A Year and a Half Late…
David Pogue gave a report on Bill Gates’ presentation of Windows Vista, the next OS version after XP. It’s due out about a year from now (unless it’s delayed yet again, not an unlikely event). Pogue comes down on it pretty hard as mostly being a Mac OS X ripoff:
If I seem to be laying on the “stolen from Apple” language a bit thick, you’re darned right. Ordinarily, I’m careful about making accusations like this, because I know I’ll get hammered by Apple bashers. But in this case, there’s not a shred of doubt: most of the features Microsoft demonstrated last night were pure, unadulterated ripoffs from Mac OS X. I could hear actual whispers of recognition from the audience around me.
Pogue did mention that they had a few original features, but they didn’t sound like much to get excited about (go ahead and read yourself). But a lot of Vista’s big features–widgets, application switcher, fast search–are features that will be one and a half years old on the Mac before Vista comes out. A few new features, like photo organization and tabbed browsing, have been standard on the Mac for a lot longer than that. Pogue seems satisfied “to have these features on both platforms,” but why wait 18 months or even a lot longer to get them?
Meanwhile, Apple accidentally revealed (on its web site, a common place for this to happen) a new application coming out at MWSF: iWeb, apparently a consumer-level web page creation program. No details on it yet, but it might be styled after Pages, and could have easy drag-and-drop media capabilities.
Update: This site has a few nice videos which take the audio from Gates’ presentation of Vista and matches it with a movie-screen-grab of Mac OS X Tiger, showing the stuff that Gates is saying Vista will have a year from now has been available on OS X for the better part of a year already.
I think many of these new vista features could be added to windows xp w/ an update service package, w/o too much trouble (yet that does not push people to upgrade their computer and os).
The search for any word in any file in less than 0.5sec thing is done on my windows xp computer via a free program called google desktop, which is very handy. I recommend it for anyone with windows xp.
Otherwise, I don’t think the vista things would make much of a difference to me. Unless, I started to turn my computer into a media center (tivo like machine w/ better computer-like user interface networked to computers),
I think media centers will be a big thing in the future yet I’m not sure where they will sit. Computer? External box with hard disk attached to computer? Box next to tv attached to LAN?
Yawn. The guy’s bias is so blatant it’s pathetic; it’s summed up in his last paragraph, which closes with:
But I think that what most people want from the next Windows isn’t more stuff added, but rather stuff to be taken away–like crashes, lockups, viruses, error messages and security holes.
I’ve run Windows since version 3.0. Since Windows 98, I just haven’t had any of those things; even in the original version of Windows 95, I only occasionally had a problem with crashes or lockups. (And no more frequently than we had the same problems on the same era’s Mac that we used in our union office.)
Today, I use Windows XP. I don’t have crashes; in fact, I can’t remember the last time that Windows crashed. I don’t have program lockups that are the fault of Windows; I’ve remained virus-free (despite getting 1,000 emails a week); and I don’t get error messages. I suppose there’s security holes, but I have never been affected by any of them.
Apple-vangelists are like evangelists of any sort, religious, political, or otherwise. As a part-time evangelist, I recognize the behavior.
They are stuck with an old-time concept of Windows that just isn’t true and doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation.
Are many of the new features in Vista direct ripoffs of Mac OS X? Maybe. Maybe they’re just natural progressions of operating system software, and Microsoft is behind on getting them implemented. Even a MS fan should be able to recognize that MS lags behind Apple in implementing this kind of stuff.
But to be fair, Windows machines are more complex. The buzz around open source software reminds me of something- Windows has always been the “open source” system when it comes to the overall hardware system. Wanna buy an Apple? You can’t get an open-source Apple hardware system; you have to buy stuff from Apple.
Well, all the stuff that people say is great about open-source software applies to the hardware side as well. Wintel boxes were so open-source that you could run with a Cyrix or AMD CPU and it’d work fine (I did it for years). With Apple, it was their way or the highway.
I like Apples. I like many of the things they bring to the market; I like Apple’s innovation. But Apple has its own brand of arrogance and hubris, just like MS does, just like every industry leader in the tech field has or will have. I haven’t bought an MP3 player because I want an Ipod, but I can’t bring myself to buy something that’s got built-in obsolesence (the battery situation).
