Beware Windows users: You might be more likely to be depressed compared to Mac users

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Beware Windows users: You might be more likely to be depressed compared to Mac users

Date Created: 17 Dec, 2004, 12:12 PM

I just recorded a conversation for later podcasting with a friend, Anthony Caruana. He maintains a blog called the PDA guy and has switched his primary domestic computer use from a Windows PC to an Apple iBook G4.

In our podcast (to come) we discussed our experience of podcasts and I referred to my history of listening to audioblogs starting with Christopher Lydon's site, and on to Doug Kaye's IT Conversations.

I still maintain podcasting is less about the method of delivery and more about freedom of choice and democratisation of the spoken word. If you want to read more of my thoughts, you can go to some early ideas I offered in October, here.

Yesterday, Doug Kaye posted the final mp3/AAC in the Poptech 2004 series which has had to have been one of the most stimulating confests held this year. This final presentation came from Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania.

Schwartz's work has for many years looked at applied social psychology topics, including the effects of technology on society, economics and psychology and so on.

Recently he has turned his attention to happiness, its meaning and measurement. You can download his 2002 paper, "Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice" here.

It forms the basis of his new book, The Paradox of Choice, chosen as one of Business Week's must have books of 2004, and also was the subject of some of his Poptech 2004 presentation.

Here's the connection to the Windows - Mac argument I want to suggest has merit.

Most of us know that high stress situations, especially at work and socially come from having too few or indeed no options. Having little perceived control over our lives is highly stressful, and can lead to a variety of uncomfortable and harmful outcomes, including anxiety and depressive disorders, and physical ailments.

Most people assume the corrollary of this is that the more choices you have, the better.

A graph of choice versus happiness would therefore look like this:

However, Schwartz and others suggest this is not the case - not at all. For years, he has studied choice and preference-making, from commodity items through to political persuasion.

And he and others have stated that based on the accumulated research, you can indeed have too many choices!

Here's is what he suggests the graph really looks like:

In other words, there comes a moment when we cross the line or reach a tipping point where we can say: "Yes - there are too many choices".

This of course is quite subjective. For some, the number that constitutes "too many" is in fact "not enough". The conclusion Schwartz and others make is that there is a point at which, for each person and perhaps populations, choice needs to be limited if we are not to be negatively affected by freedom of choice. In the US, when visitors like myself need extra time to digest what asking for a salad plate entails: "What dressing would you like, Sir - Thousand Island, Vinaigrette, Ranch, Italian, Low fat Mayonnaise, low salt, etc etc", we experience the burden of so many choices. (I see Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces just trying to get plain toast....)

Why might this be the case?

Because an enormous range of possibilities paralyses us. With just a few choices it is easier to make distinctions based on limited criteria. With many choices, one must spend more time conducting research sifting through the finer gradations of difference.

So product A may have feature X, but product B lacking X, has feature Y.

Now you have to decide not just between A and B, but factor in the relative value of X and Y to you, when you haven't even used the product yet!

This is called the cost of opportunity.

- It is why word-of-mouth is so powerful a selling agent because it helps eliminate choices. And why bad word-of-mouth is so costly.

- Why the more clients you successfully deal with the more clients you'll get.

- It is why BzzAgent may just succeed. Or maybe not.

- It is the driving force behind the many clients I see who suffer with procastination: one more report to read, one more reference to cite, one more article to research, one more day to revise, and my report/essay/presentation will be perfect!

This cost of opportunity can be paralysing. In life, the emotional/behavioural/physical response to acute stress is the classic flight or flight reaction. To which we need to add, freeze, since remaining stock still may deceive predators who detect movement. Most times we don't get a choice in how we react - it's built-in to us and quite automatic. You have to undergo much training to give yourself choice since these reactions do not rely on logic. But they do rely on your perception of danger, built up over years of experience to offer you instant action possibilities.

When we go to choose items to buy or service to purchase, sitting just underneath the surface are a variety of basic and evolved cognitive apparatus waiting to spring into action. And this is what Schwartz and others have suggested is operating when more choice begets less happiness.

