Making the Right Personal Technology Choices (Premium)

This is a discussion I've been meaning to have for a long time. And it's a topic that permeates everything I do professionally, from the writing on this site to the podcasts I record each week.

But it's also a nebulous, messy topic. It's a lot easier to recommend a single app, service, PC, or phone than it is to discuss the more general thinking that should sit behind each of those decisions. But that thinking, that way of thinking, is important. And we all get stuck in some mode, or tradition, that can get in the way of making the right decisions.

For example, I'm rightfully associated with Microsoft, given a 20+ year career during which I've mostly written about this company and its products and services. But like Microsoft, I don't exist in a vacuum. And from my earliest days of writing professionally, the one thing that always set me apart from most of my contemporaries is that I have always cared about, used, and wrote about products and services from Microsoft's competitors as well.

This experience served me well when personal computing shifted from being PC-centric to being mobile- and cloud-centric, for example. When the iPhone hit, for example, I knew it was a big deal, and I spent much of the summer of 2007 writing about this then-new product, figuring out and explaining where it succeeded and where it failed. So much so, in fact, that I started getting complaints that perhaps my website, then called Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows, should be renamed to Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for iPhone.

What those thin-skinned Microsoft fans were missing is that being blindly loyal to a company---or a brand, or a platform---is silly. (And in that case, the Microsoft mobile solution of the day, Windows Mobile, was fricking terrible.) These entities are certainly not loyal to you, at all, and your reward for this loyalty will always be disappointment.

So, yes, I'm "loyal" to Microsoft, or Windows, or whatever, only insomuch as I feel that these things are better for me, and for people generally, than are the competition. Today, for example, I feel that many Windows 10-based PCs are far better solutions for most people than are competing products like Apple MacBooks, Chromebooks, or Linux-based PCs. But that doesn't mean that I can just ignore those other things. I have to keep up on them as well, because things change. It also doesn't mean that I can allow some bias to impact my opinion of those other things. MacBooks, Chromebooks, and, yes, even Linux-based PCs do some things better than do Windows 10. We all collectively need to know about those things. To be educated. To make good decisions.

Granted, I do this for a living. And I would never wish this lifestyle on any normal person. But you don't have to be in a constant state of experimentation per se. Just keep your eyes open. And your mind.

Stay educated about your choices. There is nothing sadder to me than someone who, sticking with Windows phone as the obviou...

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