Brooks slams Macs, gets slammed back

Southwestern Florida's Herald Tribune columnist Richard Brooks likely had no idea what he was getting into when he
wrote an article about his lack of sympathy for Mac-using teachers being forced to replace their computers with Wintel boxes. He chided schools for using any Macs in the first place, citing Microsoft's 97% market share as reason alone to make PC-only schools a "no-brainer."

Over 700
letters
to the editor later, Brooks could have chosen to get a clue,
but instead
buries his head even farther into the sand and hugs tightly to his McDonald's theory of personal computing: "If Macs had 97 percent of the market, I would argue in favor of switching to Macs."

It's all about the numbers, really: "Purchasing computer equipment for a school district is a matter of public policy,
not personal preference. If more than 95 percent of the students with home computers operate on a PC platform, it makes sense for the school district to use the same platform." What a great lesson to teach our kids: it doesn't matter what you like and what works best for you, it only matters what most of the other kids are doing. Not to mention a terrible decision-making policy all around. I'm sure 95% of students would love to graduate with honors without doing any homework, too!

Mr. Brooks doesn't understand the feedback received from the Mac community about his article, and responds with the classic ad hominem attack: "I doubt that I would ever buy a Mac. I've seen what owning one can do to people. And I
don't want any part of that." You know, Mr. Brooks, it is not owning Macs that made your readers angry about what you wrote in your article. It's the fact that you make authoritative and sweeping statements about a platform you admit to have zero knowledge about, not having so much as used a Macintosh computer. Is it wise to make large-scale decisions with wide-reaching implications based on simple statistics without having any perception of the complexity underlying those figures, nor any perception of the technologies involved? Now that's a no-brainer.