Hands up, who remembers Stewart Alsop? Because for a long time he sure didn't remember the Mac. For the uninitiated, here's the skinny: Alsop is a writer for Fortune who used to be a Mac fan, but back in the Dark Days of 1996, he lost the faith; in a very public recantation, he not only dumped his own Macs, but also told his various business partners to do the same-- which they did. Yes, ol' Stewart loudly announced that the future was in Windows, and put his money (and reputation) where his mouth was. For that reason, lots of longtime Mac die-hards see Alsop as the quintessential defector. (For the sake of simplicity, we're going to ignore the whole "sour grapes" factor when Apple passed on the chance to buy Be, a large chunk of which just happened to be owned by Alsop's venture capital company.)

The problem, as many of you might have guessed, was that Windows wasn't the Magical Happy Land that Alsop irrationally seemed to be expecting. We noted back in 1999 that the poor guy had given himself his own tragic flaw: by staking his entire reputation on switching from the Mac to Windows, he had essentially painted himself into a corner. And when Windows didn't work (and judging by his "Windows sucks" hair-pulling rants for Fortune, that was an all-too-frequent scenario), Alsop never admitted that the Mac had been a better option-- or, indeed, that there was such a thing as a Macintosh in the first place. After all, he had bailed on Apple because the Mac platform was a dead end; to remind readers that Macs might be a viable alternative would require admitting that he had been wrong.

And that's how things stood for the past two years; having made a bad decision (for himself and his partners), Alsop felt compelled to grit his teeth and tough it out. But as faithful viewer Mel Krewall points out, there are signs that the man is finally starting to see the light. In his latest Fortune column, Stewart reveals that he's been cozying up to an "old flame": a few weeks ago he bought a new Mac. Yes, Stew was captivated by the svelte lines of the titanium PowerBook G4-- and after just a few weeks of use, he admits that he's "rethinking the Macintosh as a factor in computing." Hmmmm... a few years late, but moving fast?

Alsop's reversal breaks down to one simple point: "Unlike Windows, the Macintosh seems to work." And while he's still bummed by the lack of availability of Mac versions of some of his accustomed software, he seems perfectly willing to deal with a smaller software pool in exchange for a computer that actually works for a change. Oh, and about that whole "hey guys, you should dump the Macs" advice back in '96? "Boy, was I wrong: it is as hard to maintain and integrate Windows computers as it is to integrate multiple kinds of computer systems." In other words, there's no "single-platform advantage"-- at least, not if that single platform is Windows.

Poor, confused Stew; it must be vexing to find out you've been living a lie for the past half a decade. But allow us at least to answer the thorny question that gnaws at his aching soul: "So what should I do? Should I go back to using a Macintosh, which would mean asking the partners to adjust once again, and asking the techies to configure our system again?"

Well, duh.