One basic assumption of good experience design is that people fundamentally don’t like change. They can’t deal with it, it’s too risky, and changes will all too often lead to failures.

Indeed, when confronted with the prospect of change, both designers and users shy away, falling back to the tools and techniques they’re accustomed to and passing up on opportunities for improvement, progress, and innovation. But the human mind’s capacity to adapt to change, sometimes rapidly and seamlessly, can be astonishing.

In 1896, a scientist named George M. Stratton, showing an ingenuity that must have seemed like madness at the time, conducted a fascinating experiment in visual perception with himself as the subject. He constructed a pair of goggles with special lenses that inverted his view of the world by 180 degrees, causing him to see everything upside down, as if he were standing on his head, continuously. He wore the goggles for many days, never once opening his eyes without wearing them (he would shower with his eyes closed, for example).

The experiment has been repeated many times, and in every case the results are nearly the same (this description is from The Phenomenology of Space by Shannon Vallor):

Day 1: The subject who puts on inversion goggles initially reports the visual spectacle is inverted, and that the things she sees look ‘unreal’. Motor actions (such as reaching for objects) are disrupted and need to be consciously corrected to be successful.

Day 2: The subject begins to report that things are no longer looking inverted, but her body seems ‘upside down’.

Day 3-5: The body begins to ‘right itself’, particularly when the subject is active. Objects increasingly take on the ‘look of reality’. By the fifth day, motor actions are consistently successful without the need for conscious attention or correction. The time it takes for this process of ‘normalization’ to occur is highly variable, and varies inversely with the subject’s activity level in her environment. When the glasses are removed, objects do not suddenly look inverted, but they look ‘unreal’ again, and motor success is once again impeded.

In other words, at some point things suddenly flip and everything works. Our brains are apparently able to thoroughly adapt to the absolutely bizarre predicament of having ones eyeballs spun upside-down, and apparently this adaptation occurs pretty quickly.

Switching (to Mac) is Flipping

I recently switched from Windows to Mac. And my experience is startlingly close to the visceral nature of the inversion-goggles flip. When I switched, I was immediately completely disoriented by the OS’s peculiar details. I would frequently move my mouse to the wrong part of the screen for the feature I wanted, or I’d stare at the screen for several seconds at a time wondering where I would find a feature that actually did not exist. And I would constantly type the wrong keyboard combinations for cutting and pasting.

But at some point within the first two weeks of using the Mac almost exclusively (I went cold turkey on Windows), suddenly everything just seemed to click. I was doing everything the Mac way. I flipped. In fact, the next time I found myself using Windows (on the Mac!) everything seemed weird again. I was still in my new flip mode, so now the old status quo was alien.

This phenomenon must be fairly common for any kind of highly-immersive user experience: the learning curve begins to rise very steeply slowly, but then has a sudden and radical flattening out ascent where mastery of the new paradigm occurs nearly instantly (and yes, I’ll argue that operating systems are immersive experiences to the extent that most of today’s white-collar professionals spend pretty much their entire days using them).

For me as a user, this means that I don’t need to fear major changes in my working environment. They might even be fun.

As a designer, however, I’m not sure what this means. Any guesses?

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The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (the people who run the subways) have done a test installation of a new feature to help riders orient themselves as they exit our often-labyrinthine subway stations. They’re placing sidewalk-level signage to tell riders which way is north and indicating which direction the nearest streets and avenues can be found. The Times has the full story today, and I’ve copied their photo here.

I think these are great. Despite what many New Yorkers will claim, we all get disoriented when we exit subway stations in neighborhoods we are unfamiliar with, and often it takes a minute or two to figure out exactly which way is north. (This has, by the way, gotten a lot harder since we lost the World Trade Center as a landmark).

I like two things about these orientation medallions:

1. They make a relatively high estimation of people’s knowledge of New York City geography. I don’t have any data to back this up, but based on the truly abysmal performance by Americans in general at reading maps, I’m not confident that many people, even in New York, are cartographically literate enough to even know north from west. Such people would certainly find these medallions somewhat hard to use. Designers and urban planners commonly design for the lowest common denominator of their user base, or at best they aim for features that are understood by and useful for a solid majority of their users, and as a result they don’t build features for the slightly-more advanced users of their systems. So cheers to the MTA for trying something that will clearly help those riders who already have a good general understanding of New York’s lay of the land. Who knows, the medallions may even have the happy side effect of educating the commuters who don’t quite get it.
2. I really dig the nice touch of deliberately making the compass a little bit inaccurate in order to conform with the average New Yorker’s mental model of the city. You see, the long slender island of Manhattan is not actually oriented directly north to south. The island and its avenues actually run a little more north-north-easterly, rotated slightly away from the true N-S axis. But most people think of uptown as due north, so that’s how the MTA oriented the compass directions and the street IDs. No hobgoblins of foolish consistency here.

