In the last two years, I’ve seen more and more people in my social circle starting blogs. Most of which were focussed on a micro-topic, including travelling to South America, to Japan, having a baby, self-help topics, and team-dynamics. All of them with merit, but about 80% of them ran out after a while. What is the problem? How about: finding the inspiration, not getting (m)any comments, balancing it with your actual job, etc. etc. Also, the baby eventually grows up, you eventually return from your trip, and there’s only so much to say about self-help (in my opinion).

But while our perception of blogging has changed over the years, particularly if you listen to early adopters, you could say that in a way blogging has become a mainstream phenomenon. Mainstream not meaning that everyone does it, but that everyone can do it. And the reason for that is I think the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, which is a gateway onto other services (incidentally, not many Facebookers I know that started a Facebook-only blog).

Sure, many companies have entered the game, several blogs have become companies, and many personal blogs have been closed or abandoned.  Consolidation and commercialisation often means that there is no more space for the little guy. But, who cares right? You could still set up 10 blogs in the next hour and nobody would stop you. It’s just, nobody would probably read you, unless you write a really good blog + advertise it a bit. But while traffic is clearly a currency of blogging, as are comments, it does not seem to be driving the adoption of blogs in the short-term.

Looking at the current blogging landscape, I can only conclude that blogging is far from dead. But is is perhaps best to be aware that every blog is not the same. Just take a look at the following categories that I have identified, which I am sure is not a complete selection. There’s:

• The micro-topic blogs, which get started every so now and then, run out after a while, but don’t discourage others from starting their own.
• The small business blogs, for professionals and SMEs seeking to differentiate themselves. Whether these blogs can continue to exist, I think, all depends on whether they can reconcile their short-term profit goals (and needs) with the long term benefits  of blogging, which are far from clear (please don’t take 37 Signals as an example that all SMEs should blog).
• The small media-blog, which is what the Techmeme 100 is all about and which will never go away, as it’s a low-cost competitive approach towards battling/replacing big media.
• The big media-blog, which is really a hybrid of journalism and opinion, neither of which will ever go away.
• The corporate blog, which, similar to the small business blogs, still needs to find a raison d’être for itself. Exceptions are companies that already work on the web, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, O’Reilly.
• The small and large (web-)celebrity blog, which for some is just ego-stroking and for others is an artistic outlet, both of which are justifiable, not only to the people who write them, but I think is also a big driver for the new blood in the blogosphere.

Clearly, no matter what people may say about the rise of micro-blogging and social networks, the blogosphere has become a complex beast, one that continues to attract attention, whether it’s in the form of traffic, comments (those 2 aren’t correlated on Tech IT Easy), or perhaps simple hype.

Blogging is dead, yay, now let’s get blogging!

Vincent

P.S. This marks the 5th anniversary of my blogging, which started in the Summery of 2004. How the time flies by.
P.P.S. Picture is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and is meant to be symbolic.

I’ll spell it American… happy, blogosphere? Here’s a few interesting examples of how the battle is being waged in terms of virtualisation of software:

• I can’t run Windows Live Writer—simply the best blogging software on both the Mac and Windows—through Crossover, because it was built in .Net. And .Net apps don’t work in Crossover.
• You can use the free Virtualbox from Sun to run your virtual OSs (a great development environment!), but if you want to launch Windows apps from your Mac, you need to pay for either Parallels, Fusion, Crossover, or any other commercial variants for this purpose. Basically, a software like Parallels allows you to place a shortcut to a Windows app onto the Dock or the Desktop, which will launch Windows + the app, when you click it.
• The best Windows user-experience on the Mac is through Boot Camp. It would be a million times quicker to boot if you were able to hibernate on the Windows side and safe sleep on the Mac side. If you don’t want to risk losing your unsaved data however (why would it be unsaved?), you’re probably better off booting the traditional way (3-5 min. out the window right there). Well actually, it used to be an official feature, now it isn’t.
• Sharing your OS X documents with your Windows ones (in other words, using the same folder for both OSs) is very possible when you use Parallels. When you use boot camp however, it all of a sudden gives you a convenient error.

