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Sensing that Spirit

My daughter Kate and I went to the Sherway Gardens shopping mall in Toronto on Saturday morning to check out the opening of the new Apple Store. Apple Stores are somewhat of a novelty for me, since we don’t actually have any in Australia. (What’s the story SJ? Aussies want Macs too, you know!)

Apple Store, New York City. Click to Enlarge

Since living in Canada I have visted the store at Yorkdale Mall in Toronto, where I bought my MacBook Pro, as well as the store in Galeria Mall in Cambridge Boston, where I had to buy a replacement power adapter for the one I left in a hotel in Sydney, Nova Scotia. (I eventually got that power adapter back btw). I also visited the very cool and funky Apple Store in Fifth Avenue, New York City when I was there last month. These stores all do basically the same thing – let you try and buy the whole range of Apple products.

The funny thing is that the product range for Apple is quite finite. The do a couple models of MacBooks, a couple of desktop models, and about 7 different iPods. There’s also the accessories and software and various bits and pieces. It’s a wide range of stuff but it’s not so big that it’s mind boggling. And every Apple Store looks more or less the same, has the same sort of feel to them, and has the same products on display. Prices are fixed by Apple so they don’t really do discounts or special deals. The just sell and display the whole Apple range.

So why did I bother going to the opening of the Sherway Store? I knew I wasn’t going to see anything I hadn’t already seen. I was pretty sure the pricing would be standard (not that I planned to buy anything anyway). The offer of a free T-shirt to the first 1000 people was kind of cool, but hey, a T-shirt is a T-shirt right? The reason I went was just to check it out, “soak up the vibe” and be able to say I’d been to an Apple Store opening.

Well, the store opened at 9:30 and we got there about 9:35. As we approached the store, the line to get in stretched back down through the mall, out the doors, across the plaza and into the carpark. It was probably 400 metres long. It took us nearly 40 minutes to get in the door, and when we did we got a T-shirt, spent about 20 minutes looking around (at products we’d seen many times before) and then we left. With any other store, I would never have waited in a line like that, but somehow, Apple seems able to create a buzz, a hype, and a sense of wanting to just be a part of that. I don’t quite know how they do it, but it’s very real and the sight of the long line of people waiting to visit the new store was just a testament to Apple’s ability to somehow draw people with that indefineable spirit that only Apple seems to be able to generate.

Steve Jobs once touched on it in an interview when talking about Apple’s early products…

“It’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers … And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit.”

Interestingly, there was a Dell store not 100 metres away and it was totally deserted. Not a single person even browsing. I guess people can sense Dell’s spirit too.

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Horse before the Cart

The release of Google’s new “Google Apps for your Domain” program is an interesting business move, and I can see more clearly now how Google is making inroads into territory that has traditionally belonged to Microsoft. GAfyD offers email, calendar, chat and a webpage designer – all for free – but enables organisations to rebadge these apps with their own domain and graphics. All you need to do is edit the MX records for any domain you might own, telling it to reroute the mail requests through to Google’s Gmail servers. End result is the abilty to have [email protected] become a defacto Gmail service. Same goes for the calendar and chat… runs in your own domain but is hosted by Google.

My first thought was to register for my school… the thought of having 1000 student email accounts hosted offsite, with 2Gb of storage space each, complete with calendar, webspace and chat, all at no cost, seemed to good of an option to pass up. So I registered, changed the MX records, added a custom graphic to replace the Gmail one, and sure enough it all works exactly as advertised.

Next step was to ask the school to look at this as a serious option for student mail. The alternative would be to host an Exchange server ourselves, providing infrastructure, storage and backup for 1000 mail accounts. I know which is less work.

Seems I was a few days too late though. The school had just committed to buying a new server expressly to host student email, so the GAfyD program, despite its free pricetag and simple implementation, is on hold for now as we try to go it alone and host the mail services ourselves. Sure there are some advantages to hosting the mail ourselves such as Active Directory integration, fine control over content, filtering, etc, but it sure does create a lot more work. I’m undecided as to the trade off and which would have been a better path to take.

But it did cause me to think about the need to supply student email, mainly when I asked the question “what sort of things will they be doing with their email account?” It wasn’t meant as a facetious question… I could not survive without access to email, and I think every student should have an school email account of their own. My reservation revolves around the idea that I would like to think that the other teachers should have a clear idea of what they plan to do with students via email. I doubt that many are fully prepared for the onslaught on mail volume that can be created when each student has an email address and actually uses it to submit work, ask questions, clarify issues, etc. The volume of mail will increase exponentially… say you teach 5 classes of 25 kids, thats 125 kids. If they all use email effectively to send, reply, dialog with teachers, then that’s an awful lot of mail that starts to flow into the inboxes of teachers that previously thought getting 3 emails a day was a big deal. For those of use used to getting high volume mail its no big problem, but for those not used to it… I can hear the complaints now…

With the huge boom in Web 2.0 technologies, sometimes called the read/write Web, email is not the critical tool that it once was, even a few years ago. The explosion of educational use of blogs, wikis, podcasts, forums, etc, changes things somewhat. These things all offer the same sort of publicly accessible interactions that email only provides on a private level, making plain old email a little redundant. Email is still important, but not as important as it once was. In an educational setting, if I had to chose between giving each student an email address or giving each student access to a blog or a wiki, I think I would be going for the latter option.

The point is that providing an email account for each student is a relatively small first step. It’s what they then do with that email account that really matters, and in the case of my school I still don’t think we have a clear idea of just how we plan to use email effectively to enhance real learning. It’s like being given a hammer and some nails but not having any idea of what you might make with them.

