Yet another article complaining about the outpourings of vitriolic abuse and stupidity with which the Mac "faithful" respond to anything that's less than unstinting in its praise for all things Apple, this time in Silicon.com. The MacLoonies are a small minority, of course, but
It's this minority that seems to be under some form of mass hypnosis - perhaps some far-reaching extension of Steve Jobs' 'reality distortion field' - thinking that Apple can do no wrong and is a panacea for all the IT wrongs in the world.
Even if this were true, it's the wrong way to get the message across. As the article notes:
The collective moral outrage does Apple evangelists, and by extension the company itself, no favours. The vitriol seems particularly misplaced in online forums read worldwide by thousands of senior technology professionals and business decision makers holding the IT purse strings.
Apart from anything else, it's odd, because large numbers of journalists are Mac users, and give Apple far more coverage -- and far more favourable coverage -- than it could reasonably expect. But even Mac fans such as the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg have suffered torrents of abuse.
Fans of minority and/or failing systems sometimes overcompensate -- we've seen it with the Amiga and OS/2 in particular. However, in this case, Apple must bear some of the responsibility. In the Mac's early days, ace marketing man Guy Kawasaki -- the first real IT evangelist -- ran an Evangelist mailing list that drew attention to the sins of any journalists who failed to toe the Apple party line. This often led to them being deluged with hate mail.
Being a smart guy, Kawasaki figured out that this was doing Apple more harm than good and eventually he closed the list. Unfortunately, once this kind of idiocy had got going, it never stopped.
And given Steve Jobs's congenital arrogance and apparent need to be worshipped, it's hard to imagine the company trying to do anything about it. Indeed, Jobs appears at MacWorld and plays to the crowd.
The Linux movement has its share of nutters, too, but Linus Torvalds just laughs at them, and they've become increasingly marginalised. But of course, Torvalds is actually leading a revolution, rather than marketing an off-the-shelf lifestyle choice.
