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Bill Gates Brags About Vista, Reacts to Apple's Latest Ads
fr8_liner writes "In an unusually candid interview with Newsweek Bill Gates lays it all on the line, bragging about the benefits of Vista, ragging on Apple for their 'I'm a Mac' ads, and claiming primacy in a number of features shared by Vista and OSX. Specifically, it is Mr. Gates' opinion that the Apple adverts are misleading if not untruthful. He makes the claim that 'security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.' The interview also touches on the future of Microsoft and Operating systems, and some of the company's plans for internet-based computing."
So the highly trained security experts break OS X every day huh? Even if that had the SLIGHTEST bit of truth to it I STILL wouldn't buy Windows. Why? Cuz legions of Coke-swilling KIDS break windows all the time. Yeah I know which one I feel more secure with...
Marketing has a very close relation to the science/religion debate. Throw out a bunch of information, claiming they are facts, and don't provide any supporting information to prove your claims.
Oh, and dare people to prove you wrong, that makes you sound even more right
"I only know 2 things: The love for me, and the fear of me."
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Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.
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Well first off, this just plain isn't true. But, I believe that it is true (or at least has been) for Windows. A simple search of the security focus archives would reveal if this has been true or not in the past. Any takers?
"""
I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
"""
As someone above said careful what you wish for. Basically, I remember seeing the ad from Apple about Mac not having any virii. At that point, I wondered how long it'd be before someone did it (NEVER challenge an attacker). I think it was just a few months before it happened.
Basically, if I were Bill, given even just Vista's already sketchy security track record, I'd be careful about making such comments. How long do people here think that it'll take before the month of Vista happens?
Lets see: 140,000 known Windows exploits, most of them surfacing in the last 12 years makes that at least one exploit released every 45 minutes - or there abouts. Hell, Vista has an installed base smaller than BeOS right now and it has more exploits already.
Most of the stuff on
That's some pretty big talk for a company with Microsoft's record, isn't it? Especially compared to Mac.
I'm the "computer guy" in my family and I've convinced everyone to buy a Mac. So I'm constantly looking around for possible exploits to warn my parents, my wife, and my mother-in-law about. I paid particular attention to the month of Apple bugs.
So I'd know if people were finding "daily" security flaws with Macs. This isn't to say that there aren't any, but three hundred sixty five a year? That's not even happening in Windows. And most of the ones that I've heard about require physical access to the machine, or for the attacker to be on the network. And the very few that have been able to be remotely triggered have been fixed within the month through Apple's software update.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
...checks calendar... Yep, only 4 days until patch Tuesday. Gonna have my Word patches ready this month, Bill?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
When the OS you feel comfortable with results in my inbox filled with spam from zombied machines, my firewall and server log files are filled with lame Windows attacks on my non-Windows machines, or the accessibility of a web site or portion of the internet becomes pathetically slow as one of those bot nets goes on a rampage, your choice of OS sucks ass.
If your not connected to the internet then choose what ever crappy OS you want, if your going to be part of a public network, consider how your choice will affect others on that public network.
This is because Gates wants power, plain and simple. He wants to be respected, and if that won't work, he'll settle for feared. His ubernerdish countenance and ostensibly tiny penis (If you saw him on video getting pied in the face, you know that he has no sense of humor) have left him with a complete sense of insecurity. As such he has to exert his control over others in order to feel good about himself.
This is why the Gates foundation isn't going to examine its investment portfolio to make sure that they're not investing in companies that are killing people. It's not actually about helping people. It's about further extending his influence.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What hasn't sunk in with Bill and probably never will is that most Windows users are pragmatists and not fanboys. There simply isn't much in the OS to incite rabid love and loyalty, just the sober realization and acceptance that it's an OS with the widest hardware support, the most available software, and which runs on a cheaper and more open hardware platform. Other than that, there are plenty of more elegant and emotionally engaging operating systems out there.
I've never seen anyone claim he was a genius programmer. But at least at one time he was a pretty good programmer. In fact Altair BASIC was the first and pretty much forever the smallest BASIC interpreter (4kB.) Gates was one of two primary authors of the software.
