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Wall St. Journal asks why PCs at work are so much worse than at home

The Wall Street Journal gives me a laptop with Windows XP, an operating system I found satisfying when it came out eight years ago but that lacks a lot of modern touches, like a speedy file-search function. My home computer, meanwhile, is a two-year-old iMac running the Leopard version of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Among other virtues, it’s got a search function called Spotlight that lets me track down files in a flash. Or take email. Please. There’s a limit on how much email employees can store on the company’s system, and I routinely bump into it. So, I need to spend time hunting through old notes in Microsoft Outlook and deciding what to keep and what to delete, or risk a shutdown of my account. I’m not the only one; a colleague told me she often receives messages with large attached files that overload her inbox while she’s asleep.

The Wall St. Journal’s Nick Winfield talks about something we Mac users often face in the workplace.  Shitty, locked down Windows boxes that block sites we use and take forever to do basic computing operations.  The question is: Why? 

As the WSJ points out, the technology exists to divide work and play.  Give me the $2000 you’d pay on my Thinkpad running XP and I’ll put a Citrix client on my MacBook and maybe a VMWare partition for the 10 year old Intranet.  Meanwhile at home I’ll use a more robust Google Apps setup with 25GB of email storage.  I’ll even have some change left over if you keep those Windows Active Directory jockeys away from me.

It isn’t just desktops.  The story talks about Kraft’s experiment to give users a choice on phones.  No surprise that 60% chose iPhones.  Kraft employees were choosing Macs despite (or perhaps because?) the fact that they wouldn’t get support from IT.

The message isn’t explicitly Windows PC vs. Mac / Microsoft Servers vs. Cloud / iPhone vs. BBY, but that is how it reads.

The story is a great read and includes an audio portion as well.  Also not blocked by the WSJ Paywall for the moment.

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