Directions on Operating Systems Part 2 - Microsoft.
Have Microsoft 'jumped the shark'?
Now lets look at Microsoft . Well you've got Windows XP on your desktop
- released in 2002, last treated to a major "service pack" update in
2004, and frankly a very reliable platform that is now starting to look
a little tired.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? 'Tis the east, and
Vista is supposedly the new dawn. Hmm. I'm not so sure about Vista. It
could be very good indeed or it
could be the new Windows ME, and despite being on the beta program I'm not sure which way it is going to go.
So what is new with Vista then? Well at the moment we have a pretty new interface - assuming your computer is up to it. Apparently the future is all in making everything on screen transparent and difficult to read, because we don't get enough eye strain working 10 hours plus a day as it is.
Next up, we have a
sidebar full of Wide..er...
Gadgets. I've already spoken about Widgets in the Apple bit of this posting and I'll not repeat myself again. Incidentally, if you want a sidebar full of Widge...er.. Gadge...er.. applets... to run on Windows XP right NOW then be sure to take a look
here. As for the "Gadget" name - Are Microsoft actually trying to
confess to ripping off Apple?
We also have a search facility - the same concerns and comments I already made in the Apple section apply here also.
We have a lot of work done on security. Now I'm actually going to emphasise that there is a lot of good hard work gone into this on the new OS. There are several changes here that deserve a lot of credit and which will make a big difference to end user security if they're used properly. However, this is essentially not new features at all but rather fixing old faults. Little credit here I'm afraid.
What else? Well we have IE7 - the latest incantation of a web browser that hasn't been updated in years and which will probably still only just manage to catch up to FireFox if we're lucky.
We have RSS support everywhere - in typical Microsoft fashion we have a new bandwaggon that everyone is jumping on, to the point where there are so many "Microsoft Bloggers" out there that it doesn't take long for it to become painfully clear why the new OS is so late and has had so many
features cut to meet that date.
So what we have here is some muddled halfway house between Microsoft Windows XP and Apple OS X 10.4 that should be released round about the same time as Apple OS X 10.5.
Either Microsoft are playing a big joke on us all and the current builds of Vista are a big smokescreen for whatever is really going on, or they've taken 4 or 5 years to release something that might be as good as Apple were a year ago. What on earth are they putting in the water in Seattle?