Vista vs. OS X? - Rebuttal: Microsoft's Imperfect Perfection

Technology Review ^ | 02/08/2007 | TR Editors - Brad King

[Swordmaker]

The only way to create a product that can serve so many purposes is to build it "broken." In that imperfection--or, rather, incompleteness--there is room for customizing, tweaking, cajoling, and hacking, all of which ultimately make for a more personalized computing experience.

I am in awe of such prescient foresight.

[Swordmaker]

The Editors of Technology Review had to ASK ex-editor, Brad King, to write a favorable review of Vista after their senior editor wrote an unfavorable review and announced she was switching to Macs... This is the result... PING!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[HAL9000]

After five years and $1 billion, Microsoft's Vista operating system is here.

Most reports are saying that Microsoft spent $6.5 billion to develop Vista.

[SlowBoat407]

It's not a bug: It's a feature!

[SlowBoat407]

computer code is meant to be broken because from that unjoined code comes personalization that no company can give me.

Please tell me this is satire.

[LibFreeOrDie]

The only way to create a product that can serve so many purposes is to build it "broken." In that imperfection--or, rather, incompleteness--there is room for customizing, tweaking, cajoling, and hacking, all of which ultimately make for a more personalized computing experience.

Is that from a Dilbert cartoon?

[MrsEmmaPeel]

Imperfect Perfection

LOL! I hate word game crap like this!

[lonestar67]

This is the height of PC rationalization.


I do not see why people slur Mac lovers when such slavish devotion is published as a professional review.


Making Vista broken is part of its genius?

[Covenantor]

"Microsoft's early software iterations are always glitchy. For the general user, upgrading to Vista (sifting through each option, optimizing the computer for one's existing hardware) can be quite maddening.

But Gates understands this....

And that's why it's the highest price, most bloated OS?

Head shaking

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Most reviewers have treated Vista with, at best, a shrug; at worst, Microsoft and Gates have been skewered for creating a bulky, resource-hogging Apple knockoff.

That is Gates' history. Steal some innovator's idea, throw in the necessary bloat to make it fit on top of DOS or its successors, and introduce the results as new and innovative from MS.

MS position in the world is a convergence of external circumstances (IBM building a PC without an operating system, Gates snookering the developer of GDOS and IBM to present MSDOS, IBM getting out of the SW business, Gates stealing "windows" from Jobs, etc.) and the market share dominance that resulted.

Another happy circumstance for Gates was Xerox and AT&T deciding to abandon the PC market. A classic case of being at the right place at the right time and Gates' cleverness an guile in taking advantage of the situation.

He has not changed that business model nor has Jobs changed his history of innovation. In the future, without Jobs there will be no MS.

[IncPen]

But then we're faced with this dilemma: if Apple's product is truly superior to Microsoft's, why do so many people still use inherently flawed software?

Why do people vote liberal?

[rom]

Wow. I thought only liberals used such contorted logic! Though, this guy could be a liberal I s'pose.

[George W. Bush]

I'm posting this on several of these MacPing threads for those who haven't seen it. It has to do with virtualization and the upcoming release of VMware Fusion on Mac. Parallels is working on and will probably deliver the same feature set.

The first link is to the blog for the lead developer of VMware Fusion for Mac. He is thanking the person who leaked the video of Fusion's latest beta build. Obviously, he's very proud of what the company is doing.

VMware blog: Double Dragon

And this page at YouTube is the exciting part, showing DirectX games running on the Mac desktop in windowed mode.

YouTube: 3D Graphics in VMware Fusion for Mac OS X

Not only are we going to be able to run Windows apps, we'll be able to run the DirectX games in XP and Vista. And the multimedia apps like Adobe Premiere and others will also work. VMware plans to support DirectX 9 features fully for both Vista and XP.

BTW, this is also good news for the Linux folk.

Of course, the upcoming games with DirectX 10 support are not supported. But then, Vista doesn't support the nVidia 8800 card, the only full DirectX 10 card on the market.

What excites me about this is that so many people who have held back on Mac because they don't want to reboot to Windows to play games (or run a few productivity apps) will no longer have to worry. It will "just work".

Reducing all of Microsoft's consumer and server products to just a set of virtualization clients is the killer app for these new multicore CPUs. And it will bring 99% of Windows apps straight to the Mac desktop. That includes all the Windows programs and games you already own.

No wonder Microsoft slapped a "virtualization tax" on Apple and Linux (and their own users). Yeah, like we're going to let that stop us!

[George W. Bush]

And Microsoft understands better than Apple that broken is better than perfection.

So Vista's best attribute is that it's "broken"?

Muhahahahahaha!!

[Golden Eagle]

Not only are we going to be able to run Windows apps, we'll be able to run the DirectX games in XP and Vista.

That will help lure the gamers. What will still be missing though, is what professional developers need, the ability to run OSX itself in a virtual machine. Many Windows and Solaris programmers such as I have develop in their host O/S, but want one or more virtualized O/S's running on the same box so they can test as a user. As it stands with OSX you'd have to either use your development system to test, which isn't a good test, or have another seperate piece of Mac hardware. Hopefully one day they'll offer this, just not yet.

[George W. Bush]

Rumors are that Apple is going to license Leopard to run in VMs but only on Apple hardware.

Both VMware and Parallels have said their new products will be fully supporting OS X virtualization. So even if it isn't by the book with Apple's licensing, it won't be any great impediment. At least, no more than virtualizing Vista in ways that M$ says you can't.

It's just not a big issue. Everyone that wants to will be able to. Will you be able to publish it and such? Well, no. But plenty of sites are already passing around OS X that can boot on commodity PCs and there are plenty of Vista virtual machines floating around already. I think you should be discreet but you aren't really shackled by these user agreements. Generally, Microsoft and Apple are smart enough to avoid litigating these opening-the-package-means-you-accept-whatever agreements. That's because they know how dubious their prospects really are in court.

[aruanan]

The only way to create a product that can serve so many purposes is to build it "broken." In that imperfection--or, rather, incompleteness--there is room for customizing, tweaking, cajoling, and hacking, all of which ultimately make for a more personalized computing experience.

This is like my friend Joe, an engineering student, who said the Windows-running non-Mac PC was a better computer because breaking down all the time and requiring him to learn how to fix it made him a better and more savvy computer user.

[al_c]

Most reviewers have treated Vista with, at best, a shrug; at worst, Microsoft and Gates have been skewered for creating a bulky, resource-hogging Apple knockoff. Even Technology Review's senior editor, Erika Jonietz, a Microsoft user, described Vista as "terribly familiar" to any Mac OS X user

No surprise. Win95 was also vaguely familiar to Mac users.

[6SJ7]

In that imperfection--or, rather, incompleteness--there is room for customizing, tweaking, cajoling, and hacking, all of which ultimately make for a more personalized computing experience.

Perhaps M/S is providing a surrogate 'Heathkit' experience.

[Golden Eagle]

t's just not a big issue.

It obviously is if you're actually a "big" shop and follow licensing legally. Hopefully they will allow it in the near future, but your recommendation to in the meantime basically ignore the license and download hackware from foreigners might cost someone their job where I work. Where lots of others work too I'm sure.