For me, the most confusing action of all the SCO legal actions (SCO v the rest of the world) is the one with Novell. I mean, I have little understanding of contract law in this or any other area, but I would have thought that when a company buys software from another company it’s kinda done along the lines of buying/selling a car. It was yours, now it’s mine – all of it.Not so, at least according to Novell, in the case of Unix. In its latest filing, Novell is countersuing SCO and demanding that the money SCO gained from licensing Unix System V to Sun and Microsoft be put in trust (to prevent SCO spending it) until the ownership of Unix is resolved. Novell maintains that it owns Unix copyrights and thus has a right to the money.

Novell may be correct or it may not – that’s up to the courts – but one has to wonder at the competence of the deal makers involved, if who got what from the deal wasn’t actually clear. As fate would have it, the two companies involved in the action (now) are utterly different from those that made the deal (then). In 1995, when the deal was made, SCO really was the Santa Cruz Operation located in Santa Cruz, to be acquired in 1998 by Caldera Systems (a Ray Noorda company that was actually distributing Linux by 1998). In 1995, Linux was only a rumor and Linus was the name of a character in Peanuts. In 1995, Novell, also a Ray Noorda company, was unable to do much with Unix and was living in the shadow of the newly emerging Windows NT.

By 2003, a complete reversal of roles had taken place. Novell acquired SuSE and became an Open Source friendly Linux distributor, while Caldera Systems (now renamed as SCO) stopped distributing Linux and started distributing law suits. One wonders which side of this Ray Noorda was on.

In any event, if Novell is correct, SCO has no case and is heading for the scrap heap in a startling way.

Few people would dispute that the iMac has a better user interface than Windows, and having used the iMac now for over a month I agree with the proposition. However, I have to be honest – there is a significant learning curve involved in switching from Windows to Apple.

The iMac is different from Windows in many ways at a detail level. The keyboard is different, the mouse activity is different and the way that application windows behave is different. There are other significant differences too. The basic applications that most people use are different; email, address book, the browser and the file finder. They all work a little differently too. Even though the office software I’m using is Microsoft Office, it’s not entirely the same. And to this you can add a further point – that the fundamental administration and care of the PC is different.

You have to make adjustments in your acquired habits in every one of these areas. So for a time you become less productive on the iMac rather than more productive, while you plough through the learning curve. It is a fairly long learning curve and my guess is that any move to Linux on a PC would be similar.

For the home PC user there is a great deal of compensation for the learning curve. The iMac media applications are to die for. It is far better than Windows for managing music and photographs. In fact it is so much better that it is almost unfair to compare the two. I tried using a PC to manage my CDs and my fairly large collection of photos, but it was hopeless. Now I’m gradually putting everything on the iMac – because I can and it is truly simple to organize it all. I have little doubt that the same would be true of video files, but I don’t have any I care about.

It’s not just me that thinks this way. A survey by Morgan Stanley published in March suggested that iPod users were converting from Windows to the Mac at the rate of 19% – a rather amazing migration figure when you think about it, but not so surprising when you consider the difference in quality of music management.

But the question for me is whether I can recommend an iMac migration for the business user for their home PC and right now, I’m not sure. I’ll know when I’ve come through the learning curve completely.

Nevertheless there is one productivity gain that is very very significant. My iMac has a 20″ screen (i.e. it measures roughly 17″ by 11″ – like two sheets of paper side by side). This allows me to have two applications open together next to each other and this is awesomely productive. It really makes a difference in the way I use a PC.

However, wide screens are not unique to the iMac.

Click on the link for other postings on Apple Mac Productivity.