Microsoft Must Break Free from Itself in Order to Move onto the Future
| by Joe Leo, Columnist | April 12, 2007 |
continued... from: previous page
But are we paying the price? According to Martellaro (and be sure to read his entire article provided by a link), no matter what OS you may be using, it affects us all with something as small as those darn SPAM e-mails we get everyday.
Though the mother of all print magazines begs to differ. And while I agree with them whole-heartedly since I am on the Mac side, I will have to point out that I think TIME magazine is heavily-biased in favor of the Mac--which is fine by me--when almost all of their reviews of Vista are negative and pits it up against the superior Mac OS X.
Can we not forget the image that was on the magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year" this year? An Apple Display with matching Pro Keyboard and Mighty Mouse? (The person of the year being, "You." with a shiny foil sticker mimicking a mirror).
In their piece at the beginning of the year, in "A First Look at Windows Vista" their first sub-headline is? "Windows Vista: Why Nobody Cares." (See what I mean?)
Lev Grossman starts out the review/editorial, "Back in the day, your operating system was a big deal. It was who you were. Mac vs. Windows was like Catholic vs. Protestant, or Republican vs. Democrat... Now it's somewhere down around Coke vs. Pepsi."
Meaning, same color, same bean, just one tastes better than the other by preference.
"Microsoft is still winning the battles--the iPod 'halo effect' notwithstanding, Apple is hovering at about a 5% market share--but no one's getting worked up about the war... So who cares? That's one reason for the near-total non-excitement surrounding the launch of Windows Vista, the first new version in five years...," Grossman continues.
Five years. It was delayed and delayed and delayed.
He also says, "The fact that it took Microsoft over five years and $6 billion dollars to create Vista is--and I mean this quite seriously--an embarrassment to the good name of American innovation, but it's perfectly fine." (Fine = what we expect from Microsoft).
How can we even begin to classify Windows Vista and Mac OS X in the same article, much less, same sentence? Vista, an embarrassment to the good name of American innovation, and Mac OS X, created by Apple, the leader of innovation? How can they be the same, one supposedly a copy of the other?
As I mentioned and pointed out in a previous article of mine, the other problem with Vista is that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. When Bill Gates was a special guest on NBC's "Today" show the week of the big release, anchor Meredith Vieira asked Gates about minimum system requirements, and his response was?
Gates stated that Vista would run on "any reasonably up-to-date machine" and the upgrade would cost "less than a hundred dollars." [SEE RELATED ARTICLE]
He failed to mention that the $100 upgrade was for the most stripped-down version of Vista--excuse me, "Basic" Home version--and your so-called reasonably up-to-date machine? It wouldn't even be able to use those cool "Gadgets" and slick new "Aero" interface without a major upgrade.
The "Wow" really starts now, doesn't it? (Altogether now..."Wow!").