Digital Home Thoughts: Chris Pirillo's 50 Reasons to Switch from Windows to OS X

"I love my Xbox 360s, I think Popfly rocks (Silverlight will bring much needed competition to Flash). Plus, I can’t live without Exchange and its server-side rules. I love my Microsoft mouse more than any other mouse in the world. Surface looks totally awesome, too. Microsoft does some amazing things - very amazing things. My choice, however, for a primary desktop operating system is no longer Windows - it’s Mac OS X. Duh. It’s rather difficult to admit that officially, if only because… well, I think Microsoft does amazing things. They’ve also been quite supportive of my own efforts over the years, if only because they understand the value of one user. I’m still openly willing to give feedback to Microsoft’s product teams - Windows included....While I don’t need to justify my actions to anybody, I feel I have 50 strong reasons to finally make the move. This is after posting a list of my favorite Mac apps a few months ago, and inspiring Brian to create Appster (so that you could blog your favorite Mac apps with ease, too)."

Ah, my friend Chris, always stirring things up. Am I surprised by his switch? Nope, not at all - I've been watching him inch closer and closer to OS X over the past couple of years, and I had no doubt in my mind he'd switch to OS X once he started raving about the iPhone (and with good reason - there's a lot to like about the iPhone if you don't need a keyboard). Chris brings up some interesting points, the most powerful of which is the way that Windows is so heavily geared toward corporate environments. In the years that I've worked with, and for (on a contract basis) Microsoft, I've seen this tug-of-war happen over and over again. Cool consumer feature? Cut it, we need that enterprise feature. Vista has made some headway in this regard - it comes with a capable video editor, DVD burner, photo organizer/editor, and with most systems shipping with Home Premium, the very capable Windows Media Center software. That's a start - yet there are lots of holes in the products, many limitations, and almost no synergy between them. Microsoft needs to do better.

On the other side of the equation another friend of mine, John Obeto, has written a counter-article that addresses Chris' issues point by point. Where do you weigh in on this issue? If you've switched to OS X like Pirillo, why did you switch? Or, if you've checked out OS X but are staying with Vista or XP, why are you staying?