Microsoft Feared Mac Vs. Vista In '05

CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer sifted through many threads of e-mails released under the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit to dig up this jewel...More than a year before Windows Vista's release — and long before Apple started poking fun at the OS — Microsoft officials were already worried about comparisons between Mac OS X and Vista. An e-mail thread from October 2005 showed that an article in the Wall Street Journal by Walt Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg alarmed one Windows manager who forwarded a bit from the column.... 'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written. 'Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista.' Warrier added a comment of his own: 'A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].'"

Comments

Re:Tiget may be better than Vista, but

[gmor]

I'm getting really annoyed at the Mac commercials that constantly slam PC's.

I get the opposite reaction. I find Apple's ads cute, fun, and surprisingly truthful as Microsoft runs desperate "I'm a PC, so I'm nowhere near my computer" ads.

And the iPhone and iPod Touch ads are musical, elegant, and actually make me want to buy the device, as opposed to the other carriers' ads that show dominoes of inventory but no one doing anything cool with their phones.

Re:Why People Said No to Vista

[badasscat]

It's just not worth the cost. If a computer comes with it, that's nice - I'll take it

You may come to regret that attitude, as I have. I needed to buy a new laptop (old one broke) and I considered whether I should pay extra to get a new XP license with it, but because this was an unexpected purchase I ended up deciding to save the money and go with Vista.

Big mistake.

For one thing, I discovered Vista's DPC latency is always, always worse than XP. This is a big deal for me as I record music, not professionally, but for myself and it's one of the things I use my computer for. Basically can't do it in Vista, the OS defers too many procedure calls.

And I've spent literally *days* now trying to get the OS to run the way I want it to run, figuring out what I can safely shut off and basically trying to streamline it to where I don't have a mess of useless junk running all the time and slowing down my system. (I have a ThinkPad, so I'm not talking about crapware that came pre-installed, I'm talking about Vista processes, services, etc.)

I actually ended up turning Aero off and going back to the Vista Basic interface. Aero is just tiring to look at after a while, and seems to serve no real purpose. I see no justification whatsoever for dedicating all those resources to it.

Someone said in another thread about Vista that while it's basically a functional OS, it fails at what an OS is supposed to do and that's let you run the programs you want to run without getting in the way. It is instead an impediment. It's like a spoiled child constantly begging for attention and throwing tantrums when you don't give it any. I feel like I need to babysit it all the time; I am literally working more on Vista than I am doing anything productive on my computer.

If I had it to do again, I would spend the extra money for the XP downgrade.

Re:You haven't seen some viruses

[TheThiefMaster]

I personally think the most impressive virus was CIH, which could be considered to be zero bytes in size, due to the fact that it didn't increase the size of executables it infected. It didn't damage them either, it filled alignment gaps in the PE (.exe) file format, making the infected exe "denser" than the uninfected one. Pretty clever.

Re:What Microsoft should really have considered

[Poltras]

The key here is the phrase 'on the same hardware'. As operating systems do more, they take more hardware to perform adequately. And it's not a Windows thing, it's a MacOS thing and a Linux thing.

Not necessarily. MacOS X, 10.2 was faster than 10.1, and 10.3 faster than 10.2, on the same hardware. It wasn't until 10.4 that you actually started seeing a performance hit on G3 and slower G4 computers.

In any event, I'm not sure that I'd call the jump from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 'major iterations'.

In any event, I'm sure you don't know what you're talking about. The full list of features in each iteration was astounding. The difference between 10.1 and 10.2 was of the order of those between Win 2k and Win XP. The fact that they update minor version numbers doesn't change the fact that they add enough to call it a major iteration.

Don't believe me? Check out for yourself on wikipedia: 10.1 10.2 and 10.3. Thank you, come again.