Georgia, in response to my post about the OS War being over, wrote that she thought that this whole discussion is about standards. I think that the edges are getting very blurry and I eventually see hardware, on the PC-side at least, becoming pretty irrelevant. In the meantime, however, you get these little annoyances, beyond stuff like Office for Mac being inferior to Office for Windows, which make me wonder if they are here by design or because they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. I’m betting on the first.

Standards, for now at least, are still causing wars.

Vincent

(Picture is of course of the game Virtua Tennis 3, and has absolutely zero to do with this post)

If I ever succumb to the temptation to blog like I did last night, feel free to shoot me. Now, back to our regular programming…

Last week, I wrote about having heroes in your craft and how I found it noteworthy that some examples are more effective than others in everyone’s path to self-improvement. I attributed it to the vague concept of compatible brain-patterns, but really I think it’s a much more simple idea. The reason that my writing heroes have an influence on my craft is because I practice it. In other words, there is a right mix of idea and execution (I would call it semi-right as there’s much room for improvement).

There are plenty of blog posts about this. Most well-known to me is Derek Sivers’ blog post about the “execution multiplier” that makes ideas more or less valuable:

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

More recently, Sarah Lacy wrote a post on Techcrunch, entitled “Is Execution More Important than Vision?,” where she differentiates between entrepreneurs that are visionary vs. those that are good at execution. In other words, she categorises people as either fitting in the one or the other.

What is clear from all of these is that ideas unapplied are essentially worthless. Which to me means three things:

1. That if you have ideas in an area that is difficult for you to execute on, you’re probably better off focussing on areas where you can execute them.
2. Or, that it is equally important to find the right resources (skills & knowledge, network & team, money & customers) for your idea as it is to have the idea.
3. That you ultimately need to move towards a system of rapid iteration or rapid prototyping, because, as we all know, ideas are ideas, and the reality will more often than not change your original product idea. The quicker you can test them out and improve them, the better your chances of making a commercial success.

It’s a bit of a leap from my post about writing heroes to executing entrepreneurial ideas, I know, but I think it makes sense.

Vincent

On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

There’s talk on the web about “thought leadership” (I prefer the term “thought inspiration”), so I felt like writing something about what sources, podcasts this time, inspire thinking with me. An obvious example would be TED, which I think most of us know, but today I’ll list a few that I listen to regularly, which you might not.

Here goes:

• The New Yorker’s Out Loud series: I find myself listening to a variety of topics through this 10 min. podcast, from Barbar the elephant and how its idea was inspired by French colonialism; to the murder of Russian investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya; to the history of (the horrible) auto-tune, which can make anyone a vocalist.
• Big Ideas, which is a Canadian educational broadcast on iTunes, and basically showcases some excellent lectures on topics ranging from: the sense and senselessness of stretching; to Naomi Klein on her book, The Shock Doctrine; to author Robert J. Sawyer on why Star Wars shouldn’t belong to the science fiction genre and is actually quite a devolution to that genre.
• Scene Unseen, in which two students of film go back and forth on movies that came out this week, as well as picking some pretty damn interesting DVDs to watch. A must-listen for film-lovers!

Of course, there’s also iInnovate, Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, This American Life, and the, now finished, Game Theory podcasts, some of which I’ve written about before on this blog, and which are most definitely worth checking out.

As might be clear from this selection, to me, thought inspiration (or leadership) can come from all kinds of directions, not just technology or business expertise.

Have some podcasts that you find interesting? List them in the comments!

Vincent

I’m a little sick with the flu, hence a few days off blogging, but I just wanted to share this with you (the video from vbs.tv does not seem to show up in the rss-feed).