So yes, Bill did know computers... when they were much simpler. And he knew how to code, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am not a big fan of the "I am a Mac" ads. Being a Linux user, I don't care that much about OS X or Windows based PCs. So perhaps my opinion is unbiased.
I think the fact that you know what Slashdot is makes you the wrong viewer for those ads. I'm an OS X fan, and I use Linux and Windows every day. I probably have a better handle on each platform's strengths and weaknesses than most people. Those ads are targeting people who don't even know what an "OS" is. Try to put yourself in the mindset that you have never heard of Linux, and you don't know what an OS is. Now imagine, all the computers at the store(Walmart) run Windows. You don't even know where you'd get a computer that ran something else, except maybe if there was a Web site. Now imagine you've only ever run Windows, and you don't have any idea how you get viruses or worms or trojans. You've heard of Apple computer and know they sell Macintosh computers, but you don't know how you'd use one or where to get one or if they are better in any way. Now watch the ads again.
From the perspective of a computer geek these ads are patronizing and imply some inaccurate things. They are not precise and the concepts they explain are way fuzzier than in the real world. For average people, however, the messages they convey are fairly truthful and simple enough for people to understand. "Getting a mac means negligible chance of malware" is a valuable message for the clueless and I wish more would listen to it.
I think that these ads might offend Windows users instead of getting them to switch to the cool side. These ads do not show the strength of Macs. These focus more on insulting Windows based PCs.
They focus on benefits of the mac the average person can understand. I dare you to drive to the middle nowhere in Iowa and try to explain to an average person the benefits of having a capable bash shell instead of the Windows command prompt or Cygwin, in 30 seconds or less. Or explain system services or not being part of a monoculture or default network services settings.
Moreover, don't know why, but I've always felt that any company that really has superior products doesn't have to attack the competition this way.
When you're dealing with a monopolized product often the only way to market a product is to compare it to something the user does know about. If people don't know why they should go out of their way to get a mac instead of just picking up a Windows box anywhere, they aren't going to do it.
ps. I know that writing something against Apple might not go very well with my Karma, though :-(
People often complain about an anti-windows or pro-linux or pro-mac bias on Slashdot. Most of those people are incorrect in my experience. I say good and bad things about the actions/functions/features/or image of all three regularly and I haven't noticed any one being modded more than the others. I made comments both in favor of and criticizing Linux development on the desktop yesterday and both were modded way up. So long as what you say has value, in general the masses overpower the occasional fanboy who thinks Linux or Windows or Mac is some sort of religious choice.
"Troll" does not mean "anything with which I disagree". It means that someone is saying something they don't believe in order to get a reaction out of you. I believe every word I printed above. Therefore it is plainly, simply, and factually not a troll. It is also not engineered to piss people off, therefore it is also not flamebait.
It's really too bad slashdot doesn't care about abusive moderators. Oh sure, you can lose your moderation ability permanently for criticizing the editors sufficiently, or even for modding them down, but abusing moderation, well, that's A-OK.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There was absolutely nothing I could do to make the system run it. Oh sure, the system could be upgraded with a new processor, memory, hard drive or whatever, but no upgrade would allow [my beige G3 Mac to run OS X 10.2].
I feel ya, brother. I mean, I'm trying to get Vista Home Edition to run on my 486DX2/66, and it just won't, no matter which components I upgrade!
You did notice who published this interview right? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16934083/site/newsweek /
Allow me to highlight the notable characters in the domain name: www.msnbc.msn.com
MABASPLOOM!
Elevator pitches are supposed to be short - you have less than a minute to make someone invest more time in understanding you product or proposal.
Bill states that he needs minutes to sit us down and explain blah, blah, blah.
For F**k's sake, at least throw out "We've learned to copy better," "We admit that XP will always be full of holes and changed everything to give ourselves a head start to the bad guys," "It's pretty." Anything other than giving us a pie chart where the light grey shows the amount of time of hanging out and the dark grey shows the amount of time "kickin' it."
I'm not sure Bill would be a convincing sales guy at CompUSA.
And I'm not being funny, but it's easier to upgrade a PC than a Mac.
