[are you there?]
yes

There's a lot to be said for good work habits. At least that's what I've heard, mostly from people who have good work habits, and also have, perhaps not coincidentally, fairly recent iPods. It's hard to balance abject sloth and material greed, I've found, so at some point you just try to find the path of least suffering. Just give a smile on the sidewalk to some girl who's trying so hard to make an impression. You don't have to express your loathing each and every minute to the untermenschen that you are forced by God and man to walk past when all you really want is to get from point A to point B to take the money from party C. Party C understands that you're not there to talk about the weather, but it's protocol, so just fuckin' do it.

Good work habits are more than just Knowing Your Shit. Good work habits include getting out of bed before noon, whether you have to or not [glance at Andy]; not masturbating in front of customers [glance at Thomas]; coming within 4 significant digits of your proposed budget [glance in mirror]; using your spellchecker when norms will be reading; and, last but not least, not fucking the co-ops [no glance necessary].

Good work habits involving knowing your product, and know when not to bend your customer over a barrel, which does occasionally make sense. Call your mother every now and then; do your paperwork; and for God sakes, stop using the fucking copier to make visuals of your goddam buttocks. I know this is all very difficult for you scrubs, but please, do make an effort: We're in this game to win. Now get out there and kick some ASS!

Check out the smoke on slashdot. There are a few very important reasons for a company to switch over to Macs. Viruses, Spyware, and Solitaire, to name just three. I just installed Windows XP on a fairly run-of-the-mill mini-PC, the ASUS Pundit-R. It took me two day to get all the drivers sorted out. I've still got an entry in the device manager for a mysterious "USB Controller" with a yellow exclamation point next to it which doesn't seem to be covered by the ASUS or ATI driver downloads. You can re-install a Mac in about an hour, all drivers and applications included, no matter what model. If you're feeling adventurous, you can even tell the install program to leave your home directory alone, and all your application settings will remain.

On the other hand, I've had a lot of customer contact lately. Most of my customers have irresolvable reasons to stay on the platform they're on, almost invariably Win32. Whether it's a Tax-Consulting program that makes extensive use of COM and the Windows version of Microsoft Office and Outlook, or an embedded controlling program for an industrial baking machine that only runs on Win98 SE, these people are locked in, and generally at ease with that fact. But with that, the 'vendor lock-in' argument against Apple Computer goes right out the window.

Companies shouldn't switch platforms just because somebody on Slashdot can provide an overpowering argument. Switching is expensive, no matter which direction. If you switch to Mac, you have to know that you can't realistically have more that one choice for an office productivity package, ironically MS Office. On Windows, you've got native versions of OpenOffice, Hansa Office, Corel WordPerfect Office (my personal choice at the moment), and just about anything else you can think of, none of which exist on Mac. Mac does have Pages, which beats rings around Word for 99% of what you're going to want to do, as long as what you want to do doesn't involve other companies being able to interact directly with your documents.

There are many arguments against Macification, and many more in favor. It all comes down to whether or not the boss wants to pony up the money for some sexy-ass hardware.