Just over two years ago I was at a big tech company, and the only people who used Macs were the UI/UX department.  They used something called Entourage, complained about MS Exchange, and sent me stuff in PDFs.  (What, no Word?).  Then I started to see the infestation – esp VP level engineering starting to get Mac Candy.  But alas, I didn’t notice much.

Moving to bootstrapped startups (BSS) – amazingly enough everyone is on a Mac.  Actually, they should have a welcome kit for new startup hires that consists of:

  1. 15 in Macbook Pro
  2. iPhone 3GS
  3. Moleskin notebook

The only people who choose to use a PC are the finance geeks and their Excel ‘07 install.  As for me, after three weeks of detox migration from a PC to a Mac, Im not going back – after 15 years on being a PC guy.

Why?  Well, there are three reasons for this:

  1. Its cool (like, hipster) to be a Mac. If your joining the cool social media/iphone/moble/location based/cloud/SAAS/whever cool thing, as a product manager you get street cred if you are on a Mac.  In fact, if you choose a PC, the cranky engineers on macs will think you are an MBA dork.
  2. I don’t care about MS Office anymore. Back in they day, engineers authored on a wiki and product managers used ms word and sharepoint.  Now, when you go to a startup, its all wiki – google apps, dropbox, evernote.. you name it.  The only reason I have Office on my Mac is for Excel.  Probably why MSFT still hasn’t released a decent version of Excel for Mac – it would break the camel’s back.  (See finance comment above)
  3. Personal Productivity P0rn.  One day Ill do a study between Product Managers in startups and GTD methodologies.  Jesus, if someone told me sooner about the excess of Productivyt POrn I could find on a Mac, well I would have kicked outlook’s GTD plugin to the curb.  Where do I start?  iGTD, Things, Omnifocus, Quicksilver.

So the next time your at your Web 2.0/SWSXi/Techcrunch/whatever conference, take a look around at the number of Macs in the room.  It will surprise you.