Umm, in what way? If you compare Apple machines to comparable PCs, they are about the same ease of upgrading hardware. Now Apple sells more all-in-ones, laptops, and small form factor machines than average, so I suppose you could argue that Apple makes more machines that are harder to upgrade, but that is pretty, bloody weak.
for example if you want you can change the motherboard etc. - can't exactly do that with a Mac tower.
Actually you can, they're just expensive and you have more limited hardware options. Having limited hardware option != harder to upgrade though. They are different issues.
How about some counter points. When upgrading hardware on the mac, you never have to worry about calling Apple to get a new key, because your OS decided you are a criminal. You never have to worry about reinstalling the OS, or OS's in succession because you only have an "upgrade" version. If you are replacing the whole machine, say you got a new laptop, moving all your files, software, certs, accounts, etc. from the old one to the new one is an order of magnitude easier with a mac.
ok i feel pretty stupid. this might take me some time to get over.
on the upgrade bit.
Doesn't XP and Vista make it more difficult for you to upgrade your computer by making you re-register the software just for changing some components. I mean the OS is what they have control of and they are actually using it to make it more difficult to upgrade the hardware. I can drop a new video card into my mac and I wont have to deal with any licensing crap at least.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
In nearly every single Vista article, there is mention of OS X and how it's had these features for years, which is a refreshing change. It's been extremely frustrating for Mac users the last six years because they had this OS that, despite early flaws, was years ahead of its time, but the tech media continued to ignore it. Maybe this started after OS X Tiger was released, but since last year's Vista delay, the media has been really harsh toward Vista and praiseworthy toward Apple. It's like they're finally giving Apple some long overdue credit for keeping the momentum going on OS X while the "biggest software company in the world" couldn't even squeeze out an update to its aging Win32 codebase.
It's like the press finally realized how behind Windows is and how it never really came to dominate the market based on its merits. Microsoft just got lucky with a braindead IBM contract in the 80s and rode the commodity PC wave. Everybody has realized that Microsoft isn't that big and scary at all, and now that they're being forced to compete with Google, Apple, and others, we see just how floundering they are. The tactics they used to use in the 90s (announcing vaporware to freeze the market, releasing buggy 1.0 versions and getting OEMs to bundle them over competitors, etc.) don't work anymore.
Vista is a headache to use. The interface, the extra dialogs, the multiple menu styles, the redundant buttons...it's a schizophrenic OS, and it even runs your games slower. Apps like Windows DVD Maker are a pathetic joke compared to iLife. I bet we didn't see an iLife '07 announcement at MacWorld because it's going to be bundled right into Leopard as part of the OS, just to stick it to Microsoft even further.
Seeing Bill's reaction is just funny. This isn't the first interview he's been asked about OS X--there's a clip on YouTube where a CNN guy asks him about it as well, and Bill just pauses and reacts. It's funny. The press is finally waking up.
My guess is that he is reasonably aware of the hundreds of millions of people who barely notice that their os is some version of Windows. It isn't real surprising that many people who have switched away from Windows, when you ask them, actually have a reason...and further it isn't that surprising that they feel the need to be 'emotionally engaged' by their computer.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Maybe you should get someone that knows what they are doing to set the servers up?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
But I don't think the ads are really aimed at making people switch to Mac. The ads are really more designed to make people who bought a Mac think they made the right decision, so they'll keep buying Macs.
Maybe other people have different experiences, but I know about 100 people who have switched to mac computers, most of them software engineers. I know one person who switched back (to Linux). I doubt Apple has as much of a problem keeping switchers as getting people to switch in the first place.
There's certainly "the faithful" who that ad appeals to, but I'm not sure if the rest of the people who buy Macs want to be identified with a prickish looking, snobby, "better than thou" character.
Apple has been getting a whole lot of customers lately (relative to a few years ago), about half of whom are not old customers returning. I seriously doubt they're aiming their advertising at current customers. I suspect their ads are aimed at average people, rather than computer geeks, which is why no one on Slashdot particularly likes them.
The thing about windows apologists is they tote the motherboard replacement like Linux geeks tote os compilation. As if it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and my wife will stay up with me on a Friday night to watch me do it.
No, as a matter of fact I am not interested in either. I was during college, when I needed to learn, but not any more. Nowdays I want to use my computer for surfing, email, photos, videos, and a Mac offers me all of these things right out of the box with 0 setup time needed.