Also, it’s delightfully surprising to me that this idea was originally proposed by a regular New Yorker, and the city somehow made it happen. Nice job.

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Yours truly, art student at Cooper Union in 1993.

I’ve been in some interesting discussions lately about “design thinking“, in particular with respect to the question of education: How are business and design educations relevant to the management of a design-centric business?

One of my core objections to the “d-school” concept is that most of the curricula emphatically don’t teach design skills. Instead, they teach “design thinking”, which is said to be a way of approaching problem solving that is inherently different from, I suppose, business thinking.

Well, like a fish who doesn’t know that he is wet, I have no idea what it is like to not be a design thinker. And I suppose that, conversely, a lot of people who talk about design thinking have no idea what designers are actually taught. Are we really taught different skills than our MBA counterparts? Is there really something unique about what designers are taught, about how we think?

To answer those questions, I thought it would be useful to simply talk about what I learned in art school. I’m not talking about the specific skills and crafts — I learned how to cast acrylic resin, how to weld steel, how to do 3D modeling, how to paint in fresco, and how to etch a circuit board — although I do strongly believe that hands-on design experience is crucial to being a good design leader.

Instead, I am talking about the broader and more resonant skills I’ve learned that have helped me both as a designer and as a business person.

This is meant to be a dialogue. If you went to art school, did you learn these kind of things? More importantly, if you didn’t go to art school, did you not learn these things?

Without further ado: In art school, I learned:

• How to champion and defend my ideas.
• How to distinguish between personal and professional critique.
• How to respectfully and constructively critique my peers. How to attack the ideas of my colleagues and still have drinks with them that same night (and maybe even sleep with them — hey, it is art school)
• How to test drive a hundred different ideas through sketching, cobbling, and envisioning them, before finally settling on which one to go ahead and build.
• How to tell when I am done a project that could just as easily be improved endlessly.
• How to tell when an idea that is precious to me is actually holding me back. And then to feel good about throwing it away.
• How to have the confidence to present my ideas in public without fearing that they will be stolen. And how to take it in stride when they inevitably are.
• How to distinguish between taste, technical skill, and empirical efficiency.
• How to detect bullshit, and to avoid generating it myself (note that not all art school grads learn this).
• How to go the extra mile to make something high-quality.
• How to recognize talent in my peers.
• How to collaborate with my colleagues effectively to reach a common goal.
• How to be deeply competitive without being a dick.
• How to make something new just for the sake of being new.
• How to build off of, and give credit to, the ideas of my predecessors both contemporary and in history.
• How to save ideas that I’m not ready for and keep them for future use (usually in sketchbooks).
• How to start all over again from the beginning.
• How to teach all of the above.

I’m sure I could go on. Let’s just say that I definitely apply a lot of these lessons in my job every day, both in my own designs and in the way I work with my teams. Does this make me a design thinker?

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When I write a blog post about something I’m not an expert on, which is pretty much everything I write about, I usually Google the hell out of it first to (a) make sure I don’t say something stupid, (b) get some ideas I can build on to make myself seem smarter, and (c) avoid writing something that someone else already said.

But sometimes I don’t bother to research the things I’m writing about. I may deliberately avoid spending time looking at what others have said about something before I go ahead and bloviate on the subject myself. Sometimes, I’m essentially blogging blind.

Besides laziness, why would I want to deliberately avoid the benefits of expressing an informed opinion? Well, this ignorance allows me to explore the idea in a little bit of a vacuum, to see where the idea takes me without the influence of other people’s thinking, however clever they may be.

But more importantly, I think, I will sometimes keep my head in the sand simply to avoid the discouragement that I am prone to once I realize that something I may have thought was quite clever has actually been explored by others already.

