Ars Technica published a terrific article by Peter Bright that illustrates why the Mac platform is growing at the expense of Windows. According to the article:
Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it—that’s the argument. The truth is that Windows is hampered by 25-year old design decisions. These decisions mean that it’s clunky to use and absolutely horrible to write applications for. The applications that people do write are almost universally terrible. They’re ugly, they’re inconsistent, they’re disorganized; there’s no finesse, no care lavished on them. Microsoft—surely the company with the greatest interest in making Windows and Windows applications exude quality—is, in fact, one of the worst perpetrators.
The author’s perspective is not unique. What makes this article more interesting is his next conclusion:
The unfortunate thing about this is that there is a company that’s not only faced similar problems but also tackled them. Apple in the mid-1990s was faced with an operating system that was going nowhere, and needed to take radical action to avoid going out of business. And so that’s what Apple did.
This article goes on to discuss this history of the Mac and Windows platforms from 1997 on, and fairly concisely explains how Microsoft squandered what appeared to be an insurmountable architectural lead over Apple. It also explains how the third-party Mac software community rose from shareware roots, riding the momentum of MacOS X from about 10.3 on.
There’s a reason why practically every thought leader on the Internet is a Mac user in 2008: the quality of the user experience. This is not marketing hype. You can see little examples of it everywhere when you look over a Mac user’s shoulder. What Apple started with MacOS X and continued with its iLife, iWork, and Professional-series applications, has been continued and driven forward by the third-party developer community and its full scale embrace of the Cocoa application framework.
The article is actually titled From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user’s conversion to Mac OS X. It is the first of a three-part series that attempts to explain why Microsoft is losing and Apple is winning. This first article is absolutely worth reading, regardless of your Operating System preference.