With major new product releases looming on the horizon, AccountingWEB’s recent coverage of the computer industry’s two main camps has uncovered an interesting shift in accountancy’s hardware habits.
 

For the past two decades, the Apple Macintosh has been a minority interest among accountants, isolated away among those who serve the creative industries that tend to use Macs.

With the buzz picking up around the release later this year of Windows 7, IT Zone has been gearing up to renew its focus on Microsoft's venerable operating system, posing as it does a major upgrade decision for the vast majority of AccountingWEB members. As luck would have it, Apple too is tinkering with its next major OS release, codenamed "Snow Leopard".

When Nigel Harris recently started his Mac diary [1] a week or so ago, he struck a surprisingly strong chord among satisfied, long-term Mac users. Claims that you can’t get business applications on the Mac were quickly kicked into touch by several people who responded to his blog.

David Young, David Ross, Stuart Magnus and Anne Fairpo have all used Macs for extended periods and spoke in evangelical terms: "Welcome to the light," as Fairpo put it.

Like Harris, Malcolm Seymour and Peter Bateman are more recent converts. Acknowledging some issues with a dodgy battery and Microsoft Office (including lack of support for VBA), the Mac users all rely on "virtual machine" software to give them access to Windows accounting applications such as Sage, QuickBooks, VT Accounts and TaxCalc.

Virtualisation software, as Simon Hurst explained in a 2007 Expert Guide, is like electronic Tupperware [2] that allows you to place and access a sealed Windows container within your Macintosh fridge - or any other operating system for that matter. Using either VMware or Parallels, all of the Mac evangelists said they were able to run Windows applications without any problems.

The other advantages they put forward for Apple's hardware and operating system included:

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• Fewer system upgrades.
• Reliable hardware gives a longer operating lifespan.
• More functional built-in applications including iMovie, iPhoto and iLife.
• "Security through obscurity": because the Apple universe is smaller than Windows, it is a less tempting target for hackers.

While Macs carry a significant premium - pushing twice the price for PCs with equivalent hardware specs - Fairpo cited a US PC Pro [3] report that found a Dell laptop upgraded to match the features within a comparable MacBook Pro actually cost $650 more.

In a comment titled "Yer gets what yer pays for" Glenn Gilbert gave a definitive summary of the Mac's advantages on our Top 10 laptop listing [4] earlier this year.

"Lovely machines that work really well, don't continually badger you for permission like some electronic Private Pike. They're fast and reliable," he wrote. "You'll save a fortune in anti-virus/malware/spyware and all the other grot that plagues Windows machines...

"The Mac experience is one of quietly getting on with things. It's like the difference between a house built and decorated with taste and a house decorated by a chav called Vista who has a fetish for green."

Meanwhile, over at Microsoft HQ, they’re putting the finishing touches to Windows 7. Its predecessor, Vista, has been a disaster. Right from the beta test stage, accountant John Francis [5] questioned the point of the upgrade. His view was later endorsed by Gartner analysts, who announced that Windows was collapsing [6] under its own weight. As both corporate and consumer buyers shunned Vista and opted for XP downgrades, Microsoft has grown increasingly touchy and has undertaken a number of desperate PR campaigns [7] to try and counteract the Mac's cool factor.

Microsoft would find it hard to repeat or survive a similar debacle with Windows 7 and reviews so far suggest that the new version is exceeding expectations - even if the Apple brigade point out that many of the popular enhancements are borrowed from the Mac interface.

Users' experiences are deeply shaped by the equipment they are used to using, and Windows 7 retains all the behavioural patterns most computer users are familiar with. In particular, the Alt-key menu commands and other keyboard shortcuts make it easier to navigate around Windows applications without using a mouse. This makes for faster processing and is an important consideration for users with sight and physical disabilities.

Over on our sister site BusinessZone.co.uk, technology correspondent Jon Wilcox is compiling Confessions of a Windows 7 user [8]. After a shaky start involving the absence of any wireless networking driversm, his experience has been generally positive. Wilcox is using a surplus Dell Latitude D410 laptop with a Pentium M 1.85GHz processor, 1GB RAM, and 60GB hard drive and found that functionality and speed are acceptable.

The missing drivers are a typical part of the Windows user experience - and something that has become second nature for many of us. Our subliminal acceptance of this persistent irritant is one of Microsoft's great commercial achievements - and an increasing source of vulnerability, as Gartner pointed out.

JC brought a software developer's insight to the Windows 7 Release Candidate [9] launch, explaining that Microsoft's two-year product cycles added enormous costs for both programmers and users. Each new release requires multiple changes to other system components and often program code has to be recompiled, which can introduce potential errors into stable systems and piles up absurdly expensive additional testing costs.

"So every time M$ does something the rest of the world pays very heavily," JC explained. "When M$ change their mind everyone else has to come into line and to fork out - just look at the additional training for the latest version of Office where everything has changed."

Microsoft needs to realise that the longer it continues to treat customers as cash cows, the more they are going to vote with their wallets, JC warned: "What we don't need to see is Windows 8/9/10 being beta'd at 2-3 year intervals, - just to keep these guys in business."

Along with virtualisation, the advent of broadband internet and Cloud Computing are subtly destabilising the assumptions and infrastructure that underpin the Windows empire - just as MS-DOS undermined IBM's dominance more a quarter of a century ago. If more and more our data and applications are hosted online and accessed via browser, it matters less and less what kind of devices we use to access them, or what operating system is used.

This factor has been an important contributor to the rapid success of Linux-powered netbooks [10]. Linux is an open source program that costs nothing to buy, but demands a new set of software skills from potential users. Currently on AccountingWEB, Linux registers less than a third of the Mac presence, which itself still accounts for just under 2% of traffic. Windows is used by 93% of visitors.

Microsoft will not be completely shaken by a tiny additudinal shift among AccountingWEB members, but perceptions matter. This audience is very experienced at cost/benefit exercises and our members' influence extends to thousands of business technology users that they advise.

And one day, perhaps a more sceptical approach to commonly held technology belief systems might also encourage buyers to examine the underlying value of Apple's trendy brand.