This is, I think, a key to innovation — making sure you are well-informed about prior art without ever throwing up your hands because of some misbegotten fear that it’s all been done before.

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Every person, place, thing, and idea whose name can be found on the Internet has an existence that can be detected and measured by search engines. The relentless spiders of Google will find you and rank you (and let’s leave for another day the techno-philosophical question of whether web pages that have no incoming or outgoing links can be said to exist at all). This measurement is, to me, a kind of “pulse”, telling us how strong — how healthy — any given idea is in our collective digital mind.

So whenever we Google our own names (and you know you’ve done it!), we are in effect checking this “Googlepulse” to see how healthy we are in terms of our visibility and connectedness on the Internet. We are, in a sense, measuring our very digital existence.

This measurement will fluctuate over time as the number and freshness of the links to a particular topic varies, much as a person’s pulse will vary during their life as they grow, get in and out of shape, and undergo the natural effects of aging. In January of 2006, if you Googled “iPhone” you probably wouldn’t see much, but in January of 2007 you’d find a hell of a lot. In a sense, this measurement is like what doctors do when they take your vital signs — pulse, blood pressure, etc — and take note of how they change over time. Google is our digital doctor.

(Of course, Google isn’t the only way to do this. You can also gain insight into a concept’s digital pulse via overall site rankings at Alexa, blog tracking at Technorati (especially Technorati Mini), del.icio.us, blog trackbacks, any news web site’s internal alert systems, Neilsen’s Blogpulse metrics, news and blog aggregators, and of course any other search engine. Even Twitter now allows you to essentially measure your Twitterpulse through an alert system. I’m focusing on Google simply because it pretty much encompasses all of the above.)

Being the health nut that I am (and being highly narcissistic), I am no longer satisfied to simply Google myself every so often. I need a constant blinking light telling me my pulse. Which is why I love Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a new (?) feature that allows you to set up persistent search queries and then receive notifications in daily emails about any new activity with that keyword.

So I’ve set up some of my own Google Alerts for several variations on “Christopher Fahey” and “graphpaper.com”, and it’s fun to see them roll in every morning telling me who is talking about me and where I am showing up. My awareness of my “footprint” on the Internet (to introduce another metaphor) has gone up a bit, I think.

The ironic thing about this is that most of us probably have a better idea of our own Googlepulse than we do the pulse of our own living beating hearts.

UPDATE: I’ve set up a Google Alert for “Googlepulse” to measure the Googlepulse of “Googlepulse”. My haste to move this post from draft to live was inspired by an offhand remark I made on Twitter, and the response I got from David Armano urging me to move quickly. This meta-experiment should be fun. So far, even my original Tweet doesn’t show up on Google. Now that I’ve linked to it, I’m sure it will.

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Designers of interactive products and services are having more and more influence on how businesses work, providing guidance that goes go far beyond layouts, flows, grids, colors, and movement — ideas that are fundamentally more that just look and feel. We are helping businesses understand and solve broader challenges, helping them define their core feature offerings, choosing their technology platforms, collecting performance metrics, devising advertising models, and much more.

And I completely agree that designers have a lot to offer with respect to many business strategies that go beyond core visual and interactive design questions. But too often we lump these broader business concerns under the single sexy umbrella term “strategy” without really thinking about what that word really means for a business.

Strategic Defense

Too often, “strategy” is just a sloppy shorthand for the general idea that designers need to understand the business demands and challenges their clients and bosses face. Which is a great and noble objective: I completely agree that designers need to take more responsibility for the big picture around the products we build, not just focusing on pixels and HTML.

But we have to be realistic about the limits of that extended scope of responsibility. Let’s not get too full of ourselves here. A great many absolutely critical aspects of a company’s business strategy have little to do with design at all:

• Operational Strategy: Physical infrastructure (furniture, utilities, amenities) for the corporate offices, maintenance and cleaning of the facility, rents and insurance, even the corporate office’s location…
• Financial Strategy: Accounting and cash flow management, tax preparation, collections, investment management…
• Human Resources Strategy: What kinds of people are needed, how much to pay employees, benefits packages, recruitment efforts, training and conferences, building staff versus leveraging consultants…
• Legal Strategy: Trademarks, patents, copyrights, insurance…
• Marketing/Sales Strategy: What should the product or service cost? How and where should the company advertise? Should the company offer loss-leader services? Will the product be supported by fees or through advertising? If advertising, who should the target advertisers be?
• Corporate Strategy: Mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, positioning for selling/flipping the business, IPO strategies, investor relations, raising capital.

