Sometime last week, I was finally greeted with the words from a former colleague that I'd been waiting to hear for nearly three years:
"My Gateway finally died. I'm ready to buy a Mac. Let me know which model I should get."
Okay, you're saying, yet another Switcher. One more anecdote to add to the pile, one more notch in my belt. After all this time, something finally made her decide to switch to the Mac. It was probably the iPod or something, right?
Well, no. And not only did the iPod have nothing to do with her decision to Switch to the Mac, the iPod didn't even exist back when she made her decision. The story goes something like this:
In the fall of 2001, a new teacher came to our school, and the first question she asked me was what kind of computer she should buy. Naturally, I tried to steer her toward the Mac, but she'd literally never used a Mac in her entire life, and so her only "experience" with the Mac was the metric ton of untrue nonsense that she'd heard from various misinformed PC users. You're familiar with all the standard myths by now, so I don't need to waste space here, either by listing them or by tearing them to shreds for the umpteenth time. But even as nonsensical and patently false as it all is, it was enough to scare her away from the Mac and instead buy herself yet another Windows PC.
I remember the exact words she said to me at the time: "I'm probably going to regret this, but I'm buying a PC." She'd made up her mind, so I wasn't going to push the issue any further, especially with someone I'd just met. She bought a Gateway with all the bells and whistles, and that was that. Or so I thought.
But as it turned out, over the course of the following school year, she would come to me from time to time just to tell me stories about what all was going wrong with her PC, or rather what wasn't going right, and how even when various aspects of her computing experience weren't outright failing her, things just weren't going well overall. She's paid a lot for it, and had been promised a lot, and simply hadn't gotten out of it any of what she'd been promised. She knew I couldn't help her with her Windows-based problems, and just wanted to let me know that she was gradually beginning to conclude that I had been right. And somewhere along the line, she finally told me that whenever she bought her next computer, it would be a Mac.
And there it was. She had done it. It was 2002, and she'd switched to the Mac -- in her mind, anyway. But she had just bought a new PC barely a year before, and after realizing that she would need to sell her PC to make it happen, and after looking up its disappointing potential resale value, she decided that she was just going to have to live with it and keep using it for awhile longer. And it turns out that "awhile longer" just happened to last all the way until earlier this week.
Back when Apple first began airing its Switch Campaign television commercials a couple years ago, I stated right then and there that despite the fact that millions of Windows PC users would be swayed into Switching, most of them would wait until they had gotten most of the useful life out of their current PC. Think about it: it might seem unbearable for a long-time Mac user like you or me to be stuck with a PC at home for any length of time, no matter how short. In fact, if I were stuck in that situation, there are very few personal possessions I wouldn't trade in order to get myself back on the Mac platform as quickly as humanly possible. But a potential Switcher, even one who has already made up their mind for sure, doesn't see it that way. Even though they no longer want to be a PC user, they've been getting by with it for years, and so they figure that muddling through another year or two on their PC before Switching won't kill them.
And it turns out that she ended up taking the exact path to Switching that I had predicted that millions of Windows users would: she milked her PC for all she could get out of it, and when it died, it was time. Just because she waited until 2004 to switch, doesn't mean that the 2002 Switch Campaign wasn't a success. In fact, I think it's working exactly as Apple originally planned it. Because despite the propensity of the geek universe to simultaneously own multiple computers of multiple platforms, the other 99 percent of computer users just don't function that way. Normal people only own and use one computer at a time. The don't buy a new one until the old one is no longer serviceable.
So what specifically made her decide to Switch to the Mac? It was a combination of factors. The Switch ads on TV initially got her attention, and planted the question in her mind. The fact that she was using a Mac at work gave her the opportunity to experience MacOS X first-hand. The existence of an Apple Store in her local shopping mall definitely played a part in it. And I suppose a couple of years of hanging around me had something to do with it. After all, I do tend to have that effect on people. But then again, this week was the first time I'd spoken with her in nearly a year, so it's not as if I'd been continuing to influence her decision-making lately, and I'm not sure how much credit I can take. In fact, she told me this week that another member of the faculty, someone brand new whom I'd never even met, also recently Switched to the Mac. And as much as I'd like to, I know I can't take credit for that one.
But the one potential factor that can be ruled out in this case, with absolute certainty, is the iPod. She never had any interest in that particular product whatsoever. Sure, the iPod has undoubtedly caused a large number of PC users to decide to go all-Apple, but from the way the mainstream press spins things these days, you'd think that the only reason why anyone buys a Mac is because their iPod led them to do so. Well, I can tell you that at least in this instance, it's just not the case. She decided to Switch way back in 2002, and finally pulled the trigger in 2004. And there are many, many such stories out there. I don't really care what the mainstream press decides to attribute it to, I'm just glad it's happening.
Two years later, the Switch Campaign is a smashing success.
Willie Urwoni did a great job of filling in for me last week. But at the present moment, the potential to help bring millions of new people onto our platform, and to make the platform all that much sweeter in the process, is upon us like never before. These are serious times for serious columnists, and I for one am not about to let the opportunity pass us by.
Yeah, I'm back.