Anyone else thing Bill is starting to sound more and more like the Black Knight?
BLACK KNIGHT: Come Here.
ARTHUR: What are you going to do, bleed on me?
BLACK KNIGHT: I'm invincible!
ARTHUR: You're a looney.
BLACK KNIGHT:The Black Knight always triumphs. Have at you!
And so on...
blah blah blah
you do realise that as far as Bill's concerned, those 140,000 exploits don't exist anymore... When they put Vista out the door, they got to "reset" the Windows Exploit Counter... as of 30th Jan 2007, XP is no longer Windows... Vista is Windows
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
"Mac ads are as inaccurate as Microsoft ads"
Lemme fix that for you.
"Ads are inaccurate."
By definition.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
It's a politicians answer. Don't answer the question. Answer another question that sounds similar
Those 140,000 "exploits" are largely redundant and exploit a small number of actual vulnerabilities - most of them being the user.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
When I used to be employed to write adware
Please proceed to the nearest bridge and fling yourself off of it. There is no amount of "it's just a job", or "gotta feed my family somehow" that can save you from being a fucking tool.
I'd rather clean sewers than write malicious code for a living. Hell, I'd rather starve than be responsible for creating ad/spyware.
Mr. Gates, do you actually mean you are planning on stripping OUT all that shiny new DRM technology you are so carefully putting IN now, presumably because, by the time your next OS comes out (in five to ten years), all your fat corporate sponsors will have finally figured out that treating customers like common thieves and criminals is, well, sort of bad for business?
Your Servant, B. Baggins
"Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that's got photos. As I went through, they'd think, "Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?""
Great. I would then come sit them down next to a Mac, show them all the same features, and explain that Macs have had all this and more for years.
We'll see if Microsoft can follow-up the initial Vista release with upgrades that are as consistently good as Apple's.
And? Good craftspeople are often fanatical about their tools, and very devoted. Mac fans aren't Mac fans because it's shiny - they are fans because Macs are great tools. great tools truly make life a breeze. What's not to love? Quality tools are highly satisfying.
The problem with Windows is that it is a very poor tool, and frequently gets in the way of doing the job.
... and then they built the supercollider.
It is good to see more tech-specialised media having a go at him. Still, his reaction majorly upsets me - page 2 of TFA in particular, where he first whines about the lies of mac. Then he goes and makes blatant lies such as implying that OSX stole concepts which they announced, because Vista security took too long... (erk), and So.. MS came up with File, Edit, View and Help... while Apple came up with the GUI and the DESKTOP.
And also I have yet to see any interviewer get to the hard issues - DRM, WGA, licensing, and so on. All the media focusses on is the visible issues - HD media, parental controls and aero.
OS X was disruptive because it was a completely different OS from previous versions of Mac OS. When you replace the OS completely, you get a little wiggle-room in the disruption department. Microsoft doesn't get to play that card with Vista, though. XP *was* Microsoft's "OS X 10.0". It was the OS that accomplished the painful transition from the Win9x kernel to the WinNT kernel in consumer-space. Vista is just a continuation of that code-base.
Vista isn't disruptive because it had to be. It's not a rewrite, it's not a replacement, it's just a new version. The reason it's disruptive is because Microsoft took five years worth of new features and new APIs and instead of developing them incrementally over half a dozen releases, like Apple did, they stuffed them into a single mega-release. The result is that instead of updating apps gradually as new APIs come out, developers have to massively overhaul their apps for all the new APIs in Vista. And consumers, instead of dealing with a few apps breaking with each incremental release, have to deal with a huge amount of software breaking all at once.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I do not understand what sort of mind encourages one to tell a person to kill someone, just because of a job they've aided trespass. He's never killed anyone, whereas you could easily have just made yourself morally, and potentially legally,[*] responsible in any right-thinking person's mind for his suicide. If you do not think so, you are much, much worse than him and should look at yourself before criticising others.
[*]: Where I come frome, it is quite rightly illegal to encourage or help someone to kill themselves.
Look out!
really needs to get out a lot more.