It’s the story of Carlos Amorales, a Mexican visual artist, who does some pretty interesting things, including: graphic design, installations, performance art, and co-founding a record-label. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s only 14 min.!), worth checking out is:

• 01:15, when he shows how me makes his illustrations by keeping a digital database of images in different shapes. All in black, though he occasionally uses red. If you think these simplistic, then look at some of his installations (next point), and you see that these are just the beginning, really.
• 04:40, when he shows some of his installations and talks about how they give the audience the ability to enter the work. It made me think about how creative developers/artist can use the new technology of “augmented reality” to create layers above art-installations that take you more into the experience. Any museum I go to these days, I always get the audio-tour as  it adds to my understanding of what I’m seeing. The same could apply to pointing your mobile camera at it and seeing a visual augmentation. Of course, this is where those infernal copyright laws come in; I think this is something that should be done first with certain avant garde / independent artist, to show-case the potential…
• 09:20, when he talks about his record label, Nuevos Ricos (turn down your speakers before clicking this link), for which they created a manifesto, which included giving all the music away for free. Instead the focus was on performance, on entertainment. I mean, well it’s completely ridiculous and you can see that it’s more of an experiment to understand youth culture. At the same time, it is something that many anti-copyright people (including me) have argued for, that music should be about the performance, not about making money from a shiny disc / digital file. But in the end, maybe music/art should be about self-expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. Some, like the clowns in the video, who have very little musical talent, will prefer showcasing themselves. Others will prefer to just make music and make a living from that. We live in a very nuanced world, after all…

End thoughts, hope to be back this Monday.

Vincent

I think I’ve just discovered a new hero of mine in the area of blogging. Her name is Penelope Trunk and I really like her writing style as well as the focus of her blog/site/company, called The Brazen Careerist. Previous heroes include Fred Wilson, whom I also like for his style of writing, and, I’m a little ashamed to say, Robert Scoble.

The way that heroism works for me is that I start writing like these people. Scoble has this habit of asking himself questions like “Why do I like Friendfeed? Here’s 120 reasons..” Somewhat banal, when you think about it, because it’s like you’re saying “Why am I so right? Here’s 1 million reasons…” I actually adopted it for a few blog-posts, then I dropped it. Fred Wilson writes essays, shorter than Paul Graham’s (thank god), but still I like the flow of the text. And for a while, I’m sure, I tried to sound like Fred Wilson. And Penelope Trunk just has a very personable style, for lack of a better word.

That’s not to say that I will now try to write like Ms. Trunk, or that I even do it intentionally. Back when I was a kid and tried to write fiction, I always remember that it read like Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Isaac Asimov, depending on who I was reading at the time. It wasn’t on purpose, it was more like my brain adopted the writing style more easily than say, if I spent time with an accountant and tried to replicate what he/she did.

I think each of us have brain-patterns that fit a certain craft best and for me it happens to be writing. Which is interesting, because I also read and talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, yet I am not one right now and wondering if I ever will be. Food for thought.

Have you experienced the same thing in your craft? How do you take in information from your heroes, though conversations, reading, observation, interaction, or other means? How effective has it been for you? And is it something that stays with you always or just in the beginning of your life? And, the most important question of them all… Who are Your Heroes?

Vincent

I have hardly any time today, catching up on the week, which is terrible for the creative spirit. So, as a 15 min. therapy, where do good ideas come from? Here are 4 areas that I can think of:

Exploration / Rest: Spending 3 days in Paris and 2 days celebrating the national day of Luxembourg was great for thinking about life, discussing various topics and plans, and brainstorming ideas. It is in a way the anti-thesis of working life, which is focussed on making you into a machine, constantly moving, constantly following a routine, and not breaking out into new creative patterns. Ease of Implementation: Ideas are often abstract and need a lot of work to make them useful.

Iteration: This the primary way that companies innovate, by constantly developing routines, slightly adapting them over a long period of time, until version 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.infinity, etc. It is why (consumer) products are the way they are. Ease of Implementation: when you actually have new ideas they face the challenge of breaking existing patterns that are cemented into operating companies and more difficult to change. Still, new ideas are often based on practical data and should thus be more easy to implement.

