a Macintosh girl in a Microsoft world

SVMUG was interesting. Despite my best intentions, I had never managed to attend a MUG meeting before this. I walked in without too many expectations.

I was somewhat, but not entirely, surprised to find that there was some amount of Microsoft-complaining going on before the meeting. (It wasn't strong enough to count as MS-bashing, but maybe my tolerance for this is higher because I read /. semi-regularly.) It is, after all, a group of Macintosh users, and I think it's fair to say that there are some Mac users who feel superior to their counterparts who use Windows. (We won't discuss whether I'm one of them; suffice it to say that my Windows machine lives out-of-sight under my desk and has nothing connected to it other than a power cable and a network cable.)

We had to spend some amount of time establishing our Mac cred. Early on, one of the volunteers told us that it must be uncomfortable for us being Microsoft People at Apple; my colleague said that it's not, but rather that it's more uncomfortable for us being Macintosh people at Microsoft. We pointed out that we have a huge Mac development and test organisation, the largest all-Mac organisation outside of Apple themselves. Above all, we tried to answer their questions and show them that we really are Mac people. We're not Microsoft people who had to do a stint on the Mac side of the fence. We're here because we care about the Mac and we care about making great software for it.

My colleague did most of the talking during the presentation, and I chimed in occasionally. After the meeting, my colleague left pretty quickly (it was late, and he had to drive back up to San Francisco), but I stuck around, answered additional questions, and chatted. I don't know whether we were successful at convincing people that we really are Mac people, but the group certainly seemed friendlier at the end of the meeting.

In all, I did enjoy being there and talking with them. I handed out my usability cards and hopefully will get some more local users into the database. A couple of people were clearly excited at the thought of being able to participate in our sessions. We're back next month for Virtual PC, and I might attend if I have any energy left over post-MWSF. I don't make any promises, though!