[Micro Persuasion] Dear Microsoft, For years I have been a big fan of your company, products and people. In fact, I own Microsoft shares. And I’ve even been to the Microsoft Museum. Unfortunately, I am dumping you for OS X and Web 2.0.

Steve Rubel has some interesting comments regarding dumping his PC for a Mac and Web 2.0 (aka AJAX apps) in which he brings up some of the things buzzing around my skull as of late. Since I’m super tired, this might ramble on a bit. But it could be interesting, so let’s see where it goes.

This all began back in December, when Leslie first talked about the Exploding PC. It was one of the first ‘new technology manifestos’ that really hit a cord with me because it actually changed the way I looked at home computers. For the first time I found that I started asking myself "Self, what do you use your 5 computers for?" Wait. Five computers?

1. Home Server, 2. Media Center which powers the home theater, 3. Desktop PC, 4. Mac Mini and 5. Laptop. That also doesn’t take into consideration my wife’s computer or all the various gadgets like Tivo’s, connected DVD players, etc., cluttering the house. Yes, I agree - it’s WAY too many - I can realistically see moving down to 3 machines: a server, the theater and a laptop (noticed I didn’t say PC or Mac).

Ok, back to the question. For some time, I’ve been thinking about ‘dumping the desktop‘ and moving over to just using the laptop. Not surprisingly though, a few months later I got sucked into the Steve Jobs ‘gravity well‘ and went out and bought a Mac Mini (which I have been enjoying). So instead of decreasing the number of computers, I just added another to the mix. The funny thing is that If I look back over the last few months, my computer usage (regardless of platform) has centered around the following tasks:

• Communication: Email, instant messaging, blogging and web surfing for information.
• Personal Finances: MS Money
• Digital "Scrap Booking": Call it what you want, but I’ve been doing tons around personal digital photos, digital video and digital music, especially since my son was born.
• Coding: I write Windows software for a living.

First, let’s taking ‘coding’ out of the mix since the average end user isn’t going to be writing code. And while I don’t necessarily agree with Steve’s hype on AJAX, I can certainly see my communication needs being handled by these so-called "Web 2.0" applications. While I’m sure someone will come up with a decent web based ‘personal finance’ application, I still am some what untrusting of storing my financial data on the web.

What does that leave us? Digital media. I don’t want to be only a consumer, but also a producer. As for hosting those pictures, sure Flickr is neat, but I’d much rather just plop the photos on my home server (if I could find a ‘personal flickr’ app that I could host that would rock).

So it seems that the only really rich client apps that I really need (which is a bummer, I like rich client apps) revolve around the ability to create, modify and process digital media. Both platforms (the mac and pc) have their strengths and weaknesses around this, but I have a feeling that its going to come down to which OS creates the most compelling experience around the creation of content.

To be continued…. (someday)