In many ways this company reminds me of Microsoft in the early 90's, eager and hungry for business with superb talent.  Its going to be fun!

But leaving a place that has been home for 15 years is a little sad.  My best memories are the random silly things - like during a company meeting in some huge auditorium during Bill Gates' keynote my mate Steve suddenly asks me if I have ever seen Spongebob Squarepants.  Poor Bill was no contest for Patrick,  Squidward and the sponge - we were soon snorting and giggling like kids.

I admire Microsoft for doing what it set out to do and put a computer on every desk and in so doing transforming the way the world does business.  If all the PC's in the world today stopped working we would be thrown back into the dark ages - imagine our economy running on 1960's technology.

It truly is a great company.

Now the first thing I did on  deciding to leave MS was to take my friend Azzy's advice and get a Mac. In fact there are many Macs inside Microsoft though mostly running Vista.

 An iMac is now the family machine and I bought myself a spanking new MacBook pro for myself and work.  On  both machines I have installed Parallels desktop  and run Mac OSX with Windows Vista on both in coherence mode.   That way I can get J9's zune to work with the Mac  (install the latest bits to get this to work).  

So now I can join in the Mac vs. PC debate really in an unbiased way.

Both Macs are clearly the nicest machines I have ever used.  Things for the most part just work as they should after forking out about $4000 for two machines.  Using the mac puts all the fun back into using a computer.  I actually look forward to sitting at the mac and doing work.  I also noticed that my usual trip to the computer store to browse for 'stuff' to buy was now less interesting.  The Mac comes with most things you would need - hardware and software.  So with the initial  machine you are ready to be productive and don't need to buy much else.  I guess this reduces the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the deal but its still way more than a PC.

So I am dissing Vista?  No not at all - the Mac and the PC with Windows address two completely different markets.  I would not any time soon be recommending Macs for large scale enterprise rollouts - think of the training costs for one.  But if you like the best and really dig technology and can come up with the cash then go for a Mac at home. If you are on a budget, go for a PC.

There are a couple of downsides beyond price - I get really frustrated with iTunes and the lack of support for wma.  Now I need to rip my music in mp3 or rip it twice for maximum quality so my kids can listen on the PCs. Album art is appalling in iTunes compared to Zune or Windows Media Player. Apple are really trying to tie me in with the iTunes store which I can't stand - I never buy music online as its too restrictive.  Sharing music content across multiple users and keeping it tidy is also difficult. I fixed this by creating aliases in each of the kids music folders to the shared folder.  However if iTunes updates itself then   I have to reset permissions.  Also only one instance of iTunes can run at a time in that configuration - you cant just switch users and play iTunes without shutting down the other instance first.  Perhaps there is a better way but it was very easy in Windows Media Player.

Wireless networking is not as easy to setup on the Mac.  It has trouble recognizing the password type WEP or WPA.  I had to dig in a fiddle with the settings to get it to work at the internet cafe.

Best applications for Mac?  Why Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac of course! And don't forget your Parallels and install Vista for all those little apps you can't live without.