Deconstruction: This is what I call the Sherlock Holmes way or the “where have you last seen it?” way. You are faced with a problem, e.g. finding something you lost or figuring out how an electronic device works. The best way to do it is to break it down into small steps or pieces (deconstructing) and then reconstructing the reality again. In technology, you might also call this reverse engineering. Ease of Implementation: much like iteration, it is based on realities that already exist. Ideas are often better than what came before, because you’re an outsider, taking something apart and throwing away the junk. Ever lost a piece of text you wrote due to your computer/software crashing? I guarantee that your version 2 will be shorter, more to the point, and better.

Conflict: I was discussing this with Jeremy this weekend, regarding the building of teams that can challenge each other. It’s a destructive and constructive process all at once and I think the benefits usually outweigh the risks. Ease of Implementation: It’s difficult to find that kind of talent and the right mix, so I would say that implementation is not easy. It should however be at the top of the agenda of any organisation who wants to be an innovator in its field.

Other ways to come up with fresh ideas? The floor is yours!

Vincent

(I could have picked a more profound movie for this…). In the story of Sindbad, the animated Disney version from 2003, Sindbad and Marina go on an adventure together and fall in love. In the beginning of the film, you find out that Marina always loved the sea and… a little spoiler… in the end she chooses a life on the sea as her future as well. And, in the process, she chooses Sindbad over her originally betrothed, Proteus.

Watching this movie in bed this morning, recuperating from a very exhausting but great few days, I thought about the meaning of it all. And because this is a business and technology blog and I can’t exactly write posts about the meaning of life, I’ll write about what I think it means in a business context instead.

In sales, which by its nature of convincing people to spend their hard-earned cash on a product or service, has a bad reputation, you can either sell a widget (Sindbad) or you can sell a life (the sea). But really you should sell the widget, within the context of the life. So, in other words, the most convincing sales method is to sell an Experience.

Right now, I am sitting at a terrace in the Place Guillaume II in Luxembourg, listening to live music, and drinking my third tea. Had the context been, pardon my French, merde, I would’ve left after the first tea. Had the tea been bad, I would’ve left also. But because the context and the product/service are good, I have become a repeat-customer, at least for today.

I don’t think this is restricted to B2C only. In business-to-business, which is the area I operate in, we also sell services which have to either fit within the context of the customer, or create an entirely, new and better context for him. So, for instance, our financial trust manages certain financial affairs for customers who want to settle down their company or savings in Luxembourg and enjoy certain tax- and other advantages. The context/product combination is even more clearer in this case, as we are in fact offering a country as our product. Of course, we still have to do a good job, but we convince our “Marinas” to come here and work with us, through a big-picture sale.

I hate it when salespeople try to convince me about their product without having considered for one second what the financial or other benefit is for me. And there is an incredible amount of these negative experiences out there, which I think is the primary reason for why sales gets a bad rap. If you instead think of it as selling a cruise on the sea, or, better, an sea-adventure with Sindbad, I think you’ll generate much more positive returns.

Of course, this doesn’t always work for a cheap product like tea, where the margins are so low (actually, I think the margins are at about 70%, but 70% of 2 euros is not a lot) that you would rather sell more, more quickly, than spend too much effort on the context and in the process sell more slowly. The difference is perhaps that with a product like tea, the location matters a lot, which means that you have to spend more on rent and include that in the cost of your product.

End of thought for today. If you’re in sales, sell the experience, not just an expense, and I think your quality of working life will increase. I prefer a happy paying customer than just a paying customer, don’t you?

Vincent

(Picture of The SS Rotterdam returning home from her last voyage)

First of all, Paris was great! For three days, Jeremy (Fain, founder of Tech IT Easy & Verteego.com) drove me crazy in a good way, by mapping out every single minute of my life. Similarly to how we met up in Barcelona, it was a great way to get to know the city and at the same time realise that truly knowing Paris will require some further trips back.

Since Tech IT Easy was founded by a Parisian, I felt it was good to go to the source and have a “vision-refresher” as it were. At its peak, this group-blog featured 15 writers, the majority of which was from France or situated there at some point. Many are now spread across this planet and it’s sites like Tech IT Easy that represent a small node where we can occasionally brush against each other (in an intellectual way) and exchange the wisdom we have learned.