How this favours the iPod

This is probably why Apple's iPods are the clear market leaders. It's not just because they got a head start in the market place. As much as the technology media keep claiming the next Rio, iRiver, Philips, or Creative is an iPodKiller, the more these manufacturers keep pouring out mp3/wma variants, the more they solidify the iPod's leadership. There are only two iPods, with the larger iPod having just a few variations but the same basic functionality.

Can't choose between all those other brands? Do you need FM radio, line in, remote control, multiple colours, different song selection method? Heck, pay the extra and just go for the iPod - and besides, it does the job better than the others as a total iPod/iTunes/iTunes music store package. All these new iPodkillers do is cannibalise each other, and strengthen the iPod brand.

At the most basic, the iPod has the better user experience despite not being as complete a package as its competitors. As former Apple fellow now working for Microsoft, Don Norman, would suggest, the iPod is a much more emotionally satisfying experience - and being "cool" for the time being is also a part of that emotional experience although that came much later in its marketing.

The problem with too many choices is that you invite yourself to participate in a variety of human foibles. The first has been researched for many years, and is known amongst those who study Real Estate as "Buyers' remorse".

Often told not to buy (or sell) a home using emotion, purchasers often spend many months searching for the right home, given the financial commitment it will take and how long they expect to hold their purchase. Making the wrong decision can prove very costly, financially and emotionally.

The longer you spend looking, the more likely you are to allow your emotions to enter the picture, which is not necessarily ailgned with good financial planning.

It's also a tiring process, wearing you down, such that despite all your efforts, you may settle for less than a maximal purchase experience, just to get it over and done with.

The same goes for other purchases of lesser value and consequence: cars, fashion, furniture, and yes, even icecream, as discussed by Schwartz in his Poptech talk!

Moreover, if your personality type lends itself to a perfectionistic "got to remain in control", more choices can be really problematic and paralysing. In other words, with so many choices, how can you possibly know which is best, and if you wait long enough, won't more choices emerge?

This of course is how some people never buy a computer because they know if it's on the store shelf, then another newer, shinier one is already being prepped and is perhaps just a few days or weeks from release.

These people tap into the "latest is better" mentality, when in fact, there is an argument that says "get it now, get productive, and get to earn now so as to buy better later." Being productive is more likely to lead to happiness than procrastinating and waiting.

Mac users know that there is a point at which you do hold off a purchase of a new computer in the lead up to the MacWorld Expos when the likelihood of new product announcements is greater. This is one planned and rational way to avoid Buyers' Remorse.

The other way is to allow yourself not to have to have the all-time best, but to get the best you can at the time you want it (or need it). Life does not come to an end if you don't have the best or are seen not to have the best (or latest). In other words, you are not your possessions, and more "toys" at the end of the day doesn't make for a happier death.

All around us of course are drivers and influencers to have the latest, and the fashion industry uses these to its advantage. I have no idea whether Apple set out at the start to do this with the iPod, but once it saw the iPod becoming a fashion item, it used this social preference mercilessly.

However, by limiting choice with a small product range, Apple serves itself and its buyers well and of course it maximizes its operational quality control.

Not that there is no choice in their product range or how its products can be tailored for the user.

Apple certainly allows power users to tinker with the GUI up to a certain point and get into the guts of UNIX too. Others have invented hacks to alter it even further. But the point is that for many people the default interface is beyond "good enough" - it is a superlative experience once they allow themselves to spend time with it. (Paul Howland's iMac G5 review is a great example of this experience here).

On the other hand, open a brochure for Dell or got to its website and look at the choices available. How does the beginner discriminate? Look how much technical knowledge they need to have to make fine gradation choices. And what if you go into the corner store with its generic components? Is it any wonder that they put systems together for you (with dinky names like The Annihilator), so as to reduce choice?

The "too many choices" in the Windows world extends beyond componentry to system use. For geeks, it's wonderful to have so many ways to tinker with the system, and develop a sense of mastery. More power to them. Macs don't appear to offer as much hardware hackability, and on the surface this extends to the operating system, although I'm sure UNIX wizards can still have a ball, not to mention Linux users who prefer the build quality of Apple's Powerbooks. (The building of Macquariums with old Macs, or converting iBooks into Tablet-style computers suggests creativity will always be present, regardless of the original design intentions of manufacturers.)

