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.

Comments

Article Summary

[morboIV]

Funny how the summary doesn't include things from the article like:

Vista is infinitely more pleasant to use than its predecessors. There's more logic to its folder structure and naming scheme. Things are easier to find. Fewer steps are required to perform common tasks, especially when it comes to networking. It's almost like someone has an agenda or something.

Re:Article Summary

[morboIV]

Or how about this one:

Windows Vista is not, as the Web's chorus of caustic critics claim, little more than a warmed-over Windows XP. Funny how that quote didn't make it either.

Re:Article Summary

[Lisandro]

Well, yes, Slashdot was always renowed for their editorial objectiveness, specially regarding new Microsoft products :)

But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable - it pretty much boils down to "Well, it looks spiffy, borrows a lot from OSX, and seems to be a worthy upgrade, but none of this really matters as we'll all be using it in a year anyway". Sadly enough, i think that's more or less right.

Re:Article Summary

[Tim C]

But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable

Which is precisely why the summary here (which let's face it is all a lot of people are going to read) being so unfavourable is so disappointing.

I appreciate that this is essentially Taco and Malda's hobby writ large, but even just a passing nod towards reality in the headlong rush to rubbish Vista as much as possible would be nice once in a while.

User Account Control

[glas_gow]

Then there's User Account Control, an intrusive dialog box that pops up whenever you try to install a program or adjust a PC-wide setting, requesting that you confirm the change by entering your password. This will strike most people as an unnecessary nuisance, and you can turn it off.

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.

Re:Okay we get it

[AxminsterLeuven]

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.

News for Nerds

[value_added]

A summary of the fine article:

• Windows Vista is beautiful
• The Start Menu has changed
• New Programs include Sidebar, Photo Gallery, DVD Maker, Chess Titans and Flip 3-D
• More logic to its folder structure and naming scheme
• New Sleep mode for laptops
• New Presentation Mode for PowerPoint
• Internal fortifications blah blah Service Hardening blah blah blah
• Includes IE7
• Includes Windows Defender
• Includes Parental Controls
• Includes User Account Control
• Includes a backup program
• Netmeeting has been replaced by Meeting Space
• Wordpad can't open .doc files

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.

Re:Or in other words...

[drsmithy]

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.)

Re:Or in other words...

[Greyfox]

Not really. Microsoft has been copying Apple badly since Windows 2.0. They built their house on the shaky foundation of their non-reentrant program loader and they've codified two decades of design mistakes. They've never had a better product than Apple has and they stubbornly continue to polish that turn of a system in the hopes that someday it'll be shiny. Meanwhile they copy the exact things that caused Apple to fail in the 90's -- the vendor lock-in and high prices that drove everyone to the cheap commodity PCs. Sure you could get an Apple if you wanted to pay twice as much for all your hardware. Meanwhile Apple's opening up and becoming a lot more competitive on that front.

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.

Re:Without Apple

[Colin Smith]

It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff". It's slower, not in fact cheaper, particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years. Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.

Are you Mac Zealots still talking about that TCO study that compared Windows 3.1 and System 7 ? I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.

Re:Without Apple

[Cro Magnon]

They'd have nobody to copy. Microsoft don't do anything unless they're forced to. Without Apple you would still be using MS DOS.

Without Microsoft, you would probably still be using MacOS Classic on a PowerPC, dreaming of the day you could smoothly run multiple tasks and not have one crashing program bring down the whole OS with it.

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 ;) ) It's that ANY company, Apple included, will stagnate without competitors pushing them to improve their product.

Re:Okay we get it

[soft_guy]

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.

Re:Broken Link

[thesolo]

The video is absolutely hysterical, and clearly tongue-in-cheek. In case anyone got the impression from the summary that he was actually trying to defend Vista, he's not. Mr. Pogue says, in regards to Microsoft's new Spotlight rip-off:

"This is how you find things in Mac Os X. You hit a keystroke, you type in what you're looking for, and Spotlight, as the feature is called, finds all the files, folders, and email messages from your entire system.

Well, now they have that in Windows Vista too. Up pops the start menu, you type what you want in this little box...but is this a rip off of Apple's spotlight feature?

It is not. How can I prove it? Watch again.

Apple's search feature is in the upper right corner of the screen, Microsoft's search box is in the lower left corner of the screen. Not the same thing at all!"

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.

Some good, some bad

[Slur]

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.