There are plenty more than even software pieces that are equivilent to iLife. Many of them have feature far and beyond anything iLife can do. And even many of the free, like Picasa for example, which outdoes iPhoto by a lot in many reviews. But unless they fit your style, or match your expectations and what you’ve learned over the years, it just won’t matter how good they are. You can always learn a new piece of software, but the purging of old habits for new is always a daunting task.

I appreciate this article for its balance – so here is my take:

There is no perfect OS. There is no perfect computer. There are no perfect applications.

There are however personal preferences – and that is what this all comes down to. My wife, HATES iLife – she is a blogger, does crazy things with photos and does video content quite a bit – but at the end of the day she is more about getting things done (for her that means with tools that she knows and does not have to relearn) then being cool.

Does that mean what she uses is better then iLife? Sure it does – for her.

At the end of the day, people like what they like and trying to convince someone to like a different computer system can be like convincing them that vanilla is better than chocolate when all they really want is strawberry.

Oh and to Joe – for an email client that just works well on PC (and Mac for that matter) – try Postbox. It is the first email client that I actually like – based on Thunderbird, but with nice twist.

Where are the Windows equivalents of these applications?

Garage Band – Great for recording podcasts, I don’t think that there is anything which is as easy to use on Windows. Even you borrowed your wife’s Mac to record your last audio podcast.

iMovie – I think you have proven there is no competitor on Windows.

Time Machine – Windows Backup and Volume Shadow Copy are nowhere near Time Machine in their usability or backup capability. The registry is still a thorny issue.

Proper user privileges – Both Mac and Linux have proper account separation and the applications are designed with this in mind so you rarely see a password dialog. Windows just uses a placebo to make it look like it is secure when UAC is nothing to do with security.

Web Browser – IE8 is junk, to get a good browsing experience on Windows you have to install a third-party browser which lacks the integration of IE8. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that Microsoft cannot write a decent browser?

Which applications did you want when you bought all of the Windows PCs? Your answer did not mention applications at all (except Windows 7 which is not really an application). Otherwise how do you justify your statement that people buy applications?

P.S. All email clients are broken, email is broken. Once you are in the cloud you might start looking at Google Wave for your blogging and communication. The demo looked very cool for bloggers.

the funny thing is the whole story of OneCare.. i already detail part of it. but before the whole struggle started it was starting to do better in retail channels and it also began to get ahead of all free av and basic home solutions. OneCare is still the engine of security for Hotmail and there going to be OneCare for small businesses, server and for WHS that never went to be. i hope that they allow installing of Microsoft Security for those scenarios now.

The biggest loss in Microsoft Security is for XP and Vista since it don’t comes with managed firewall.

Windows Advisor(beta) is what was supposed to replace the part of onecare that did tune ups and it also meant as a way to resolve conflicts for XP.. it has not been updated.. so who knows if it is still going to be released.

But as i said OneCare 2.5 was just awesome. really sad to see it go all because of symantec, mcfee and OEM’s pressure (since symantec and mcfee paid a lot to bundle trails with new machines)

But as i also said. just they being able to make DVD maker does what it does was a fight since that is another market with lots of OEM money and Companies like nero, roxio, windvd, etc,etc. that is how things are unfortunately.

And all Enterprise computing is not entirely Windows, but I would imagine that both Linux and OS X would find it hard to stretch to 1% worldwide given the numbers involved.

I still find 18% vs 12% in home computing is unrealistic. You assume that 100% of enterprise computing is on Windows (the 70% is a subset of the 88%), but I don’t think that’s true. And if that’s the case, then the 18% becomes larger and the 12% becomes smaller.