Like many of you, I use a PC day in and day out. These days, for the majority of my work as CTO, it is no longer to design a circuit or design software, but to perform office-related tasks, such as writing a document, creating a spreadsheet or responding to e-mail. However, it seems to me that over the years, performing these tasks successfully is been becoming more difficult to do rather than easier. As the complexity of my office tools increases, their reliability seems to be inversely affected.
A few weeks ago, I spent several hours putting together a presentation for the company's board of directors, using a popular Windows office suite. When finished, I saved the presentation and went home. The next morning, I returned to the office and tried to open the document, on the same PC, which had spent the intervening hours locked safely in my office, but to my horror, the application came back with an error saying that one of the files required to run the application had gone missing and I needed to reinstall that file.
Okay, no problem, I thought, as I kept the office suite installation disks in my office drawer, for situations just like these. I inserted the disk and hit enter, but the installer program aborted, telling me the CD was not the correct disk and that I needed the identical disk from which I had initially installed the office suite, which of course it was. So I hit my browse button and located the file in question manually, again hitting enter, and again with no luck.
The error came back again - "Please use the original disk!"
At this point, I was left with few unpleasant options. I could reinstall the office suite again, or even reinstall the Operating System. It seems to me that over the years I've installed this particular OS more times than I care to recollect. I couldn't stand the thought of doing it yet again, and there still remained the question of my board presentation...
I often wonder how the average businessman or home user copes with this kind of situation. I have spent years building data centers and have some degree of technical competence but simply cannot seem to keep my desktop PC in good order.
With all of this accumulated frustration bubbling up in me, I did something that many people thought less than advisable - I went to a friend who had an Apple Macintosh PowerBook and asked if I could borrow it. For years, Mac users have been telling me how much they prefer their computing environment, but I had always thought of them as a dedicated fan club and mostly ignored their cries.
With the introduction of Mac OS X, many Windows compatibility issues had supposedly been fixed and with the operating system's UNIX base you had the best of both worlds. Yet without further proof I wasn't going to jump in head-first.
My friend lent me his Mac OS X laptop. It was certainly sexy to look at, but would it work? Over the next week I threw everything at it I could think of. I wrote documents in Microsoft Office and sent them to my Windows colleagues who could read and edit the files with no problems. I installed Microsoft Outlook and interacted with my e-mail, calendar and contacts just as I had always done before.
But I held one last shot in my arsenal, which I thought was going to be a sure showstopper. I wanted to remotely log into our office network using the VPN over the Internet and our corporate Wireless LAN. I was astounded to find that this worked the very first time. Not only did it access the network, but I could assess both our Windows and UNIX servers with NFS and CIFS from the same laptop. Could this be too good to be true?
Needless to say, following these tests, I was convinced. I went out and purchased an OS X laptop and have been using it ever since. As of this writing, I am on the road in the UK (I live in San Jose, California) and am using Microsoft Outlook to e-mail this back to corporate headquarters over our Windows VPN. Over the last two weeks I've been presenting to BlueArc customers using PowerPoint with standard corporate presentations templates, without any modifications. So far, there have been no issues and nothing that would lead anybody to think I'm using anything other than a regular PC. No blue screens either.
If this article sounds somewhat like a paid advertisement, it's not intended to be so, and certainly is not the case. But, if like me, you have assumed for years that there is no way you can do your job without a Windows PC, maybe it is time to look again. Sometimes it is important not just to Think Different™ but also to Be Different.
Dr. Barrall is the CTO, Executive Vice President and co-founder of BlueArc Corporation and the principal architect of its core technology, the SiliconServer Architecture. Prior to joining BlueArc, Dr. Barrall founded four other ventures, including one of the first Fast Ethernet companies and a successful UK consultancy business. In this role he was involved in the introduction of innovative networking products into UK markets including the Packeteer and NetScout. Dr. Barrall received his PhD in Cybernetics from the University of Reading in 1993.