Meeting several Tech IT Easy authors, Steve Danino and Emmanuel Perez-Duarte, it reconfirmed to me the intellectual spirit in which this weblog was founded, as well as the search for something, anything, but probably tech- (and/or business!-) related. Many of our authors enjoy a solid educational background, which is both good and bad. Good, in the sense of the value it brings. Bad, because there are many opportunity costs in life and even more so for well-educated men and women. It is clear then that we all write when we can, but more often than not, we cannot.

It is all the more important then to get more (and more and more) fresh blood onto Tech IT Easy to replace those that have moved on, and to connect those who are “old” to those who are “new.” The vision, my vision for Tech IT Easy has always been that of building a community of talented people who directly and indirectly assist each other to make our world a (technological) marvel.

Does that work in practice? In my opinion, only if people work hard at making it happen and the effects are far from direct or instantaneous. Rather, if I need to speak to an interesting person in France (or anywhere really) or bounce a complicated idea of someone, I’ll often look up one of our Tech IT Easy members and vice versa.

A few blog posts that I thought were great and directly showed off the value of some of our members, were Remy Miralles’s posts about being a software developer, and Cecil Dijoux’s (who is incidentally also a musician by night) posts about High Availability Architecture. I have met neither of them yet, but I know the day will come. These posts are more the exception to the rule, which is that, on this weblog, we often do not market ourselves, but instead think out loud and whatever opportunities happen because or outside of it, are the individual’s own. The risk is that sometimes you of course do the opposite of marketing, but hey…

It is the nature of the beast that is blogging that its value is hard to determine. We host this weblog for a negligible amount and the 45 min. a day that I spend blogging on it is also negligible in terms of expense. We could value this blog by asking for money, but apart from some unobtrusive monetisation exercises on the horizon, we will not make a serious effort at that… because it would create a different kind of pressure and hence different kind of focus. But, who knows…

The value that Tech IT Easy has to me, remains to be that node, out of which occasionally there is some new strings that are formed, either intellectually or through building up a new relationship or venture. Everything else is… soft tissue.

In the words of the once great Arnold, I’ll be back!
Vincent

By the sea, you mostly think about people, pedicure, skin, sand, seaweed, tennis balls and of course you try to make a link between innovation, start-ups and their connection with guerilla marketing.
what? you don’t? come on, you are not even geek enough …

Keyword of this head-on-the-sand brainstorming : Guerrilla Marketing
Always very impressive.
Knitting sockets for street-lamps, waking up your co-citizens,  or printing you “tete” (head) on the floor out of the metro to sell records or ray ban glasses…. ah ! fascinating – respect for the brand / checked . prescription circle short-circuited and the brand needs a promotion to an icon.
I had kind of forgotten of this silly risky stuff going back to my mentally safe and rigid country-cocoon. Until a few days ago I stumbled over a campaign made for Media Markt from Leo Burnett that is actually a guerrilla marketing study-case. click it!
Media Markt Junkmen.
In two words the guys used an ancient  hoaxing mechanism for the real world and attempted to turn it into a sales channel. Actually  since it had a guerilla conotation the guys just tested reactions without really managing the channel. And of course they raised comments, digs and lifted eyebrows in various shapes.

Doesn’t advertising need it’s own R&D space? Second life what? Real life needed… To my attention, there are no real start-ups in the advertising space (end-to-end) so this risk had to be integrated into a big corporation’s structure like Leo Burnett. (ok maybe there are, but that’s another post)

Three comments from my side.
one : they and us have to get used to it, interactivity is here.
two : guerrilla has the same connotation as innovation, as for now (this is why geeks like that stuff)

three : next week, the time I hold my breath underwater I am going to take this further — How do you turn  guerrilla heroes and heroism into sustainable business and transform surprise to respect from the mass and their structured values ?

some of your good ideas might help me … breathe better

Georgia

…Is if this were possible on it (apologies for the deformation, apparently Windows isn’t good for everything):

Concept iPhone keyboard – a composite made out of  an iPhone + a Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

I’m actually quite surprised that something like this isn’t possible. The iPhone screen would make a fine portable screen and the touch keyboard is pretty terrible for typers (at least my polls have revealed). With the current bluetooth keyboad even, I would think a simple synergy was possible and I don’t at all get why Apple does not allow for this to work.

