Behavioral inertia

March 19th, 2006

Familiarity Breeds A User Base: W00t! It’s gotta be a good week, when it starts with a dose of John Gruber. The Daring Fireball is back, with a very interesting take on why most PC users won’t switch to the Mac. For those who have invested years and many dollars in the Windows platform, even the recognition that the Mac is better isn’t enough to get them to convert. Gruber has no solutions to the problem, but it’s well-enough positioned that hopefully someone else will…

(Via MacSlash.)

This is definitely something I’ve encountered myself; it’s something that drove me for a long time to stay with the PC. I grew up with a PC. We got an IBM XT PC when I was 7. A 286 came home a couple of years later. From there I went through three different 486 systems (two Intel, and one AMD), and a Pentium II (a Dell, after the IBM, the first computer I owned that came from a major manufacturer).

The Dell was a great system. I owned it and used it for almost 6 years as my primary system. In all that time, I never had a hardware failure, I never had a virus, and I never had a spyware problem. I went through a series of regular formats and reinstalls of the OS, but nothing really major. And starting in 1997, I began work in the tech support industry (after years of being “the kid you asked computer questions”).

PCs were what I knew; they still are to some extent. There’s something about complex systems, I think, that lend themselves to analysis through more than just a purely rational way. Ask a seasoned meteorologist what he thinks the weather is going to be, and he’ll tell you what his computer models show. Ask him what he feels it will be, and I bet it’s something a little different. This is probably more evident with human-designed systems.

Ask a seasoned person in tech support how they know certain things, how they know the computer will act in a certain way, how they know where to find that program option you spent an hour looking for when they don’t have any experience with the program, and you might not get a rational answer. At some point, you look for things in a place because that’s where it should go, through convention and a kind of shared, understood meta-standard.

Even a person who doesn’t reach this almost zen-like understanding of PC behavior certainly learns to intuit the meaning behind many of his or her PC’s behaviors. Kind of like after a while you know what your cat or dog is thinking, after a while you figure out what to do to fix your cranky PC.

And to move away from this familiarity, despite the frustration and headache, can be a little scary. To learn a new system all over again, despite the assurances of a shallow learning curve, despite being told the system “just works,” despite users who are often fanatical in their devotion to the platform, can be daunting; and let’s face it, most people are lazy and set in their ways.

So this has been Apple’s challenge for the last 10 or 15 years: convince users to try something new. Apple has been helped by generally good press, especially since the introduction of the original iMac. Apple design has kept the company afloat for all this time.

Now is the time, I think, that we see if Apple has reached their tipping point. Have people gotten comfortable enough with their computers that they can apply their general knowledge of PC applications to using a Mac? Do they have incentive to do so?

I saw Apple computers in Costco today. There was a Mac mini bundle. This reminded me of nothing so much as when I would see Packard Bell computers in Wal-Mart. For many people, a Packard Bell was their introduction to the world of computing and the Internet. (Can you imagine? It’s a miracle any of them bothered to stick around.)

The point is that the Mac is getting exposure to people in ways that was never done before (or at least hasn’t been done in a very long time). The iPod and iTunes have opened up markets that were almost oblivious to the company before, and I think the iPod is beginning to pay Mac dividends for Apple.

Time will tell.

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Posted in Writing, technology