A company can literally succeed or fail based on the wisdom of a single decision in any one of these fundamental strategic business areas. How many small businesses have failed because they signed an expensive long-term lease? How many great products have disappeared because they didn’t cover their ass with a simple patent search? No matter how great a product’s design might be, all too often it’s the basic, boring operational and accounting strategies that become the real make-or-break business success factors.

But how many of these business questions should a user experience designer address when consulting a client or helping their employer with their “business strategy”?

Very few, I think. A business strategy is what people who actually run businesses worry about every day — so unless you are part of company management, a top-level management consultant, or a venture capitalist with direct control over company management, your purview will almost certainly be limited to some subset of a business’s overall strategy. This is not to say that all of these factors are irrelevant or off limits to designers. But most of them are.

Many will argue that all of the above topics can and should simply be seen as aspects of a holistic capital-D “Design”. Conceptually I want to agree… but realistically I simply cannot agree: Few designers have the experience or training to offer the kind of specialized consulting required to be credible or helpful in almost all of these fields. In short, “business strategy” is more than design.

Why this is Important

I was once in a group discussion at a design conference where the topic was “business strategy”. After about 15 minutes of listening quietly, it struck me that everyone in the room had a different idea of what the topic really was. Some thought it was about how to start or run a business, others thought it was about how to provide ROI metrics for design services, and still others thought it was about how designers can and should learn more about how their clients’ businesses actually work. When I asked the group what we were talking about, I got a lot of blank stares and some people admitted that maybe we weren’t sure but hey, the discussion was interesting anyway.

So can I ask a favor? Can we designers all please stop using the word “strategy” without preceding it with a specific adjective? As in “design strategy”, “marketing strategy”, “customer acquisition strategy”, etc. Let’s be very clear about what we’re talking about when we extend our responsibilities beyond what they taught us in design school. We do have a great deal to say in many aspects of business strategy, but not even by a long shot can we claim a right to play a role in all of them.

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In the future of Idiocracy, Carl’s Jr.’s slogan becomes “Fuck You, I’m Eating”… which isn’t really a stretch from the attitude expressed in their current ad campaign.

David Armano’s Logic+Emotion blog today discusses a tacky new ad from Hardees & Carl’s Junior, in which a pair of smarmy white high school kids rap about their stripper/teacher’s “flat buns”, intended to introduce the world to their new “Flat Bun Burger” product. The ad really is just too stupid to describe, and I won’t even bother put the video of the ad here, since David has already (and reluctantly, by his own admission) put the ad up on his own site for you to see.

The commercial seems like a scene right out of the excellent and wildly-underrated movie Idiocracy (directed by Mike Judge, of Office Space and Beavis and Butthead fame). In the not-so-distant future in which Idiocracy is set, Carl’s Jr. is one of the dozen or so corporations who essentially control a world populated entirely by people with below-50 IQs and whose culture has devolved into shameless gluttony, juvenile sexuality, and crass violence. A professional wrestler is President, law degrees are sold at Costco, slot machines are in hospitals, and lounge chairs have food-dispensing hoses and toilets built into them.

This ad only helps to cement the movie’s profound prescience about the reality of our rapidly-dumbing culture and the overall downward trajectory we often seem to be heading towards, often hand-in-hand with corporate consumer marketing. In fact, every day I see a dozen commercials or products that seem right out of the future world of Idiocracy — but I see them right here in 2007 America. The movie is a satire, of course, but as with all the best satire it frequently and repeatedly hits shockingly close to home. (Happily, you can go ahead and view lots of hilarious scenes from Idiocracy on YouTube right now.)

On Human Dignity

I work on interactive marketing for some major consumer brands, but I am perpetually grateful that I never have to work on ads like this. Behavior’s clients are almost exclusively blue-chip brands with deep respect for their customers, users, and audiences. But many designers are sometimes presented with the option of either doing something classy or doing something crass and degrading. We have a choice between treating the customer with respect and treating them with contempt. The makers of this ad are either morons (which I doubt) or people who think of their customers as moronic assholes ripe for exploitation.

