Both Worlds

There’s a strange underground culture of PC users: they want their PCs to be Macs. But here’s the topper — one of them is the Microsoft Director of Windows Evangelism (itself an Apple term, remember Guy Kawasaki?). From As The Apple Turns:

Basically, some guy at Microsoft– not the Mac Business Unit, which is obviously filled with Mac-using people, but Microsoft Proper in the heart of Windows country down Redmond way– got bored during an eight-hour conference call. And we have to interject just for a second, here, and say: An eight-hour conference call?! What were they doing, waiting for Windows to finish installing?

Eight-hour conference call. Sheesh, even their meetings are bloatware.

But we digress. Anyway, yes, he got bored during an eight-hour conference call, and despite the fact that he’s a “director of Windows platform evangelism,” he decided to download and install a “variety of interface tweaks” that replicated Mac OS X’s Dock, changed XP’s icons, etc. so that his Sony VAIO reportedly now kindasorta looks like its running Mac OS X. Says he, “many of us used Macs since we were kids and never stopped, even if Windows paid the bills.” Of course, if this is his idea of “Windows platform evangelism,” the odds are pretty good that Windows won’t be paying his bills for much longer. But hey, at least the guy has taste.

… Wired reports that there are apparently a ton of Mac fans riddled throughout Microsoft’s ranks; while that fact might perhaps explain why Microsoft products often seem to include an unseemly level of “homage” to existing Apple products, it does indeed make us wonder why Microsoft isn’t better at copying Apple’s ease of use.