i.shui.tech

Admittedly, I had been moving towards Outlook for a few months. Ever since the Exchange Public Folders issue in OS X Mail (Mail wouldn’t send out email until it completed indexing the public folders… which, by the way, has been resolved by my Exchange admin), I had been pulling up Outlook on a PC through Remote Desktop Connection. I soon had my Address Book moved over, shortly followed by iCal after a few complaints from missed meeting invitations by other Outlook users.

Then the Tablet PC evals came. I set up Outlook and tried out OneNote (which I had thought to be tied only to Tablets PCs). I was hooked. Not just on the Talet PC, but Outlook and OneNote also. The integration of the Office suite was smooth. I do get occasional application crashes (ok, send the error report to !@*#! Microsoft…), which I presume is just something PC users learn to live with*. And so, I keep everything synced and backed up with offline copies, keep virus and spyware software religiously up to date, and just expect a yearly OS reinstall. Oh, and I autosave documents every 5 minutes or so.

I love Macs. The OS is years ahead of Windows in terms of stability and security. And yet, they have yet to integrate their office applications as well as Microsoft. I presume this comes from Microsoft’s focus on business, while the Macs focus on… well, everything else. I’ve come to a point in my career where organization is important to my success at tasking, and in my mind, Microsoft just beats the Mac hands down as a business platform. For the past couple of years I had been using StickyBrain, which I would put into the same software class as OneNote. StickyBrain doesn’t integrate as well with OS X Mail and iCal. (It does integrate nicely with Address Book.) The integration of Outlook’s mail, calendaring, and tasks, combined with OneNote, has won me over. Yes, I admit it, as a new road warrior, I have become a MS convert.

My Mac is still my preferred machine for all things creative. And I can always trust it’ll be up and running smoothly as the day I bought it. But when I walk out the door, I take a PC under my arm. I’ve rarely ever had issues with cross-platform compatibility and truly believe Macs and PCs can coexist peacefully on the same network.

*I asked a few PC users and they admitted to frequent Windows app crashes. Well… I would call it frequent. They just thought it was normal(!?). This might take some getting used to…

~ by Quyen on November 7, 2005.