Android has been a really spectacular operating system for me, and I've had (notice the past tense here) nothing but love for it. Surprisingly, the decision to give it the boot as my primary go-to OS of choice has been nothing short of a life changing decision. It doesn't seem that dramatic until you realize that your entire life is wrapped in these little "Choose your own Adventure" Novella sized Electronic devices that we carry around in our pocket.
To date, I've had Android operating experience since the old T-Mobile G1 days. It happened when my brother gave me a G1 as a gift, and growing up in the old 386-486 days I could appreciate the sheer, ground breaking potential of what the Android operating system could offer. Before then, smart phones each operated in their own little universe having it's own interpretation of an operating system, and things, frankly, were a mess. You paid a ton of money for what resulted as a science experiment. Android blew the cover off the whole thing. They put a GUI (Graphical User Interface) on the Linux operating system and essentially brought the power to the people. It was the magic move that toppled tech empires and made people re-think what the modern computer was all about.
So, after my personal experience with nearly five years of Android operating systems spanning from the G1 to the G2 (Currently still in use) and the Nexus 7 tablet, nobody could have predicted that I would have skipped the ship and left Android, especially after the years of nearly flawless service that it delivered
So what happened?
If I had to pin it down on one statement, I would have to say that I was finally tired of getting 80% of a product for 10% the price. It sounds weird that I would consider that a bad thing but lets think about it. Let's use the analogy of a car, because I'm a guy and that's what works.
Let's say you can buy a car that only has 4 of the 7 body panels painted. The 4 panels that are painted are perfect and superior reflecting the best paint technology of the time, but the other 3 are bare sheet metal and you have a ton of body shops out there offering to paint the other three panels, but they are all going to vary in quality, some will do the job for free but have questionable quality to the work. Others will offer to paint the panels in a manner that closely represents the factory job but will never quite represent that factory paint job. Now lets expand on this a little and say that every six months the car company in question changes the chemical composition of the paint and their version of "Red" six months down the road is a little different then the "Red" currently out on the market.
You can start seeing the mess that can transpire.
The chief argument may be that it doesn't matter because at the end of the day it's still a car, and it beats walking. That may be true, and that's what kept me on the Android OS for the past five years.
At the end of the day though, when you need to get a job done and you need work to transpire to the next level, the biggest thing I've found is that I need consistency, predictability, and quality control.
For that, Android simply does not get the job done. Microsoft, on the other hand, does. Like the Tortoise that races the hare, they offer they steadfastness, quality, predictability, and electronic infrastructure that business people and creative thinkers need to get their projects off the ground and into the real world. They offer it, and charge for it, and if your really serious and you need it, you'll pay for it.
I have, as I find myself typing this blog on a Windows Surface Pro.
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