Yostivanich

The Halo Effect is an idea that tech­nol­ogy colum­nist pro­mote to describe the idea that peo­ple who buy iPods and use iTunes on a daily basis become com­fort­able with the Apple envi­ron­ment. This gives the idea to mul­ti­ple tech colum­nist that young, afflu­ent, hip, young peo­ple when they go to pur­chase their first com­puter will take a look at the Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers and buy one. How­ever I per­son­ally feel that this is some­thing that will not hap­pen, this post will explain those rea­sons and while the idea is appeal­ing it really is not worth­while after tak­ing a sec­ond look.

Now to clar­ify, I am not going to try and dis­prove the whole gen­eral Halo Effect on all prod­ucts and com­pa­nies rather this is just a state­ment on the Halo Effect as it is rumored to exist with Apple. There are sev­eral prob­lems that I see with the state­ments on the Halo Effect as tech colum­nists dis­cuss it. The biggest issue that I see is that the deci­sion to buy a com­puter espe­cially one where you can not go cheaper than a $1,00 or so(excluding of course the Mac Mini – which cur­rently starts at $600 exclud­ing the mon­i­tor, mouse and key­board) is that this deci­sion is not one taken quickly or lightly and there are going to be more fac­tors than just the use of one or two other Apple prod­ucts. The sec­ond is the gen­eral envi­ron­ment that exists in the aver­age work­place, col­lege, or home. The final and third rea­son is receiv­ing help on your new com­puter with set-up and gen­eral trouble-shooting.

Let us take the first rea­son, the sim­ple fact that one prod­uct will not change a person’s buy­ing habits eas­ily. Yes, I do believe that because a per­son is used to the Apple inter­face and using an Apple prod­uct that they could con­sider look­ing at a Mac, how­ever any­one who would actu­ally seri­ously con­sider cross­ing over into the Mac­verse, needs a much greater push than just an iPod and iTunes to make them spend the money on an Apple com­puter. The peo­ple who will buy a Mac, are peo­ple who already have the idea of buy­ing a Mac and needed just another good rea­son to do so. So these are peo­ple who are already very likely to have pur­chased a Mac already before the iPod, how­ever the iPod does not form the basis of their deci­sion or the start of their thought process to buy a Mac.

The sec­ond rea­son, details how the gen­eral envi­ron­ment defines a large part of our pur­chas­ing deci­sion. Col­leges, offices and major­ity of homes run com­put­ers based on Win­dows, this does not allow for the oppor­tu­nity to intro­duce a Mac into this envi­ron­ment. While, yes, Apple and Microsoft machines do and can com­mu­ni­cate with each other very eas­ily and with no changes to the struc­ture of the envi­ron­ment or to the indi­vid­ual com­put­ers. How­ever, to some­one who is not tech­no­log­i­cally com­pe­tent with trou­bleshoot­ing or com­mand level con­trols the mere hint of the idea of a prob­lem raises the bar immensly for peo­ple as to why should they switch when their first week of using the com­puter will be get­ting it work fully. While there are ways of run­ning Win­dows on the Mac for those nec­es­sary Win­dows only soft­ware, and a vast major­ity of prod­ucts have a Mac ver­sion avail­able, the aver­age per­son doesn’t have an idea of how to do this or even that this is pos­si­ble, which is my final reason.

The third and final rea­son relates to when a per­son begins to have issues or prob­lems with their com­puter or wishes to try and do some­thing on their new com­puter. Rather than being able to ask just any­one who they know that is knowl­edge­able with com­put­ers it now requires a qual­i­fier when ask­ing for help to clar­ify the type of machine being worked with. For as much as peo­ple wish to make of the “net gen­er­a­tion” it is still a gen­er­a­tion in which the gen­eral mechan­ics of how a com­puter oper­ates is still hid­den from them. Think of these peo­ple as some­one who uses a car, they can work with a car and use it and be com­fort­able with it, but the minute some­thing goes wrong, you call in the experts. The aver­age per­son even though they use a car day in, day out still does not under­stand the under­ly­ing mechan­ics of a car. This is the same with a com­puter, the “net gen­er­a­tion” is com­fort­able with tech­nol­ogy, but this level of famil­iar­ity does not auto­mat­i­cally grant the per­son the abil­ity to set up, work with, and learn how to work and man­age a new oper­at­ing soft­ware. A per­sonal exam­ple of this, is my older sis­ter, who is a very smart per­son and works with com­put­ers on a daily basis using them for a great many of her tasks. How­ever when she first got her own com­puter and going through the Win­dows setup process, the entire time her hand needed to be held, not because she couldn’t do it, rather because she wanted to be sure that she never made a mis­take, and had no idea what to do if she did some­thing wrong or even whether or not she did some­thing wrong. Sim­ple tasks such as ask­ing to decide on the name for the main user account, the name of the com­puter, etc. would involve 2 or three ques­tions to be absolutely sure that noth­ing was going to go wrong. While there is noth­ing wrong with this type of care­ful setup, this demon­strates the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with the Halo Effect, the gen­eral per­son even the gen­eral net gen­er­a­tion does not under­stand how a com­puter works, they under­stand how to do what they need to do and that is about it. This is the same idea as the per­son who knows how to drive, but does not know what a tachome­ter is, the dif­fer­ent gears of a car or how a car even works (of which I per­son­ally know of at least a dozen or so peo­ple who fall into this cat­e­gory). It isn’t a lack of intel­li­gence or famil­iar­ity with the prod­uct that is the issue, it is a lack of under­stand­ing of the under­ly­ing struc­ture and con­trol of the prod­uct, in this case the computer.

I do feel that the Halo Effect can be a pow­er­ful moti­va­tor in buy­ing deci­sions that peo­ple choose to under­take, how­ever I feel that Apple has too much work­ing against it to gain any real mar­ket share. The peo­ple who will pur­chase a Mac, are the same who would have pur­chased one before the iPod, tech­no­log­i­cally lit­er­ate users, pro­fes­sional graphic design­ers, and those who have always bought a Mac. Peo­ple do not like change, espe­cially when they are not sure of whether the change is first worth the money, able to fit in with their cur­rent lifestyle, and still able to receive help.