Let’s make some noise!!!

Vincent

It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

1. A willing human recorder
2. A recording device designed for capturing experiences
3. A way to process that information into “usable bits”
4. A favourable legal environment
5. And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

I don’t like to re-blog things, but I’ve long suspected the following to be true and as such it’s worth a mention:

Shouldn’t you announce your goals, so friends can support you?

Isn’t it good networking to tell people about your upcoming projects?

Doesn’t the “law of attraction” mean you should state your intention, and visualize the goal as already yours?

Nope.

Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen.

Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.

Read more on Derek Sivers’ great blog for musicians and entrepreneurs alike.

Vincent

P.S. I wrote about Derek Sivers before on “Guess Who No. 8” (another tradition we have to reboot soon!)

It’s a strange sensation to be in PowerPC land. To those that don’t know, that was the (IBM) technology which Macs were previously built on, before moving to the much more flexible and powerful Intel platform. My first Mac, bought in 2004, was a G4 iBook. I loved it and remember even writing an ode to it on this weblog. It is currently still alive in the, hopefully, responsible hands of a family-member.

What made the G4 special was that there was no going back to Windows. You could emulate it, v e r y  s l o w l y , but you really had to make due with what Mac OS X offered you and I loved that idea of being stranded on an island and having to make the best of it. As a result, I learned a lot about my Mac and it also spawned plenty of blog posts on better Mac productivity here.

But now that I am on a Macbook and have been logging on to Windows via Bootcamp regularly, my reality has somewhat changed.

H A R D W A R E !!!

Macs vs. PCs… I was always aware of the hardware differences, particularly quality-wise. If you do the simple math, my 2004 iBook, now 5 years old and expected to last at least 2 years longer. I don’t know what it’s like in PC-world (not the mag), but I imagine you won’t get this kind of return on investment (ROI) under EUR 1000 ($1500). And by ROI, I mean, on the road ROI, as my laptop was constantly with me travelling. If you have a dusty EUR 200 ($300) PC server lying around somewhere, I expect that will probably last you half a decade as well.

I’m pretty certain that today, if I were to choose either Windows or OS X, I would still buy Apple, simply because they build their machines so damn well. Dvorak, when the Macbook Pros were just launched, called them the Bentleys of computers, and I whole-heartedly agree.

S O F T W A R E !!!

My post today is really about the software-war, which is what most Apple (and Windows) fanboys seem to focus on. And I’m here to tell you that there is no more software-war! Apart from a few (somewhat important) design-flaws in Windows (unfortunately I haven’t tested Vista or 7 yet), the migration between both platforms is fairly flawless.

All the major applications exist on both platforms: Office, programming, designing, picture- and video-manipulation. I don’t want to step on anyone’s territory, I know that, for some of those, Macs are better and for others, PCs are. But for the everyday-consumer like me, you can use both platforms as a tool.

Where I was mostly worried, ironically, was not anything that was inherent to the Mac platform, though I did argue partially that it was some time ago. It’s a free software called  Quicksilver, which allows you to launch apps, find and manipulate files more quickly than using shortcuts and the mouse, or even Spotlight. It has taken over my day-to-day so much, that I no longer have files lying around on my desktop, the Dock, and rarely use the Finder either. The reason is that, for launching stuff, using the keyboard together with search, is much much faster than going somewhere “manually.” Imagine doing the same on the internet and browsing to every address individually, instead of having Google and predictive text…

But even that has no longer become a problem on Windows due to a number of alternatives that exist and of which I chose SlickRun as my number 1 replacement.

I will not go into the Design aspects of the Mac OS, which are without a doubt superior to Windows (XP at least). But where software as a tool is concerned, the war is over! I can survive just as well on Windows as I have on OS X.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps marks an end to my pro-Mac posts (though, let’s wait for Snow Leopard to be sure). Who knows, I may eventually even (gasp!) post a review of a Windows software here soon.

Vincent