Peter, how ill you mark student case studies if they use information from WIRED’s latest issue?

http://www.wired.com/wired

The true source of Apple’s competitive advantage is fear! The packaging gets thrown away…

The thing that really sets the Apple products apart is that the designers seem to be very thoughtful about how people use things. A lot of the detritus of the Windows OS is pushed into the background so you just don’t see it. For what it’s worth, I’m taking a hiatus from academe in order to manage European IS/IT operations for a top-five pharmaceutical company. Definitely no black turtlenecks and goatees there.

I think there are two kinds of geeks. The “old school” geeks, the ones who don’t like GUI at all (the ones I dislike), probably still use UNIX machines and enjoy their text based command prompts as much as the people still in love with AS-400s enjoy their three-letter codes. (I readily admit that the AS-400 is stable as a rock, though…)

The “GUI geeks” - the “younger” ones - are probably playing with different home made or open source upgrades of OS/2.

Even though I have limited experience of it, I tend to be one of the people still arguing that OS/2 was possibly the best GUI-based OS ever - and that the meltdown of the IBM-MS project set us back maybe ten years in OS innovation.

Graeme is right, of course, that real geeks use unix and its derivatives. Earlier in my career I kept a SparcStation on my desk just to look cool, even though I was using a Windows machine as my primary workstation.

At economics conferences people often use a TeX variant, such as SliTex, rather than PowerPoint, as a matter of principle.

You know, Steve Postrel uses a Mac. I don’t know that he’s a froofy artist type. But, he does do qualitative work which is the same thing.

Incidentally, I assume the dig about artist types is a joke as well, but you do know that Macs are now (since the release of OSX) quite popular with geeks as well, because it is now a Unix - rather like Linux, arguable more so.

Personally I mostly need a PC that works with minimal hassle, but I have to admit that there are times when that Unix stuff is very useful.

As for Microsoft copying Apple, which is a common claim (and probably true), I’m just glad that Microsoft is doing Apple the service. After all, if Microsoft didn’t make the design (be it windows-based software or GUI or whatever) available to the world, then how would Apple ever get to know whether their inventions actually work for people? There’s almost no one using Apple, so Microsoft is doing them and consumers a great service.

And I know how to use a right mouse button

I know you’re trolling, but Mac OS has supported two-button mice for years, and Macs come standard with a mouse that can be used in two-button (in fact, multi-button) mode if the user wants to.