The "right" OS for you is the one that runs the apps you need with a minimum of personal hassle.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I hate it when people make foolish claims like this. NO, ads are not inaccurate "by definition". People, quit using phrases like "by definition" and "literally" etc. with such carelessness. If ads are inaccurate, it is a *tendency* and nothing more. Inaccuracy is an accidental property, not essential property. For example, if I show a commercial saying, "Battle-of-The-Bands event at City Expo Center, 9:00pm on Saturday. Tickets for $20" ...there is nothing inaccurate or deceitful about that. Simply because (especially in America) businesses believe that profit is justification for any action, especially immoral ones that will convince customers to buy, doesn't mean that advertising *must* be inherently designed to misinform. That is a cultural practice due to a (non)value system that doesn't even understand why ethics and morality are worthwhile.
This really adds a new chapter to the Apple vs Microsoft product design debate. In the past we could compare Apple and Microsoft products, and also compare the process and methodology that both companies use to design products. But, fools that we were, we were comparing shipping products only. Of course if Bill Gates decided that Windows should have Parental Controls in 2002 and Apple shipped Parental Controls in 2005, and Microsoft in 2007, then it is actually Apple that is three years behind not Windows that is two years behind. Thanks for clearing that up, Bill.
Also I like how he says that the only reason why Apple has been shipping all these new features and iterating upon them again and again regularly is that Apple has been leaving out security. Isn't that classic projection? This is like when the town's biggest drunk picks on the town's workaholic by calling him a "drunk". It's like the workaholic may have problems, but you're the town drunk, buddy.
Right, and that's a very good point. Rather than continue to support a fundamentally broken design for eternity, Apple said, in effect, "OK, new OS entirely, lots of old stuff just plain Will Not Work." MS has been reluctant to do that, maybe up to and including Vista. I really, really think they need to draw a line and say "Anything OS-ish before _here_, sorry, not gonna work, period" so they can stop including fundamental design flaws for the sake of staying backwards compatible with 5 or 10 year old stuff. It's funny - I can't read files from Word 95 on an XP box, but they try to make executables from then work. What's more likely to be needed? Seems to me, let the office formats be backward compatible, no problem there, but dump the OS compatibility attempts that make the new one suck for the same reasons the old one sucked. Now, let me be completely clear - I have not, and quite likely never will, buy vista. So I'm saying this as an already-decided outsider. I just don't see what needs I have that it would meet.
LOL, well said. I went through that a decade and a half ago when I switched from the moribund Amiga. If you think Windows isn't thrilling today, you haven't switched from a multitasking OS to Windows 3.1-on-DOS.
The media will kiss the ass of anybody who payed for as much ADVERTISING as Microsloth. Microsoft was treated so nice that when the EMAIL macro virus problem hit-- nobody reported it only existed on OUTLOOK.
Now Apple spends more than they ever did on traditional advertising. I hardly watch TV and I see plenty of ipod and mac ads.
Now the media is somewhere in the middle of two large customers. Back when windows XP came out, that was not the case.
If SLASHDOT or MOZILLA payed for a chunk of ads, we'd hear about how much better Firefox is, evil Windows Vista DRM, how Vista can never be secure, ODF, and how MS bribes politicians.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I'm absolutely certain Microsoft had nothing to do with the project. Microsoft is bad at many things: programming, for example; and marketing (see above interview). But MoAB would be the worst marketing stunt ever: not only was the blog team unable to discover any serious flaws in the competition's product, they gave extremely detailed information about the few potential threats they could find—making it easy for Apple to release patches almost immediately.
I've never met one of these mythical "I like Macs because they are shiny" people. Perhaps you live in a very strange neck of the woods, like Beverly Hills or something?
The vast majority of Mac users I know are people who like them because they make a lot of money out of them - in areas like publishing, music, photography and video. Macs have only become "shiny" recently. They used to be beige, just like PCs. So why did people buy them then? Why did so many Mac users switch to Mac clones that were boring and fairly ugly, when Apple licensed the OS?
Remember the world before Photoshop, the laser printer, and Desktop Publishing? You could only get Photoshop for the Mac. Apple brought the Postscript laser printer to the masses, and revolutionized the publishing industry. Same with music. For a long time, Pro Tools on a Mac was the only thing worth using for professional-grade digital recording. And today Apple has powerful and easy-to-use video editing software. Most Mac users are users first - they care more about their field of work (often a creative field) than they do about the Mac itself. It's just the Mac makes otherwise complex things very easy, so you can focus on the work, and not "operating a computer." There's a whole generation of filmmakers who are growing up on Final Cut Pro right now, because they want to make films, not because they want a shiny computer.
