Mac or PC?

Its a deliberately contentious title. However the discussion in the FW office recently has been around where Microsoft and Apple are going with their products and support for business users with processor and graphic intensive requirements such as ourselves.

Traditionally we've seen successive upgrades to operating systems provide easier and faster ways of conducting business with increased reliability and ease of use leading to cost savings.
Consequently at FW we've often been early adopters off new software technology. However with the latest iterations of Windows and Apple OSX it is far from clear where the tangible benefits for business users lie.

We've recently reviewed the consumer preview version of Windows 8 and found there to be many enhancements which benefit consumers of content but very little if anything that is of interest to the business user. In fact as far as providing a cohesive user experience for the business professional is concerned Windows 8 feels like a retrograde step.

To a certain degree this is also the experience over at Apple with Mountain Lion and their efforts to integrate apps into the OS. Indeed with Apple dropping their server line and also repositioning the editing software we use at FW - Final Cut Pro - as a consumer product, their lack of support for the business user seems all the more stark.

So where does this leave a business user in 2012?

Nature hates a vacuum and we discussed the possibility of new bespoke operating systems appearing on the market. As business reliance on specific hardware dwindles in favour of cloud based computing and as the open source community increases in size, scope and ability it's just possible that we might see some exciting new products come to market which would challenge the dominance of Microsoft and Apple. In fact to a certain extent this is already happened with the rising popularity of Android which has lept from phones to tablets to Chrome OS.

Additionally, many of the larger production companies doing what we do already run their own bespoke versions of industry software. The Mill for example use their own version of Shake - a piece of software for compositing which was purchased by Apple and then subsequently canned.
Other companies have editing and graphic texturing and rendering software that they have written themselves and in some cases subsequently published for third party use.

A couple of days after we had this discussion at FW, the hacker group Anonymous made the headlines because they'd published their own OS:

We won't be abandoning Windows and Mac OS's for the Anonymous OS any time soon, but it would seem to be a good proof of concept. How long before a more credible industry specific bespoke OS based on Unix/Linux surfaces?

Maybe it doesn't matter

Ultimately, for everything but the creative elements of our business, we're already cloud based and hence device independent. Being device independent means we can use a Mac or a PC, a tablet or a phone to access many of the documents we need in order to run the company.

Which of these devices is seeing the most increased use as a computing device at FW? It's the mobile phone. Phones are getting larger, more high resolution displays and faster processors. Text and voice input is getting better and better and of course they're on-line all the time. These are compelling developments that allow us to run our business with less and less recourse to a desktop or laptop computer.

So at the end of the day, whilst we feel there is a heavy consumer based bias to the improvements we're seeing in Windows and Mac desktop/laptop operating systems, I think we're over it, a phone is rapidly becoming all the computer one needs.