But should something go wrong in your Windows setup, and you are able to place the error message into Google to search for solutions, guess what happens? It appears (since it's happened to me often) that there is an enormous choice of solutions to explore, with each component manufacturer having its own explanation for what might be done to solve the problem. Frankly, it's overwhelming and unhelpful. What appears to be a great Wintel advantage (enormous choice of components) can come back to bite you on the ass big-time.

The same goes for software. How do you sort out the huge range of shareware and freeware to do the same job? In the Mac world, often lambasted for too few applications, the standard is such that your application had better reach a very high standard or its flaws amongst the small community of users will be exposed very quickly - again, word-of-mouth - since it's much harder to hide out in such a community who value sharing so much. It goes with all those years of belonging to a club sharing a "beleaguered" platform, withering on the vine. Right - and this is why Apple's share price has tripled this year.

Yet there is a point at which I depart from Schwartz's analysis.

In his writings, he talks about Maximizers versus Satisficers.

Maximizers want the optimal experience, and will spend much time going over all the choices, in the belief that more choice is better in order to choose the best. Nerds tinkering under the hood fall into this category, and work output is secondary to the joy of tweaking, and belonging to a community which supports such efforts.

Satisficers accept that this a form of personal torture, and know that often enough in life, good enough will do.

In my writings, I have often said that while Microsoft promotes itself as innovative and able to bring out the best in one's computing experience (helping you become Maximizer), in fact, in action it more encourages a "good enough" mentality. How often have I heard friends not so much discuss a preference for Windows-based PCs, but justify their choice as "it was cheapest; all my friends have one; I use one at work; the kids need it for school, it has more software I can freely obtain, the salesman says it is easy to upgrade later."

Freedom to upgrade - more choices - is in fact an illusion. Most people I know, and your experience may be the inverse, simply hand their old PCs down, give it away, or store it. Given the commodity prices of new PCs, it's cheaper just to buy a new PC than upgrade, since you also get a new total warranty, not just a component warranty.

So in the world of computers, more choice doesn't necessarily mean that, nor does it necessarily make for happier experiences with computing.

Apple users I know don't accept good enough. Despite their limited choices "imposed" by Apple who "controls the whole widget (hardware and software)" they operate as Maximizers, trying where possible to optimise their experience.

When I hear less-informed friends offering, "Yes, Macs are still better for graphics and audio", thus repeating the usual subtly pro-Windows hoary chestnuts, they are right but for the wrong reasons. They're stuck in a DOS view of the computing universe parroting PC sales claptrap. Not their fault, but if those who work in domains requiring high-end graphics and audio are the ones who demand the highest quality production values, then they will mazimise their chances and engage in more creative innovative work by using the Mac. But not because of the components, but because of the entire Mac experience, as Paul Howard has written (as above).

There are enough reasons to offer the possibility that Windows users are unhappier with their experience, and more likely to experience depressed moods when spending time on their PC. And I haven't even mentioned the existence on the Wintel platform of malware, spyware, and security issues, which are a blip on the scope for Mac users.
(And what can we make of the fact that Microsoft has purchased anti-spy software to deal with weaknesses of its own Windows platform?)

Now, what was the point of writing this entry?

Profusion of choice and its paralysing unhappy consequences can be understood and dealt with before purchase. And frankly, as much as writing a blog entry like this is was an exercise in applying psychological theory to my Mac passion, it might actually be helpful to some people.

If you are new to the Mac platform, about to be a new user (or know someone contemplating a switch), you have narrowed or opened your choices to two - Mac or Windows.

Two choices is better than none. No choice is not particularly healthy. Check out what Cringely has written about a possible Microsoft natural monopoly a few years away.

Once in the Mac fold, there will be many more choices, but essentially, there are far fewer regrets you will have once you have made your choice.

From there, there will be a learning curve, but you will experience very little opportunity cost - that is, missing an opportunity to buy better - because that curve will expose you to new ways of doing things which you will quickly discover exceeds the Windows experience.

There is no time to regret, except for the time and potential productivity wasted in not switching earlier.