Filed under one-liner personal mental mantras: “accept the customer’s money, but don’t take it.”
That’s the take-away of Take Money Or Accept Money?, Daniel Jalkut’s response to Wil Shipley’s iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?
This post started as an email to Daniel, but then I realized that it might help some folks understand the Mac-user mindset.
(For non Mac users, it will be helpful to know that Daniel is the programmer of MarsEdit which costs $30 and FastScripts which costs $15 (as well as some other apps not pertinent to this conversation). Both MarsEdit and FastScripts are primarily time-saving apps. MarsEdit lets you post to websites [like this one] as if you were writing an email. FastScripts lets you run scripts from a global menu rather than having to switch around, finding it, and launching it.)
When I read “don’t take [your customer’s money]” I immediately thought of the apps that I’ve paid for that let me do things more easily. I’ve paid for web browsers, including the now-free Opera and the not-free-but-still-better OmniWeb. (Interesting footnote that Wil Shipley helped to start the company that sells OmniWeb, so he knows a bit of what it means to provide something that customers want to pay for even when there are free alternatives.) It’s also why I still buy Microsoft Office instead of using the free OpenOffice.
When people ask me why I switched to the Mac, I tell them that it made my life easier. In fact, in 3 (?) years of using a Mac, the biggest problems I’ve run into can be summarized in one word: Windows. Parallels and VMWare Fusion (apps which let you run Windows on a Mac) have caused more frustration than anything else — and I should be clear that 99% of frustration is due to Windows, not either of the apps specifically.
Making my life easier is why I have an iPhone. Yeah it was more expensive, but it works better, and it syncs flawlessly. I no longer cringe when I sync. My Treo was unreliable. I’d be in the middle of adding a bunch of calendar items when it would crash, and not only would it lose the calendar item that I was working on, it would lose everything I had done since I launched the calendar program. It got to the point where I had to:
a) Launch the calendar b) Add/change/modify an event c) Exit the calendar (which forces the Treo to save the calendar) d) Launch the calendar e) Add/change/modify an event f) Exit the calendar
Repeat.
Was this overkill? Probably, but after losing all my revisions a few times, it became the only way to feel safe.
Making my life easier is why I moved from MovableType to WordPress. Due to licensing restrictions, Dreamhost can’t offer MT as a one-click install, but they can offer WordPress. The difference isn’t just the initial installation, it’s the security updates. Whenever MT had a security update or just a feature update, I’d have to ssh to the server, ftp the package (which wasn’t easy because they made you login before you could download it, to make sure that you got the right version), then un-tar/gunzip and replace the files on the server with the ones from the new folder. To upgrade WordPress I go to a webpage, click, and then wait for an email telling me its done. I may or may not have to click another link in the email I’m sent.
Even if it wasn’t as easy, I think I’d use WordPress because MT soured on me when they attempted to take (using Wil’s understanding of the term) money from their customers. It seems to have worked out for them, and hey, great for them, but it made life for me much more difficult, and that’s not what I need.
Making my life easier is why I started using MarsEdit. Yeah I could use the free web interface to post, but I’ve lost too many incomplete posts that way. So I started writing blog posts in email messages (taking advantage of auto-save) and then logging into my site and posting it. It worked, it was free, but it was clumsy and time consuming. What’s it worth to me knowing that I’ll never lose another post because of a browser crash? What’s it worth to me knowing that if I want to put something up I can do it in one step instead of 3 or 4?
On the most recent MacBreak Weekly, folks were talking about the cost of a Mac (about the 1:09:43 mark). I’m quoting here but have cleaned it up a bit for readability/clarity:
Merlin: To me there’s no competition here [between the price of a Window PC and a Mac]. If you’re on the fence and you’re thinking ‘Oh gosh, I know how to use Windows, I’ve used it my whole life, I can go buy this $35 tower machine, or I can spend $2,000 on a Mac.’ Leo: That’s the problem. I had someone call in on the radio show and I had no response, they said “I’m looking at a Dell Core 2 and a MacBook Pro and comparably [equipped] there’s a $2,000 price difference, as much as I’d like to buy the Mac, is it really worth $2,000 more?” And I don’t think you can say it — I don’t know, can you say it is? I don’t know, I mean, it is for me, obviously, it is for us [the others in the discussion]. Merlin: If that’s still a question to you, then the answer is absolutely no. I know that sounds kinda stupid “shopping mall zen”, but if you still have a question in your mind whether there’s any comparison, you should definitely buy the [Windows] PC, no question. Leo: Maybe you just don’t know about the difference. Merlin: That’s what I’m saying. For the longest time, even though I’ve used a Mac all the time almost exclusively since like 1987, it wasn’t until the last 3-4 years since OS X matured that I’ve felt comfortable saying to garden variety users, yeah, this is something you should use. It’s still an easy default to just get Windows. Your stuff still works as badly or as well as it did before [with Vista, possibly worse but unlikely to be better - TjL] and you save yourself a couple thousand bucks. Why not buy the store brand if you can’t taste the difference? Alex: That’s true, but, I can’t…. I value my time. [laughs] As soon as I add value to my time, the $2,000 becomes really cheap. Leo: That’s a good point. Alex: I don’t want to worry about all the things we worry about related to my one [Windows] PC which causes enough trouble to make up for all the other Macs. Merlin: I value my joy. I value the fact that I am genuinely, really really am excited about using a Mac. The years that I was using a PC… those are not joyful days for me. [snipped out some here] Merlin: It is kinda funny, you get people who are crazy anti-Mac, and they get one and they use it, and all of a sudden they’re not so crazy anti-Mac anymore.
(Aside: they were also joking there about John Gruber’s analysis that “There’s a whole class of recent switchers who define “Apple fanboy” as “anyone who’s been an enthusiastic Mac user since before I switched to the Mac”.” Once again John brings the hammer to the head of the nail.)
It’s not (just) about the price. It’s about the experience.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, since moving to a Mac I’ve spent more time doing work on my computer (getting stuff done) vs working on my computer (trying to get my computer to work properly).
Take the recent Windows Update which killed my Windows Explorer (meaning I had no GUI in Windows). Just another run of the mill problem for Windows. I had to go to Google, figure out what to search for, track down an answer, and know how to launch the TaskManager when you can’t get anything else to work. And even then it was a matter of getting into the registry, creating a value, setting it to something, rebooting, getting back into the registry, setting it to something else, and then rebooting again. Now it works, but I’m always left wondering: for how long?
Mac users are willing to pay more for something that works better. That may be the biggest difference between us and most Windows users.
Another good example? Remember how “expensive” the iPhone was? Well even before the price drop, a comparison between the iPhone and a free Treo proved that over the course of your two year contract, the iPhone wasn’t more expensive (especially now that all early adopters are getting $100 back). Now that the prices have dropped, an iPhone is $110 less than a Treo 680 that they’ll pay you $50 to buy!
When I wrote the first of those articles, someone wrote back “Well yeah but that doesn’t matter, it’s just the cost on the day that you buy it that matters.”
That’s a strange way to think when comparing two products which both require a 2 year contract.
