St. Paul Pioneer Press writer Julio Ojeda-Zapata recently interviewed tech industry luminary David Pogue. Pogue is the well-known author of countless books on various Mac-related (and non-Mac-related) topics. He’s a former columnist for Macworld magazine who now writes for The New York Times. The interview appears as an article today called Pogue’s Many Hats, and the questions cover the gamut of Pogue’s interest in Palm PDAs, Macs and PCs, and more.
Pogue has feet in both the PC and Mac worlds — he confessed to owning Dell and Apple desktop and laptop computers, a necessity of his work. Pogue said that most of the tech industry writers he knows are Mac fans, too.
“The only surprise is that the rest of the industry is still so incapable of advancing the state of the art,” said Pogue, “they’re even incapable of successfully copying Apple!”
Pogue, whose writing credits include the best-selling “Mac OS X: The Missing Manual,” said that Mac OS X is superior to Windows XP, even though XP is actually more feature-rich. He calls OS X “young and pure.”
“Mac OS X is important to average consumers only in that it sets up Apple for its new strategy, which is creating software that can’t run on any other machine. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes,” said Pogue.
Pogue is optimistic that Apple’s strategy will provide the company with growing marketshare, but he also said he’s not sure that it even matters: Apple is, as he pointed out, a very profitable company.
Pogue also commented on the Palm PDA market, which has suffered enormous blows recently with an ailing tech market and flaccid product introductions. Pogue explained his theories on why Palm hasn’t done better, and what competitor Handspring is doing to diversify its own strategy.