MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

Ran across an article on TechRepublic article A very personal Google Android vs. Apple iPhone war just got some more personality.

According to the article there is some real rancor between the iPhone and Android teams/CEO/whatever. Although that might make for some good soap opera type of entertainment – I’m more interested in a comment the article made comparing this spat with the Apple-Microsoft “war” of the 1980s-90s.

For those of you that have been around for a while, the Apple iPhone vs. Google Android war looks a lot like the Microsoft-Apple battles decades ago. Apple went closed ecosystem and Microsoft went with the “we’ll flood you with partners” approach. Nowadays, Google is playing up the Microsoft flood the zone approach with an open source twist.

I thought that was an interesting take on the business/coding/user/and mindshare battles that went on between the Apple OS and Winders….uh, I mean Windows. As a synopsis I suppose it works fairly well – but let’s take a look at what the aftermath has meant for the two companies, and see if there are any parallels to draw in the phone OS space.

Microsoft is now supporting well over TEN operating systems – there are multiple versions of Vista and Windows 7, all which have significant differences (although the cores are basically the same). Apple? 6, assuming you count the Server editions of 10.4, 10.5, and 1.06 separately. That doesn’t sound like a big difference until you factor in all of the possible hardware configurations that can affect system stability and usability – indeed, hardware can make the software look stupid in a blink of an eye, and an untrained user may not be able to tell the difference.

Plus Apple machines are MUCH less likely to go haywire on you – whether OS or hardware related.

In the marketplace, you can buy Macs from a variety of places, but have a relatively few models (albeit well-positioned in terms of capabilities!), all which perform well. The Windows side is a confusing array of options, sizes, price levels, support levels, performance levels, and even quality levels – none of which is easy to discern.

So assuming a similar path in the phonespace means that in a few years we’ll still have a few iPhone models (more than now, if you included the iPad in this scenario) – and tons of Android phones at varying levels of functionality, quality level, and usability.

…. and Google will be using the then-current release of the OS to integrate the features Apple added in their LAST release.

In any case, this is gonna be interesting to watch!

I have a client who called with some computer issues, and their situation serves as the inspiration for this entry.

This is a small business, with a couple of people in the office taking care of “just about everything”.

So, if you want to keep your office from working well, do these things:

1) Put the absolute minimum of RAM in your computers. (One machine has 260K for the OS – Windows2000). This will make your office personnel spend most of their time WAITING for their machines to do anything.

2) Never train them in anything. That way they won’t know anything about tools that will help them do their work – like Outlook, or web browsers, or….

3) Don’t share ANYTHING, even though they are on a network already. This way one person will have to wait until the other machine is open to get anything done.

4) Never backup anything. That way you’ll REALLY be hosed when (not if) a machine breaks down!

5) Don’t setup any standard communication lines – like a REAL email address based on the business’s domain. That way no one will know how to contact anyone – they’ll all be using yahoo, or hotmail, or…….

6) Don’t crosstrain – don’t let anyone know what anyone else is doing, especially in terms of websites, usernames, and passwords!

7) Don’t setup guest accounts on your machines – that way anyone who walks by can mess around with the machine.

So how is YOUR office doing? Need some help? Contact the MaconMacGuy for some mostly intelligent help!

I’ve had a few clients express interest in Linux, especially for their older machines which would be doing real basic computing tasks (web, email, word processing, etc).

Many are afraid to muck around with the standard installation – the idea of messing around with the hard drive, or wiping out their current OS is enough to scare them away.

I’ve begin recommending WUBI to them (Windows-based Ubuntu Installer). Aside from being actually fun to say (try it three times, as fast as you can, while sitting at a traffic light with your car windows down….) it is a non-destructive way to install Linux onto your WIndows machine to see if you like it.

You download and install Wubi, which then takes over the rest of the installation. You do have to give it an amount of the hard drive for it t “take over” – I used 10gig which has been enough for my needs. You’ll also give it an administration username and password – WRITE IT DOWN!

On reboot you’ll see a “Pick which OS you want” menu. Select Ubuntu and the machine will boot in Ubuntu. It’s a full fledged installation, and works MUCH faster on my glacial Athlon 2200+ machine. My rough guess is tasks are about 25-35% faster on this machine under Ubunut compared to Win XP Home.

I can provide training on this, and installation help.

More information:
Wikipedia article on Wubi
The Wubi Installer

The Wubi Guide