You guys are unbelievable! What a wealth of helpful knowledge for Mac users, and all for free! Where’s the snag? Maybe there is a free lunch, after all!

Congrats, and keep up the excellent work, guys. Thanks a bunch!

—Ilbert Walker

Thank you for all this research—very interesting and useful!

I used, and still use, MORE from versions 1.0 through 3.1 and didn’t know there were so many new options. I have published 200-page internal company instruction books and have done dozens of PowerPoint-type presentations in MORE over the years because couldn’t get Word to do what I wanted.

Thanks again from an outliner junkie.

—Ralph Finley

I am a big time user of OmniOutliner. I have been using it to create Keynote presentations for my history students since August. It works like a charm.

Another interesting outliner/research tool is TakeNote for Windows/Mac from Academix. It’s very inexpensive, simple to use, and reasonably effective. I have my students use it for research projects.

Love the columns.

—David Huston

It’s nice to find outline enthusiasts and viable software after a long dry spell (since MORE). I hadn’t realized the variety of ways of displaying information until coming here.

—Tom Swell

I agree, somewhat, with the comment about adding some color, although let’s not go all the way back to the multicolored iMacs. I don’t want to see “flavors” showing up again. It’s hard to convince your Windows user cohorts that an Apple is a serious computer when it’s lime green. Black is a good suggestion. That way, I can polish my shoes and my laptop at the same time.

—Paul Barker

I think the biggest problem with Apple’s advertising is that they only advertise a product when it’s new. In other words, a new iMac is released and they you’ll see TV commercials for about a month, then nothing until the next new product. Apple really needs to focus on continuing advertising for existing products.

Another thing that I’ve noticed while looking through the weekly sales flyers in the Sunday papers (other than the fact that Apple should start distributing these in the markets that have Apple Stores) is that Apple needs be more active in the way their resellers advertise Apple products.

What do I mean by this? Take your typical Best Buy sales insert. You will undoubtedly see the top-of-the-line Apple product (and, therefore, the highest-priced) on the same page as the bottom-of-the-line corresponding PC product (and, therefore, the lowest-priced). The average person seeing this isn’t going to compare the features of these. They’re just going to think, “look how much more expensive the Macs are!” How can you sell a $2,000 iMac next to a $400 generic piece of crap?

—George Krueger

Nice marketing ideas. I would like to throw in two more from the perspective of a recent switcher:

1. Direct the marketing to Web designers and developers. This is the one simple reason I recently switched. The moment I learned that OS X came pre-installed with Apache, PHP, and Perl, that G4 iBook looked more interesting than ever. And then, when I heard how easy it is to configure these services together, that was the moment I placed an order. I, like many other PC-based Web designers and developers, did not know this before someone told me about it. If OS X could somehow bundle MySQL on top of all this, it would’ve shaved another 15 seconds before I picked up the phone and called the Apple Store.

2. Develop and distribute a comprehensive PC-to-Mac migrating tool. I would have loved to have seen a suite of freely available tools on every Mac sold that has the ability to easily and accurately export bookmarks, e-mails, addresses, and other pertinent personal information from a PC to a Mac. If Apple spent more time developing intelligent migration tools for PC users and less time developing irrelevant and arrogant switch ads, their campaign would’ve been more successful.

—Sox