I had an epiphany tonight.  An epiphany both good and sad.  It is good because I had it, sad because it has taken so long to come to it.

Like so many others out there I was born and bred on Microsoft.  When you start out with a certain set of values and teachings you believe them to be fundamentally true.  Whoever you are and wherever you are it is likely that you believe that your country is the best, your value systems the most accurate and your religion (or lack thereof) the most holy.  We don’t usually try to believe things we know to be false.  But the things we believe are seldom tested for their truth.  To do so (and discover our own self-deception) is too much for many of us to bear.  While it won’t be the case for all of you it is likely that you believe the things you do because they are the original things you learned in life.  Few of us ever question these things once they become part of our psyche.  An affinity for one all encompassing software vendor should be included in this list of things accepted blindly.  Think of it as the technology equivalent of ethnocentrism.  Unix old-timers from the 60’s and 70’s are likely to believe that Unix is the way.  Mac lovers from the 80’s have remained steadfast for a quarter of a century.  And Microsoft devotees from the mid-90’s have held the line for theirs.  I have long believed in Microsoft’s superiority.  Having said that, I have long known that their superiority was 2 parts marketing prowess, one part business acumen and 1 part software code.  I don’t think they were ever the best.  But none of  the others were the best either.  There was (is) no “best”.

My trailer is no longer hitched to Microsoft.  I no longer have a clear vision on who to follow.  I have long since abandoned Internet Explorer for Firefox but the Microsoft Office suite (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, etc.) is still light years beyond any competitor.  But even my beloved Office suite isn’t necessary for 95% of the stuff that I do.  Google Docs (docs.google.com) or something similar eliminates the need for most of the population to have Office at all.

I tend to use a computer that runs Windows Vista but I’m not emotional about it.  The OS is little more to me than a way to get to the web apps that now run the world.  Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Wordpress are the apps that I find myself using.  Whether I’m running Windows, Fedora, or OS X doesn’t really matter anymore.    Fully 90% of my time on a computer is spent putting content into the Internet.  I spend almost as much time using my iPhone to work as I do a PC or notebook.  And here’s a kicker.  I have long been a devout Apple hater but I love my iPhone.  Not just a little bit, either.  I friggin’ love the thing.  I resisted the iPhone for quite a while.  I kept putting it off until I got a chance to see how the whole Google Android thing panned out.  A few years from now I suspect it will be the shizznat but it’s not for me today.  Once I had the iPhone for a while I found myself asking questions that I have never asked before.  If I like the iPhone so much then could OS X really be that bad?  Could it be as cool as this phone?  If I had caught myself asking questions like that two or three years ago I would have burned myself with cigarettes as punishment.  But now I give regular thought to buying a Mac.  I’m not ready for it to be my day to day computer but I’m willing to put it in the rotation (I use several different computers during the course of my day).

I have also long tried to wean myself over to Linux as my day-to-day OS.  I try and falter on a regular basis.  It’s not becasue Linux isn’t good, though.  It’s usually because I need to get some work done and I know how to do everything very well when using Windows.  I know Linux pretty well but I still regularly have to learn something in order to get something else done.  I’m a busy guy and don’t always have time for that.  It has been easier to pop back over to Windows, bang it out and move on.  But more and more these days I only need to do that when I want to use Photoshop (I’m not lovin’ the Gimp) or some other app that I’ve been using forever on the Windows platform.

None of this is new to a lot of people, myself included.  But even as I have watched the technology change drastically over the past few years I have continued to bring it all in and wrap it around Microsoft at its (my) core.

…but not anymore.

If anyone from Apple happens to read this:  send me a MacBook (MacBook Pro would be nice) and I’ll switch cold turkey and post my every epiphany for the world to read.