Its progress is insidious. It takes hold from within. Often viewed initially as a benign thing, it can quickly metastasize, growing alarmingly strong and fast, until its host has been subsumed, converted into a ruthlessly efficient vector for spreading it further into other, unsuspecting individuals.

I’m talking, of course, about Mac ownership.

Our department is now pretty much Mac-centric, but most of the other units in our division are still Windows-only shops (to say nothing of Linux). Yet just the other day one of the desktop techs, a staunch Windows user, declared that he’s in need of a new laptop. Since being able to run both OSes on a single machine would be a benefit in his work, he came over and asked about our group’s experience with Boot Camp and virtual machines. Now, since you can’t run OS X as a virtual machine in a Windows environment without hacking the OS, the only reliable single-machine solution is really to get a Mac laptop, and that’s the conclusion he seemed to have arrived at, too.

Now, it’s a given that he’ll be running Windows as his primary OS. But OS X will be there for the times he needs to roll out to help a Mac user. As a long-time Windows user who is (justifiably) deeply skeptical of the usual Mac fanboy faggotry , he’s certainly not going to just start guzzling the Kool-Aid.

But now he’ll have the cup right there on his desk. It might be empty, at first, but it’ll be there, waiting.

Sooner or later, he’ll take that first little sip.