Tim Almond

I’ve just read Paul Graham’s piece "Microsoft is Dead". It’s well written, and I believe it’s largely true. The title isn’t quite right - Microsoft aren’t actually dying - but their level of control is.

But something in the article struck me:-

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s.

The thing is that if you spend your time with geeks involved in startups, that’s what you’ll meet. If you work in another circle (large corporate computing with complex data models - like me), you see a whole different pattern. You’ll find 1 or 2 Macs in the design department that does the newsletter. You’ll sometimes find Linux servers in these environments, but not much on the desktop. Very few of the developers in these companies are running Macs at home.

The world of computing is very diverse. To an outsider, it appears to be quite uniform, but within it, you find areas where people have different priorities. People doing information-based websites are prepared to reduce the time in testing compared to someone writing software for an ATM or avionics. A company building software for a public-facing website will put a higher priority on aesthetics to a company building an internal system. Optimising code is more important to someone building a real-time monitoring system, than someone building a daily reporting system.

As I work with many different clients, I find these differences in priorities. It’s important to try and understand where someone else is coming from.

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Tags: Software Development, Technology //