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I have to disagree with the heart of your argument, Bill. As a switcher, I've become quite a proponent of Macs, but there are a LOT of areas where Macs just don't have the support they need to compete. You mentioned games as the one area where people are best to stick with Windows. There are others. And there is a LOT of software out there that simply does not exist... or does not exist in an "as good" form ... on the mac platform.

Let's take the first, and (from my background) most obvious example: WordPerfect. Laugh all you want, but being a Word snob puts you in same category as Mac vs. Windows fanatics. The legal industry is the main example here. WordPerfect is still deeply entrenched there, because of the way the legal industry works. The heart and sole of any law firm is their vast back-catalog of motions, forms, macros, etc. Word does a horrible job of converting the files... and in an industry where motions are carefully crafted word-by-word to precisely fit precise legal length limits, a perfect conversion is a must, and only WordPerfect perfectly translates it's own files. Open a brief using Word that has been painstaking sculpted in wordPerfect, line by line, to conform to a precise 10-page limit (very common), and see how it looks. What's the point here? There is no WordPerfect on the Mac platform. There is an entire industry left out in the cold when it comes time to consider switching. Not just gamers. There are others, but I don't want to turn this into a laundry list.

You can tell me how superior Keynote is to PowerPoint until blue in the face, but when you need 100% complete and perfect PowerPoint compatibility, Macs again don't quite cut it. And let's consider MS Access. Where is the Mac version? It doesn't exist. And don't get me started on Entourage compatibility with Exchange servers. I hate Exchange as much as the next guy, and I'm no huge fan of Outlook (I'm a Eudora guy on both platforms, actually), but in situations where the features of Outlook are needed, "somewhat/partially compatible" is not an acceptable answer.

How about IE? Let me preface this with the disclaimer that I run Safari on the Mac, and love it, and run FireFox on my PCs, and love it much more than IE. But there a lot of important websites out there that require ActiveX and IE, leaving us out in the cold, and on my PCs, forcing me to use IE over Firefox. Microsoft's entire KnowledgeBase comes to mind, as does Exchange's webmail and even OfficeUpdate (and windowsupdate is IE-only, unsurprisingly). There are lots of other sites requiring IE that are not as Microsoft-bound, however. Take McAfee's free online virus scan, for instance.

These past examples are still only dealing with Microsoft products. For all it's warts, at least MS makes a pretense at Mac support. But aside from obvious examples like Adobe, the list of major software companies supporting the Mac platform is dangerously short. Beyond that, the catalog of smaller companies turning out Mac programs pales in comparison to the catalog of available windows programs. don't bother comparing quality of software... the mac development community is just as capable of putting out flaky, poorly-written software as the windows development community is. Only the Windows community has numbers on it's side... and percentage-wise, the smaller percentage of decent Windows software is more than compensated for by the fact that the numbers are so vastly huger on their side that the amount of good (or at least decent) software out there is huge compared to the amount of good mac software, no matter what the good-to-bad ratio is on each side of the fence.

You make good point about the quality of the iApps and other fantastic mac-only software. But there is just as much Windows-only software out there that is very good, even when compared to mac software, assuming an analogous piece of software exists. And it's the frequency that there is no analogous piece of software on the mac that causes the biggest issue.

There is a large amount of wonderful software for the Mac. If you are fortunate enough to not need any software that does NOT exist on a Mac (and I will happily agree that a MUCH larger percentage of the population COULD fall into that category but use Windows machines instead), then let's do the happy dance and "Mac away". But for a lot of people, there is software that cannot be easily replaced with a mac. Those people face a severe shortage of available titles, and fall squarely into the category of "second class status in the software world". Implying that this category does not exist in this universe just because YOU have all the software titles YOU need to do YOUR business is a severely flawed leap in logic.

I love my mac. I tolerate my windows computers. But I need both to get my job done, because there is still a lot that I can't do with my Mac. And that makes me feel like a second-class citizen. In THIS universe, Bill, not some alternate one. I hope this changes as Macs marketshare and mindshare grows, but it doesn't change the fact that this is true today. Not FUD... fact.

-CD