The CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, John Halamka, got tired of Windows security updates interrupting his business so he spent a month working on each OS (OS X, Red Hat's Fedora Core Linux and Windows XP) and published his findings in CIO magazine.

Halamka says testing alternatives to XP has been a valuable exercise because it made him realize that the Mac can be a viable computing platform for enterprise users.

"some of the functions one takes for granted on PCs, such as printing screen shots and right clicking, aren't obvious on Macs"

hahaha, right clicking isn't obvious (then get a mouse with a right mouse button) and a screenshot - well, it's not exactly obvious on Windows either (print screen? what?)

In the context of the article though, he raises a good point of not wanting to retrain users. A lot of people are just used to rote learning things in Windows - move the mouse to a certain area and click. Move these things and change the style of doing things instead of understanding a concept and being able to apply it to different situations. Users will be frustrated and long for their Windows boxes

hehehe, once upon a time i used to think that the print screen button did exactly that, sent the screen to the printer

Once upon a time, it did.

Sorry Decryption, I disagree I think even the most hardened Windows user would manage to understand OS X in a reasonably short time.
If they've been using PC's as long as I have they've been through the pain of migrating from DOS to Windows 3.11 to NT to Win 95 to Win 98 to Win 2000 to Win XP.
Then there's the migration from the various so called "productivity" applications: Word Perfect to Lotus 123 to MS Office and maybe even to Lotus Notes. In my experience none of these have been a simple or delightful excercise... especially the Lotus Notes bit .
Where my move to OS X at home has been a lovely experience.

and once upon a time it did!

decription: I have long wondered why people learn word or excel and not word processing or spreadsheeting, no one learns how to drive a holden, and then has to relearn to drive a honda. I mean that if they learned the underlying concepts any 'puter becomes much easier to use. Having noted that I was very frustrated the first time I used linux and somewhat frustrated the first time I used OSX.
Bart: you are a pussy if you think any of those programs had a steep learning curve! Any seasoned Lotus Manuscript user will tell you that was the hardest program they ever had to learn (but once you mastered it it was far and away the best word processor, not only in DOS but for years and years after). Its feature set was not matched by word till about v5 and it was much better than WordPerfect, it was just so counter-intuitive to use.

sao

A pussy eh!... Yeah that's probably true. My problem is that my first computer was an Amiga 1000, which had an easy to understand GUI and apps that seemed well thought out in respect to usability. Sure it was a little weird to have to first insert the Kick Start disk and then put in the Work Bench disk but that was just part of its character.

Then I started using PC's at work and could not understand why on earth anyone should care about the C:\ prompt. In fact the transition from Amiga to PC was probably the hardest to cope with. Only because one was beautiful and well mannered, the other very ugly and terribly obnoxious.