In fact, in the comments on David’s blog there is much speculation about the creative meetings in which this ad was hatched. I can only say that if I were working at a company producing ads like this, I would fight hard to do something classier, or I would quit and go work for someone a little less cynical about respecting human dignity. I don’t want to be one of the architects of the Idiocracy future.

As designers of experiences and shapers of brands, we do have a choice in this matter, even when working for clients who may have an inclination to “go negative” and tap into this poisoned well. Even if you suspect that an ad like this would actually work, that it would actually succeed in bringing millions of people into Hardees/Carls Jr. to buy these flat bun burgers, you have a responsibility to the inherent dignity of the human race to NOT produce ads like this.

Note: It’s not the sexuality of the ad I object to. I still think Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” (the obvious inspiration for this spot) is cool. The music’s kinda catchy, too. There’s just something about the whole thing, maybe it’s the over-the-top glorification of juvenileness and stupidity, that makes me sad for everyone involved with this ad and the millions of other cultural products like it that crowd our media landscape more and more.

Do you work on marketing that relies on these themes of disrespect, selfishness, immaturity, and stupidity? If so, how do you justify it? Do you have a choice in the matter, or do you feel that you have a higher obligation to give your clients or your customers what they seem to crave?

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As I was subtly hinting at in my last couple of posts, I have changed my Windowy ways. I have switched (back) to Mac. Finally.

This is the first in an ad hoc series of articles documenting my experiences with this transition, looking at it from many perspectives: personal and cultural observations, usability and user experience design inspirations, and technology and business considerations. And, not least of all, I hope that it will also serve as my formal introduction to the Mac community that I have for many years only been able to observe from the outside.

How I Became a Windows Addict

After college, when I landed my first real multimedia-industry job in the early ’90s, I was required to use Windows (version 3.11) as my day-to-day work machine. I had never used Windows before — in fact, I’d never even seen Windows before. I instantly found it awkward to use, and I immediately recognized it to be a lower-quality imitation of the Mac OS. Still, it wasn’t long before I owned a Windows PC at home.

Little did I know that this would be the beginning of a thirteen-year relationship with Microsoft Windows.

Earlier in my life, between the ages of twelve and twenty-three, my computer platforms were very diverse, including the Apple II, the TRS-80, the TI-99/4a, and the only computer I actually owned myself before the age of twenty-five, the Commodore 64. My father had a Mac SE, and I experimented with Hypercard on it in High School. Later, as I made my way through art school at Cooper Union, the professional platforms of the Mac and the Commodore Amiga became my tools of choice.

At college, I focused on conceptual installation and sculpture. I didn’t take any design courses whatsoever. I was cutting steel and casting plastic and reading about Marcel Duchamp, not learning how to use Photoshop or manage Suitcases. As a result, my exposure to the Macintosh was unusually light compared to that of most people who would become design professionals. What’s worse, back in the early 90’s Cooper Union’s design department owned all of the art school’s Macs, and they were very strict about who could use them. For several years you were literally not permitted to use the computers in the Mac Lab until you had completed several prerequisite courses in setting movable type in a medieval letterpress! Very old school policy, one that pretty much put the Mac out of reach for me.

And then Windows entered my life.

In all the intervening time, over a dozen different computers, four jobs, and starting my own company, I never went back to Mac. I just kept renewing my vows with Windows. Has it really been thirteen years? It’s hard for me to even believe it.

Why I Waited So Long to Switch

Computer ownership involves a lot of inertia, a comfort with the status quo that’s hard to overcome. You become invested both in your own expertise and in the tools you own. In my case, I became a bona fide Windows “power user”, and a pretty decent Windows system administrator to boot, and I accumulated an extensive collection of PC components and peripherals, piled up in drawers and toolboxes all around my home office.

My reasons for sticking with Windows for thirteen years are pretty simple:

Games: My career began as a computer game designer. Naturally I was also a player. And all of the best and most innovative games in the mid-90’s were PC-based (this was in the console “dark ages”, the lull between the NES and Playstation eras). Desktop PCs were miles ahead of everything else, and the Macintosh was barely on the radar at all. One can only play so much Sim City, after all. From the classic graphic adventure games from LucasArts, to the great isometric sims and strategy games from Warcraft to Civilization, to the thrilling genesis of the first person genre with Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal, I was up to my knees in pixilated blood thanks to the smokin’ PC platform. The Macintosh offered me nothing.