Anyway, to sit here and pretend that MS never thinks of anything or that they aren’t faced with issues that Apple avoids through closed-source hardware is silly. MS does a good job with what they do, Apple does a good job with what they do, but they have chosen slightly different methods of accomplishing similar tasks.
Paul
Seattle, WA
Well, Paul…you must not put too much of a train on your wintel boxes. In my little office we have 4 wintels desktops, 3 wintel laptops and 1 mac. Guess which machine has NEVER had to have a tech come service it? Yeah, that would be the Mac. All the Wintels have had some sort of problem. Lockups are a daily occurance. Crashes about once a week.
Some key software missing is the only thing keeping us from all going Mac.
Today, I use Windows XP. I don’t have crashes; in fact, I can’t remember the last time that Windows crashed. I don’t have program lockups that are the fault of Windows; I’ve remained virus-free (despite getting 1,000 emails a week); and I don’t get error messages. I suppose there’s security holes, but I have never been affected by any of them.Then you probably are the beneficiary of both luck and smart computing–but you are more of an exception than the rule. My own Windows XP machine crashes and locks up with some regularity, and I’ve had more than my share of problems with it. Right now I’m dealing with the Desktop (the main environment program, ‘Explorer’ I believe it’s called) crashing and rebooting several times a day–I’ll have to reinstall WIndows again. But that’s a problem with the OS, not a third-party app. I once uninstalled unnecessary apps only to find that it more or less irreparably screwed up another–something which happens relatively easy on the PC, but has not happened on my Mac since the early days of pre-OS X, when there were extension conflicts. You may say it’s a program issue rather than an OS issue, but the design of the OS is integral, allowing the error to happen in the first place.
The ‘smart computing’ part of the equation comes with viruses and other security problems, in that you probably know more than most people how to avoid them. Most people don’t. I have some friends who often fall for virus emails, and spyware/adware is rampant, even on our school computers, which are maintained by IT people. Every week, someone’s computer locks up, freezes, or has some issue or another and I have to stop the class and come fix it for them. (I teach them about ALT-CTRL-DELETE early on.) Every semester, some of the computers start showing pop-up ads out of nowhere. One time, I was giving the final exam, and one poor young lady started her Windows machine to find that MSIE had littered the desktop with a dozen windows, each displaying lurid porn sites. You can avoid these things by practicing smart emailing (never open attachments unless you’re 100% sure where they came from, etc.), and installing only software you trust–but most people don’t know about these tricks, and computers should be designed not just for those smart enough to avoid the major pitfalls.
Are many of the new features in Vista direct ripoffs of Mac OS X? Maybe. Maybe they’re just natural progressions of operating system software, and Microsoft is behind on getting them implemented.I think that’s being more than just a bit generous to MS. They’ve been ripping off the Mac ever since the Lisa came out and Bill Gates soiled himself when he saw the GUI. Apple has borrowed from MS on a few things, but it’s been more than 90-10 in the copying department, MS “borrowing” far more from the Mac than vice-versa. Apple is the innovator, MS is the pretender. If it weren’t for Apple driving MS to “innovate,” your Windows machine wouldn’t be half the computer it is now. MS even copies concepts Apple has worked on but never decided to put in–witness the “stacks” Vista will feature, something that Apple developed six or seven years ago.
But no matter what you attribute MS’s lag to, there is still a lag, usually two or more years, before it catches up with Apple. Why settle for a two-year-old computer?
Wanna buy an Apple? You can’t get an open-source Apple hardware system; you have to buy stuff from Apple. Well, all the stuff that people say is great about open-source software applies to the hardware side as well. Wintel boxes were so open-source that you could run with a Cyrix or AMD CPU and it’d work fine (I did it for years).So what? You want to have the fun of building your own system? Few people are really interested in that. You want to save a few bucks? Fine, but you wind up paying for it in the end, one way or another. I don’t see how this is such a great advantage.
Anyway, to sit here and pretend that MS never thinks of anything or that they aren’t faced with issues that Apple avoids through closed-source hardware is silly.Well, tell me about the last three great innovations that MS came up with, one that didn’t appeal just to techies and weren’t on the Mac first.