Moving Beyond Platform Bias or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (well, Like) Windows 7

My wife will tell you I'm a Mac snob and she's right. For the last seven years I've been an avid Mac user and all-things-Apple proponent. I'm a veteran of platform battles. XP drove me nuts. Back then I felt people wanted it because it was easier for network folks to manage and it allowed users not to have to think about much. "Computing for Dummies" I thought in my younger, more smug days. I argued with folks up and down about why we needed the Mac OS, how important iLife was to creating things that register on meaningful parts of Bloom's Taxonomy. I still believe those things are important, I'm just realizing it can be done a couple of different ways.

For seven years I lived in a 90% Mac district. We were early adopters of all things iOS as well. Then I moved out of the Apple Orchard on to new adventures this past month. More than one former colleague thought it was pretty funny I'd be moving onto a Windows district that ran a Novell network. Maybe 100 iPads in the district. The bread and butter of my training expertise was gone - no iLife, no iBook Author, few iOS devices.

Great your title says "integrator," now what? Back to square one?

Our district bought brand new HP Elitebooks this summer for all staff members. Other than the size (I was getting very used to a 13-inch Air) it's a great machine. Windows 7 does what I need it to do 95% of the time. I purchased Camtasia Studio for my video editing and screen casting needs. When I stop and think about it, it's very Butter Battle-y to quibble about platforms. There's an Apple Menu, there's a Windows "Start" orb. There's a Dock, there's a Task Bar. One has System Preferences, the other Control Panel. The display isn't as sharp as I'm used to, but it's not like I'm doing high end graphic arts. I'm working off of spreadsheets the majority of the time right now as I get acclimated to assessment and data responsibilities.

A combination of middle age wisdom on don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff) and the rise of online resources have moved me beyond worrying about platforms. Evernote, Dropbox and Google Drive - three apps I use a lot - work just as well in any environment. As my Jedi Master, Doug Johnson told me, Google Chrome and the iOS will probably make the mainstream platforms obsolete in the not-to-distant future.

For the near-term I'll continue to buy Apple products for my household, mainly because when they break I know how to fix them. But when it comes to work, my horizons are widening. That's a good thing.