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David Pogue Takes On Vista
guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.
Guess which feature the majority of users will disable.
Seriously, I hope there is some sort of privilege separation, only requiring password authentication for applications that need escalated privileges, otherwise this feature will be ignored left, right and centre.
The summary is basically saying "It's all looks, there's no substance, there's nothing good ... it's a copy of OSX". That's not especially flattering toward OSX.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Yes. And when Vista's successor is announced, we'll get "Vista didn't have this crap" and "At least with Vista, you could ..." articles. Every day. It is the Slashdot way, grasshopper.
Of course they love Apple. Without Apple, they would have a desktop monopoly.
According to antitrust law, Microsoft and Apple are not competitors.
A summary of the fine article:
Sigh.
With a little effort, Microsoft could fit the David Pogue Takes On Vista review onto a sticker to put on the retail boxes. Until then, let's hope some enterprising Slashdot reader downloads a copy of Vista and offers something more substantive for discussion.
Nah - they are competitors even in the eyes of the courts / law, but that doesn't meant that MS isn't a monopoly for legal reasons...
No, they're not. Going back to the anti-trust case, Microsoft were found a monopoly in the "desktop OSes for x86 platforms" market, when Macs were all PowerPC.
Even today, from a market definition perspective they don't compete. Microsoft sells Operating Systems, Apple sells computers.
Remember, a dictionary definition of "monopoly" is not the same thing as the legal definition as far as anti-trust laws are concerned. MS's 95%+ of the desktop market is "good enough" for them to still be considered a monopoly in the marketplace even though they are not the "exclusive" provider of operating systems.
In no legal fashion or finding, are - or have - Microsoft and Apple ever been competitors. Apple's existence has _zero_ bearing on whether or not Microsoft is(/was) considered a monopoly.
(Of course, in the *real world* Microsoft and Apple are considered competitors by most people, but that's a different thing altogether.)
Most Vista reviewes (and the /. reactions) fail to consider the mission of Vista in most big corporations. Sure, there might be some comparisons to Macintosh for the look & feel, but in a corporate (> 500 employees) environment, the Windows platform really shines. From a robust permission scheme, remote control of group policies and really easy deployment there's nothing like Windows. (The macintosh really falls down in a controlled environment.
Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?)
If you add Exchange to the mix, Windows really shines in the shared environment. Sure, for "grandma's" use and other special applications the Mac is a bright and shiny object, but it's just not a good team player.
A common gripe I have with the Mac OS community is this seeming insistence that everything that is cool or nifty, or even useful, is somehow a rip-off of something Apple did first. If you look at articles like this one, you'd think Apple invented the on-desktop search bar (Google), or widgets/gadgets (DesktopX, Konfabulator).
Apple often does things *better* than other companies (with the exception of Dashboard) but they usually don't do it FIRST. This makes the claim that everyone rips off their stuff from Apple pretty silly.
Lets look at some of these claims in the article regarding what Microsoft is "stealing" from Apple:
1. Glowing Min/Max/Close Buttons
Ugh, I'm sorry, but this is not an Apple first thing. I've seen this in Windows custom UIs (WindowBlinds for example) for a good long while now, not to mention game UIs and a bunch of Flash applications. This is a very nice design element, and yes Apple did it well, but they didn't do it first.
2. "Instant Search"
Yes, I know... you're trying to compare it to Spotlight and the traditional Sherlock tool. Guess what though, well before Spotlight there was Google Desktop which gave you the in-frame search box. I like Spotlight a lot, it makes navigating files on my system a hell of a lot easier, but it's not new, and all similar search systems aren't instantly copycats of it.
3. Sidebar and Gadgets/Widgets
Like I said before, the Gadget/Widget thing has been around a LOT longer than Apple fans like to think. Dashboard was the first attempt to integrate them straight into the OS as a bundled feature, but it was pretty poorly implemented. Apple in this regard was several years late to the party. The MS Sidebar is also a fairly poor implementation... so I guess if anything you can accuse MS of stealing some of Apple's own bad design work.
4. The bundled apps "Photo Library" "DVD Maker" "Chess Titans" etc...
Umm... ok... I'll give you Apple folks this one. With the way MS broke apart the Outlook features into individual apps is a little too close to the iCal, Address Book, Mail.app scheme. This one is probably a straight-rip from the Apple playbook.
5. Flip3D a poor man's Expose
Bull. Flip3D is a cheesy way to show off the 3D capabilities in the desktop layer. It has nothing to do with Expose and the multiple ways to display everything currently running. I think Expose does things way better. Flip3D is a gimmick, nothing more. If MS wanted to ape the Expose design, they could have easily done it better.
There are a lot of things Apple does well, and the article does admit that Apple borrows, often even from Windows, to get its feature set. However, the claim that these features were taken from Apple as opposed to being taken from wherever Apple themselves snagged them is presumptuous.
Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome.
Windows is usually a total mystery even to those who have mastered unix to the point of, say, writing kernel-level code.
Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics.
Maybe if your view is from the orbit occupied by people who get confused when two or more windows are on the screen at the same time...
Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.
If you're using ports (or portage) the difference is still just semantics.
Heck, even if you're sucking files out of the developer's SVN repository and compiling it yourself, it's *still* just semantics. You're still just a "whore" beholden to whomever is writing the code.
Microsoft arrogantly believes that they are the IT Industry but they've always made a product that's just good enough to be tolerable. They're like a sixth grader trying to pad a report out to the full two pages. Or a Bush administration that won't go away after 8 years in office. Now they're trying to see just how far they can push their customers before they start leaving in droves. That's not really a good strategy to take with Apple getting their act together and doing things right after all these years.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Deleted
Which is exactly why we need competition. It's not just because Windows is teh suxor, or Gates is the devil. (true as that may be
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If you tried to engineer something like USB in the 80s, it would have been cost prohibitive. USB took tremendous efforts to bring the whole industry together. ADB was created by one guy, Woz, in a few weeks. And ADB worked very, very well and was very reliable and it was amazingly cheap to manufacure. That would be like calling the carburetor a failure because it has been replaced by fuel injection.
Also, I would not call AppleTalk a failure either. It did a lot to help people who were trying to network groups of Mac systems together. For its time, it was a good system. The fact that the industry standardized on IP does not mean AppleTalk was a failure. In fact, the whole ZeroConf effort comes out of trying to bring discovery that AppleTalk had from the beginning to IP networks.
And calling MacOS a failure? Give me a break. I suppose DOS was a failure. And the Apple II. And the telegraph.
You are an ignorant Microsoft fanboy.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I burst out into laughter in the middle of my office. This OS is the most blatant rip-off from Apple that MS has done in years.
I disagree with your characterization of Apple's development methodology. In fact they have a lot of salaried people working directly on the kernel, incorporating the functionality Mac OS X needs for features like Disk Journaling, Spotlight and Time Machine, the design and incorporation of which are determined by the OS team. It's true that Apple includes a lot of open-source software and established standards in the OS, but frankly both Apple and Microsoft suffered for a long time from the Not-Invented-Here prejudice. I see Apple's willingness to use well-designed open source tools and standards as a refreshing change.
Also, although the Mac OS X kernel uses BSD in its subsystems, it is not "mostly BSD." The kernel is a hybrid of Mach 2.5 with BSD subsystems available. But you don't even need the BSD subsystem to use Mac OS X. The BSD subsystem is an optional part of the OS installation. Just in terms of raw bytes, the majority of the OS resides in the frameworks. The lowest-level frameworks like Foundation and ApplicationServices were originally developed by NeXT and are brilliantly executed. The choice of Objective-C may seem like a strange choice now, but it's lean, easy to learn, and makes software development far simpler. If NeXT/Apple only ever used what they could get out of the Darwin project, there wouldn't be very much to excite us about Leopard. So frankly, Apple is far more innovative than most Windows fanboys think.
The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.
You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. The kernel source is just endian-agnostic, it's not rocket science. There wasn't anything much deeper than that to build Mac OS X on Intel. But where they deserve serious credit is in making the developer tools, the headers, the excellent developer documentation... and providing it all for FREE and nicely ahead of their OS releases. Microsoft doesn't come close in its support of developers, nor in having the courage to revisit and rip out the crumbling foundations of their OS.
I agree that technically Windows in the 90's had some better things going on under the hood than Mac OS 7 through 9, but I still preferred Mac OS during those years. The main thing that kept me on the Apple platform was the consistency, aesthetics, organization, and manageability of the OS. Some of the things that bothered me about Windows at that time were:
- The centralized and cryptic registry (vs Mac OS Preferences folder)
- DLL Hell (vs Mac OS Extensions folder)
- BSOD from several fronts (vs Mac OS mysterious lockups)
- That flat, gray feeling (vs Mac OS sleekness)
- Inconsistent menus and interfaces (vs Mac OS well-established Human Interface Guidelines)
- Inconsistent text editing behavior (vs consistent Mac OS text services)
- Ugly font rendering (vs Mac OS decent typography)
- The word "Microsoft" preceding everything (vs no market-speak in Mac OS)
Meanwhile, there were some things that bothered me about Mac OS at the time:
- Mysterious lockups, requiring several long Conflict Catcher sessions
- Rare use of threading in software, system-modal dialogs
- No free developer tools
- No protected memory, often making software development into a reboot-fest
- The best VM system was third-party
- Expensive! hardware
- Not even an option to show the folder hierarchy in a Finder sidebar (Apple should copy MS here)
- Mac OS toolbox tedious to use (but lots of cool APIs and SDKs)
- The dark years (3rd-party licensing, dwindling marketshare, Copland...)
But all that is behind us, thank goodness! The future is in Unix and Unix-like systems with all the great strengths we had only been dreaming of all those years.
-- thinkyhead software and media