortcomings and failings in each the same users complain of.
     
I have only ever heard devotees like these characterise Mac users as religious. I don’t know any Mac users who are cultish in any way. I know many Windows users who exhibit all the symptoms. Who is calling whom names?
      I chose to make Apple’s computers my main production machines, after an unemotional, non-religious comparison of each competing platform. The Apple Mac and its OS won hands down for allowing me to concentrate on working with computers, instead of having to constantly work on them in order to make them work each day. Macs simply work.
     
That is a fact that at least 25 million Mac users know and are glad to share. Every Mac user I know has Macs in order to do things. They didn’t choose Macs in order to tinker with machines and operating systems. We’d rather get stuff done, the kind of stuff that earns money every day.
     
We don’t have time for crackpot computer religions, cults of personality or pretending to be backyard computer mechanics.