by Nora Rubinoff

Created on: July 05, 2008

More Virtual Assistants are Making the Switch to the Mac
by Nora Rubinoff

Interest in the Mac platform is growing in the virtual assistant industry. More virtual assistants (VAs) are exploring either a switch to Mac or adding a Mac to their office network. Some VAs have come to this decision because they don't want to implement the new Windows Vista operating system. Some are at this point because they have more clients who own Macs. Some are influenced by Apple's aggressive and successful Mac and PC commercials. And some, like me, reach this point because they are tired of spending so much time tweaking Windows, keeping things secure and rebooting after lock ups.

According to Apple Watch on eWeek, "Apple's retail market share is 14 percent, and two-thirds for PCs costing $1,000 or more." "Windows desktop PC sales are way down," writes Joe Wilcox. Stephen Baker, NPD Group vice president of industry analysis states, "in notebooks they're [Apple] growing two times the market. Windows notebooks are pretty much flat right now." According to Baker, for the first quarter, Windows notebooks had "zero percent" growth year over year, while by comparison, Apple notebooks had "50 to 60 percent growth."

In February 2007, I decided I was fed up with Windows. Vista's launch was imminent, and I knew I did not want to implement it on my office computers. I bought an iMac.

I will not lie the first week of migrating data from my legacy PC to my iMac was time consuming, and moving Outlook, even with Little Machines' inexpensive O2M application, was a real pain. A fundamental mistake that I made: I stayed "open" during the migration time. This meant I was bouncing between iMac and legacy PC, since some data was moved and some was not yet there. If you make the switch, I strongly recommend you don't do it that way. Close your office for a few days until you are all set.

I still have my PC connected to my network, and I use a KVM switch between my iMac and PC so that I can share a mouse and keyboard. Occasionally very, very occasionally I still use my legacy PC. For the most part though, it's been retired to act as a TiVO server for our household.

Here are 5 reasons why I'm happy I've switched to Mac:

1. Every day I come into my office and get to do much more of what I'm there to do each day work! Windows requires constant vigilance to keep your system buttoned up tight. Even though I used the best security protection available for anti-virus, anti-ad and spy ware as well as a firewall,

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