I think most likely it is you who has the superficial tastes, and are projecting your own interpretation onto people, rather than trying to understand their true motivations. Sure, users might appreciate the looks as well, they might like the Aqua interface. That doesn't mean they bought it because it is pretty. I doubt they wouldn't have bought it if it wasn't a great system as well as being pretty.
In fact, that pretty much sums up how Microsoft thinks, and how a lot of Windows users think. They think if they copy the "look" of the Mac, then they can have the Mac's appeal. But that's just superficial, "skin deep" beauty - the Mac offers form and function together. I'm reminded of when the original iMac was a huge hit, and other companies thought they could capture market-share by adding colored panels to their machines, while maintaining the same clunky form-factor and Windows OS. Notice how you didn't see Mac users buying those machines based on appearance, and they ultimately failed to interest anyone?
As an example of this in user-space, why do so many Windows users use absurd animated cursors, or elaborate screen-savers, or "skins" on applications? Why do so many Windows gamers "pimp" their PC with neon and case-mods? Those trends never caught on in the Mac world - especially the "skinning" thing. So, what explains the desire of Windows users to change the surface appearance of their system, without improving the functionality? Often these appearance mods actually get in the way of usability, let alone enhance it.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I thought he played with some code, made a mess out of it, bought someone else's code, then licensed yet another third party to replace his original attempt at coding?
Not quite - he copied and stole code. He broke it, got some financing from his Father to hire someone to fix his breakages. He stole more code, got lucky with the IBM deal, and persisted in stealing code into the '90s. By this time, his company was rich enough that they didn't need to steal code any more - they just bought the companies that owned what they wanted!
MS still has stolen code in their products...
> Ditto for Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, respectively...
... if they complain to Microsoft it is Dell's fault, but ultimately it is the consumer holding the legal and technical responsibility. That's a really big moneymaker there, because you're taking retail money from the consumer but you're only shipping them wholesale parts.
No, Steve Wozniak is an accomplished design engineer and Steve Jobs is an accomplished product designer. They are both successful separately from their business concerns such as being founders or CEO. If Steve Jobs didn't want to be any kind of business man he could still work at Apple on their product design team. Similarly at Google you find the CEO is a technologist, not a sales guy. This is how it's supposed to work in Silicon Valley.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are sales guys. They design pyramid schemes, not products. Their innovations are in software licensing, pricing, marketing. One of the big things they innovated was putting a disk in a big empty box and selling it for a lot of money to people who had never before paid for software. Another innovation was taking the cost and responsibility of system integration away from "system integrators" and putting it onto the consumer. Instead of buying a personal computer that just worked, you bought computer "hardware" and computer "software" and you "installed Windows" and you began troubleshooting. If it doesn't work it is the consumer's fault. If they complain to Dell it is Microsoft's fault
When I first saw these new Mac vs PC ads I was very disappointed that Apple was doing the whole "Mac vs PC" thing. That felt tired and still does.
... you don't ever upgrade a Mac and lose your audio.
However they have steadily won me over because they are communicating some really important technical stuff in a non-technical way. I know many of us here would rather see a 5 minute video where user A upgrades Tiger to Leopard and DONE! and user B gets started upgrading XP to Vista, he is still typing in a product code and user A is making a movie already. What they have done instead is anthropomorphize the computers themselves and therefore Mac goes "upgrade? isn't it just straightforward?" and PC goes "oh, no, you've got to do this and that and this and that" and he is in a hospital gown and scared about losing functionality. That's the actual fears of Windows users who are thinking of upgrading to Vista, and that is actually something that Apple should be telling its customers about its competitors' products. You have this guy George Ou who is an IT writer who knocks the Mac in a ridiculously inaccurate way, and he got Vista recently, and after a week of not being able to install it, he gave up and put XP back on his machine and put Vista on the shelf and this guy is an IT writer with a name-brand 2006 PC. You just don't have that on a Mac