Now, of course, the Mac has plenty of games available for it. And honestly I have less interest in games than I did five or ten years ago. And the best gaming, of course, is on the Nintendo Wii anyway.

Tinkering: One of the things I liked most about PCs was how easy and cheap it was to open them up and experiment with the hardware guts, and how much software there was for further mucking around. It wasas if I owned a fancy sports car that I could trick out in the garage every weekend. Over the years, I’ve built dozens of PC computers from scratch, scavenging parts from older computers, discount stores, and even from the trash. I’ve also accumulated a lot of software: apps, utilities, hacks, tweaks. But in the last couple of years, I have retired from my hobby of tinkering with computers. The first step was realizing that the amount of money I save by building a PC from scratch was not worth the hundreds of hours I’d invariably spend dealing with hardware incompatibilities, OS glitches, and assorted Windows and PC bullshit.

At some point I decided that I should be using my computer for things besides playing with my computer. Getting a Mac is definitely part of this philosophy.

Cost: In 1997, before the iMac came out, I could build three smokin’ Windows workstations for the price of a single low-end Mac. Even after the low-priced iMac came out, I really never saw the Mac as an affordable computer given my budget and salary at the time.

I’ll be frank here: The Macintosh has always been a luxury product, targeted at the higher ends of the American economic class scale. And even now that Apple’s pricing gets comparatively lower and lower, there are still millions of people who cannot justify the cost of a Mac when a powerful new Windows machine can still be had for half the price. It’s a Wal-Mart mentality, making significant sacrifices on style and even quality in favor of price, but it’s an approach that I can hardly begrudge millions of Americans for taking when the other option is economically impossible.

As much disdain as I have for the Windows PC platform, I will not stoop to berating people just because they cannot afford a fancy Macintosh computer. I’ve been there, and I know how it feels.

Which brings me to probably another reason lots of Windows users resent the Mac: It’s a class thing. For a long time, I didn’t want to identify with style-conscious and wealthy computer buyers who were willing to pay twice as much for something just because it carried a certain cachet. Conversely, there’s a certain admirable asceticism to using a PC, like wearing a hairshirt. I’ve gotten over it.

Visio, Project, and Outlook: At various stages of my career, Microsoft Project and Microsoft Visio have been the centers of my professional computing life. As a project manager, MS Project is the essential project planning tool in the business world, and as an information architect, Visio has always been the industry standard. And Outlook has always been my dashboard for my business PIM needs. I am an expert power user of all three of these programs, and all three are only available on Windows.

The emergence of windows-compatible Intel Macs have made all of this obsolete, since now Mac owners can run Windows on the same machine via Boot Camp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion. In a pinch, I can always run these apps in a Windows partition on an Apple machine.

But more importantly, I have come to have faith in the emergence of alternative, non-MS tools for every single application MS currently has a stranglehold on. Tools that are not only just as functional as the MS products they seek to replace, but that are already achieving an astonishing amount of adoption momentum. People are using non-MS apps more and more every day, including, surprisingly, many people within our enterprise-level clients. OmniGraffle is fast becoming the preferred alternative to Visio among my fellow information architects, for example, and tools such as Merlin and are viable MS Project replacements.

But more generally, tools that go beyond the desktop and aren’t mere feature-by-feature replacements. Google Spreadsheets, for example, is superior to Excel for much of my spreadsheeting needs: I can share it over the internet, it saves versions automatically, and it’s far easier to use than Excel. 37Signals‘ Basecamp and Backpack do a lot of things that no project management or PIM software does. Google, Yahoo!, AIM, Twitter, and Wordpress comprise a great deal of my day-to-day computing tools. None of these are anything like what Microsoft is developing for the desktop.

Down with the People: Finally, since I am a web user experience designer, it’s important that the tools I use allow me to understand and empathize with the tools my end users are using. Getting a Mac will surely decrease this empathy, but you know what? My Windows usage is so idiosyncratic that this empathy is probably minimal. Maybe I’m rationalizing, but again, I’ve gotten over this reason, too.

Why I am Switching

So clearly there are very few good reasons for me to stay with Windows, besides pure inertia. So why should I upend my entire computer life and adopt a whole new platform? That’s for next time, Why I am Switching: What I Expect and What I Fear.

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