mad anthony

Rants, politics, and thoughts on politics, technology, life,
and stuff from a generally politically conservative Baltimoron.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Is John Dvorak a moron?

I don't normally read PC Magazine, but every now and then a John Dvorak article comes to my attention. They always seem to suck.

The first one that I saw was when Office 2003 came out and John wrote a rambling column complaining about it. What's funny is John's main complaint is one I agree with - Office 2003 doesn't include Microsoft Photo Editor, a decent basic photo editing program that came with earlier versions of Office. I use it, because my photo editing needs, mostly for eBay, are pretty basic - rotate, crop, resize. However, fixing this is easy - just install it off your old copy of Office, which is what I did. Also, John spends a bunch of time complaining about some Adobe program that became the default photo handling program when Photo Editor was uninstalled - even though the program has nothing to do with MS Office.

Then there was his ringing endoursement of the Concord Digital Camera - a pick so bad that other PC Mag editors berated him for it. Concord cameras exist for one reason - so that stores like CompUSA can advertise in big letters on the front of their circular 5.0 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA $99 AFTER REBATE. The cameras suck, but they are 5mp, so they sound good. Oddly enough, the compUSA ads never even list the brand.

The most recent example was posted by an anti-Mac person on a discussion board I read, where he berates Mac fans.

The company figures it has certain market niches locked down. This includes computer users in advertising agencies, news bureaus, and various professional organizations as well as creative artists and writers. I also count an odd, die-hard faction of true believers, but these people are inconsequential except in online forums, where they make a fuss whenever anyone discusses the Mac. They probably hurt the Mac community more than anyone by creating an unfair crackpot image that gets associated with the machine.

When I go to the local Apple store, it always seems to have a fair number of faithful Mac users. These people aren't companies - they are individuals who like Mac. I think there are a lot of individual Mac users, and they aren't crackpots or "odd" people. (He also skips the huge education market, but that's another issue).

The other thing that's interesting about the crackpot online forum line is that every Mac fan "crackpot" in online forums seems matched by anti-apple people who find the need to call Apple users morons, question their sexuality, and make all kinds of claims. I understand why Mac users defend their machines, but I'm not sure why PC users feel the need to complain about Mac users. Even if you hate Apple, it's good to have another company innovating in the hardware and desktop operating system fields.

(For the record, I swing both ways - I own a homebuilt XP desktop as well as an Apple G4 Powerbook 12")

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