Gates Talks Up Vista on NBC's 'Today' a Day Before its Release
| by Joe Leo, Columnist | January 30, 2007 |
continued... from: previous page
Vieira says to Gates, "They want something that's easy to use, secure, and they also want to know that they can control it, in terms of what their children access... why should I care about this system?"
Gates's response was, "Well, Vista's a big advance in all those areas. An operating system has never had parental control features before. So you had to buy complicated software, now we've built that in..."
(Mac OS X has parental controls features built-in which allows parents or computer administrators to limit the things users can do).
He goes on to say that they've listened to their user base, Microsoft's user base of about five million people who test drove Vista during its development, and the new version of Windows has, unable to clearly get his point across, "A lot of easy to use, finding your things, when people have more and more music and photos."
(Like OS X's Spotlight feature).
Gates states that Vista will run on "any reasonably up-to-date machine" and the upgrade will cost "less than a hundred dollars" but fails to mention, which Microsoft's own website does, that the full user experience will not be available to all users unless specific hardware requirements are met.
One of the major features that will be left out is the Aero interface (similar to Mac OS X's Aqua interface).
And the hundred dollar upgrade applies only to the basic home version of the software. Business and professional users will have to spend between $200 to $400 for their upgrade, not including, again, those hardware-specific upgrades (if necessary).
"Response from Apple has been 'copycat, copycat.' How much pressure have you felt to compete with Apple?" asks Vieira.
Gates's response was, "Well Windows PCs are over 90% of what people use... we have a lot of innovations, that move way ahead of anything thing Apple's done. We love the competition, but... [Windows] has always been the best choice."
Innovations. Like including music and photo managing software into Vista (the iLife suite from Apple), a feature called gadgets that are little tools to help you (Widgets on the Mac OS), and features that put the user in control of the computer and the whole experience (the very foundation of Apple's operating system).
The inevitable question and topic of course, is security, viruses, and malware.
[Note that you can watch the entire video here, while available, for Gates's exact words]