Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Why I'm not excited about Windows Vista

Well, after 5 years of waiting, Microsoft finally rolled out its latest iteration of Windows today. I'm not excited about it at all. Five years ago Microsoft promised to completely redo the essentially DOS file structure system that has always remainded below the surface of Windows. They promised that with the new Windows Longhorn (as it was originally called) you would actually be able to find the files you needed. But about two years (and who knows how many millions of dollars) into the project, they reneged on that promise and started focusing their attention on making Vista pretty. Whoop-tee-do. Substance has been abandoned for style. That's how I read it. And it just makes me want to ditch my PC and go with the Mac. I started using computers a year or two before MS-DOS was introduced. I first learned on a TRS-80 Model III. Then I went to DOS. Then in college I switched to a Mac. I loved it. It was built as a graphic user interface from the bottom up. But after college I was forced to go back to PC because that's what they used in my first few jobs. But I quickly realized that Windows 3.1 and 98 were nothing but a GUI tumbtacked upon a DOS system. It was clumsy and cumbersome. I'll grant that Windows XP was a huge improvement over previous versions, but Microsoft continues to show no vitality, no creativity, and no real progress in their products. Others do the real work. Then Microsoft buys them out and markets their products. But with their cash-cow, Windows, they still just can't seem to go it right. Microsoft is like the federal government: no one is happy with it, but there's no alternative. Maybe I really will bite the bullet next time and buy a Mac.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey, now that Mac's are x86 based (still cannot call them Intel based) you can run Windows under Parallels with no speed hit or you can boot windows if you want. Little risk to switch to Mac. If your inner geek really comes out you can post all the cool stuff you did from the Unix command line (Terminal) and X11 while running OS X.