Irony

For most of my technical career, I've supported Apple products. When I was in college, after a couple of years in one lab supporting PCs and VAX terminals, I moved to another that was mostly Macintosh, and from there went on to a good run as an Apple tech: to a local Apple reseller, an on-site tech at a media company, to a field tech for an Apple-Authorized Service Provider, and eventually back to the education space before re-entering the corporate world as: Macintosh Support Engineer. For about twenty years, Apple products were my speciality, my area of expertise, that thing about me that made me alternately cool and god-like to some, weird and unlettered to others.

Early on it was just what I found myself using every day. If you're in college, and you work in a lab full of Macs, you learn to use them, and you understand how they were. I was always more or less bi-lingual: I could translate what I did on a Mac to what I was doing on a PC, back in those primitive days when Windows was, at best, little more than DOS in drag. I was never an ardent fangirl thinking Apple was superior. I knew I didn't know enough to make an argument. I knew what I knew, and it took me pretty far.

I remember the bad days for Apple. The 1990s, prior to Steve Jobs' triumphal return, were terrible for the company, even as they continued to innovate. They did not have the salesmanship they have now. They started the decade with product bloat, trying to be like the crowded PC marketplace with big breadbox-style machines, as well as their expensive all-in-one units. The PowerPC was a great leap forward in performance, but eventually ran its course as Apple's partnership with IBM ended and Intel caught up the performance race.

Even after Jobs' return, it took a while for Apple to regain its footing. Microsoft took an investment stake in Apple, offering some product support, a financial lifeline, all in return for helping shed its monopolist image. OS X took a couple of versions to really take off too: the 10.0 release was not ready for consumers, and it wasn't till 10.2 that it was really usable. Since, then, a steady progression of improvements and feature-adds have made OS X into a really good operating system. Sales of Apple's other product line (*cough* iphone *cough*) have helped as well.

In all of that time, in the techie world - a world where you essentially are the products that you support - I was seen by corporate IT people as this weird specialist who could keep the one or two (or that, times a hundred) machines running, which were just a small fraction of the total population. To Mac users, I was this amazing smart person who could make things work. To fellow Macintosh techs, I was someone who learned and contributed to the composite body of knowledge? New update broke something? Shared. Here is the fix: do it differently.

As a user of computers I was always that minority - the weird Mac user, using second-rate copies of Windows, various browsers, finding ways to dance backwards in heels, but with amazing video and photo applications. "Macs are for Graphics", people would say. People still say that, though it isn't strictly speaking true. Most of the Mac users I know now are software developers. They like Macs because they are based on Unix.

Now, working in the corporate world, here I am now responsible for a much broader range of technologies, Windows as well as Macintosh, and the various tools to support them. Additionally, Apple's minority status in the computer world is completely reversed in the mobile world. Globally, Android is dominant, but very location-specific and fragmented across manufacturers. Apple dominates as a manufacturer and in providing a uniform user experience.

The strengths of the fragmented PC-based market in the 1990s are weaknesses today. The only spitballing I'll throw in here is that modern global supply chains did not drive the razor-thin margins on OEMs then that they do now. The point is, Apple is to the current mobile space wha Microsoft was to the personal computing space a generation ago: a giant cash machine defining how the market should work.

So, along comes Microsoft, with their Windows 8 and their Surface devices and their Office 365, and what happens? The cool Apple people, long underdogs, laugh and ignore them - even though Microsoft arguably provides a better experience for some of their products on the iPad than they do on their own operating system.

If ten years ago I was figuring out how to make Apple products work with printers and servers geared towards Windows, now I'm struggling to make sure our remote access and wireless solutions work with iOS. I have to get our email system to work with iPads and iPhones. These are problems we have solved where I work, but the point is, we're forcing infrastructure to work with the device, rather than the other way around. It's like designing a car around the steering wheel.

That, my friends, is irony. Take it from one of the ironic generation. It isn't as cool as it sounds.