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The Anatomy of a Good Decision

I started using a personal computer in 1982. It’s now 2006, and for the majority of the past 24 years I’ve used computers running some version of Microsoft Windows. My first experience with Windows started with version 3.0, then 3.1, WfW, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP. On the server side I’ve used Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Server 2003. I have also been a Microsoft Office trainer, hold a Microsft Office Specialist certification and have even been a technical writer for Microsoft. Professionally, I’m currently responsible for managing a Windows network that encompasses 6 Windows servers and around 300 Windows XP workstations. You could say that I have invested a good deal of time and energy into Microsoft products over the years.

So when the time came recently to buy myself a new computer, it may seem surprising that I bought myself a Mac. Yes, a Mac.

It’s not my first Apple. I started my love affair with personal computers on an old Apple IIe, back in the day when if you wanted your computer to do anything useful you often had to write the software yourself. I also had an old Mac SE30 that I used to just love working with, and even an LC575 back in the old System 7 days. But that was ages ago, and I’ve pretty been in a Windows world now for the past 15 or so years.

So, after all this time, why another Mac? Because when the time came to fork out the hard earned cash to by a new machine I wanted to best computer I could get. I wanted great performance, rock solid stability and value for money. Do the research and you will probably come to the same conclusion. For me, it had to be a Mac.

The decision to switch was not taken lightly. I put a lot of thought into my decision to be a “Switcher”, as Apple calls us. I had a great deal invested into the Windows platform, both time and money. All of my software was for Windows, all of my expertise was in Windows, and to be honest, I was comfortable in Windows.

What I wasn’t comfortable with was the endless stream of viruses and malware that seemed to be attacking the Windows platform on an almost daily basis. I wasn’t comfortable with the inordinate amount of time I seemed to be spending maintaining my computer just I could use it to be “productive”. I wasn’t too comfortable with the way every Windows machine I ever used just seemed to slow down over time, to become more and more sluggish until it ground to a useless halt and the only solution was to reinstall the OS. I was very uncomfortable with system freezes, application crashes, and a system that clearly was not able to cope with the not-unreasonable demands I was expecting from it.

There is an old joke about a dog laying on a wooden verandah floor, howling in pain every few minutes. A man comes by and asks the dog’s owner, “Your dog appear to be in pain. What’s wrong with him?” The owner explains that the dog is laying on a nail which is sticking out of the floor. The man then asks the obvious question, “Why doesn’t he get up and move?” The owner replies, I guess the pain just ain’t bad enough yet.”

For me, the pain of Windows just got too bad. It was time to get up and move.

I made a list of all the things I used my computer to do – from basic word processing, to video editing, to webpage development. I admit, I like trying new software applications and I had a lot of applications on my hard drive, some I only used occasionally and others i used all the time. I listed the tasks – not necessarily the actual applications – that I used a lot and then started to research what alternatives existed in the Mac world. For the tasks that I use my computer for, there was not a single application that did not have a Mac replacement that wasn’t equivalent or better than wat I currently had under Windows.

To be fair, the Mac version of MSN Messenger, which I used a lot, was greatly watered down compared to its Windows cousin. iChat looked great, but most of my friends use Windows so it was not greatly usful to me. Skype was good on the Mac, but lacking live video like the Windows version. Other than that, I had alternatives for just about everything else I needed.

I spent ages looking through the Mac OS X tutorials on the Apple website. I use my computer a lot and I wanted to to be totally sure a Mac would work for me. Would I like the new interface? Could I deal with the Dock? The switch to a new user interface for a new operating system seemed like such a big deal! I had Macs before and really liked them, so I don’t know what I was worried about, but I was. I think it was all about having so much history tied up in the Windows OS I knew so well that the decision to switch seemed so much more important that it ought to have been. I’m sure that’s what keeps many Windows users where they are… the fear of the unknown and the new.

Logically, I couldn’t help thinking that if the Mac OS was anywhere near as good as the user experience I had been enjoying with iTunes and my iPod, then it would have to be pretty good. I mean, if Apple could do such an amazing job with those two things, then why should OS X be any different.

Still, I vaccilated on the desicion. I went to the Apple Store online so many times, loading up my shopping cart with the newest MacBook Pro, only to hesitate when it came to clicking the buy button. I just wasn’t sure that I could throw away everything that I’d worked with over the past 15 years. I watched the videocasts from Mac World and listened to Steve Jobs go through all the cool new features of the current models. I read article after article, blog after blog, review after review, but I just wasn’t quite sure I was ready to finally let go of that Windows lifeline and officially become a “Switcher”…

And then a wonderful thing happened. My Acer Tablet PC broke. Now I had to get a new computer, so I bit the bullet and did it. I bought a MacBook Pro.

That was about six months ago, and all I can say is why did I wait so damn long! When I sat down to write this I was going to make a list of the five things I liked most about my Mac and the five things I liked least. You know what? I can’t even think of five things I don’t like about my Mac. I can’t even think of one thing I don’t like. To me it is, without argument, the best computer I have ever owned. It does everything I could have asked for, and more. The interface, the user experience, of Mac OS X is so far ahead of anything else I’ve used, there is no competiton. It’s sleek and sexy on the outside, it’s an absolute joy to use on the inside, and the stability of its Unix heritage under the hood makes it, for me, the perfect computer.

I feel like I finally have a computer that works the way I work. I don’t have to think about how to make it do stuff, it just does it. It doesn’t fall over, it doesn’t crash, it doesn’t require me to be “the computer guy” the keep it running, it doesn’t need to be restarted all the time or to be updated all the time, it’s fast and stable, it lets me do all the things I like to use my computer for.

To use a well worn Apple cliche, it just works. Thanks Apple.