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Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
[I'm under the impression that it kind of sucks ...]
You could have stopped there. Windows is just a bad implementation of VMS + Unix + DOS that, due to Microsoft's successful violation of anti-trust law, is pretty much the only operating system you can buy pre-installed on commodity hardware. Because of that successful illegal behaviour, all the corporate apps (and games) run on Windows, hence all the corporate users are on Windows, adn all the gamers are on Windows. Vista offers exactly nothing to those users. But if you buy a new computer, Vista is what you are going to get because Microsoft wants it that way. It isn't exactly a surprise that nobody is buying Vista 'upgrades'.
Apple has done both of the above- a few times
.NET and other technologies like WPF. However, when MS decides to move away from Win32, as they HAVE DONE on the 64bit version of XP and Vista, it runs as a separate subsystem along side the replacement, and again with emulation.
This IS NOT the same. MS has also ported Win32 and the NT Kernel many times; however, replacing the fundamental OS API set is something different.
MS is actively moving developers to managed code, and with a long term reason, so they can drop Win32 as secondary subsystem on NT with a new main system API.
Apple did VERY LITTLE when it comes to transitions making life easier on users. Their idea of compatibility was basically using a System9 VM on OSX. This is not creative, nor easy on the end users. MS on the other hand back in 1992 implemented the Win16 subsytem for application compatibility with Win 3.x while developing Windows NT. This was NOT an emulation environment, but a seperate Win16 subsystem that runs on the desktop side by side Win32.
MS is already doing this to a certain extent with
NT's core is a client/server kernel technology and it is in the NT layers where what is kind of cool about Windows exists. NT's subsystem model allows for MS to move in or out any Subsystem that is equal to the main OS subsystem, this is also why a BSD *nix variant runs NATIVELY as another subsystem on NT, without EMULATION or VM.
Microsoft doesn't do any of the above because they don't have to.
Again, this is simply not true. First, XP64 and Vista 64bit do NOT USE the Win32 subsystem as the main OS subsystem. So they have done this, not only 1992 with the Win16 subsystem, but today on the 64bit versions.
I don't really care what you think of MS, as they both suck and do things well depending on what you look at. However to try to use Apple as a 'shining' example when it comes to OS architecture or API implementation it is VERY laughable.
Even Quartz2D continues to fall on its face with no default hardware accleration, pushing developers to use the very old QuickDraw API to maintain performance in applications.
Even 10.5 hasn't delivered an accelerated version of Quartz2D, yet Vista REPLACED their entire video subsystem while adding in WPF and other technologies. And Vista's new video subsystem is SO TRANSPARENT to users and even nerds, that people don't think Vista is any different than XP.
So with regard to the video, MS did too good of a job of creating a new video foundation/system, as most people don't even get all of it is NEW and think Vista is just like XP because all the applications look and run just fine.