Windows Vista Woes
I recently caught a glimpse of Windows Vista at a local Best Buy while shopping for a new notebook computer. To say I was unimpressed would be an understatement.
Aside from a few UI updates and some fancy transparent window effects, Windows Vista is really not all that different from Windows XP. In fact, much has evidenced that Windows Vista is lacking in software support as compared to Windows XP.
And Microsoft certainly wasn’t shy about copying ideas from Mac OS X. Vista features a search-as-you-type input from its start menu, with the same functionality and a strikingly similar search icon to the Mac OS X Spotlight feature. Vista’s newly entitled Window Switcher feature, accessible via Start-Tab, also closely resembles Mac OS X Expose. And the list goes on.
What is so wrong about taking ideas from Apple’s cutting edge operating system?
Nothing at all. But my point here is that from what I have seen, Windows Vista doesn’t have anything that I haven’t already seen in OS X, or in any modern web application for that matter, and Vista doesn’t do anything to improve upon those features.
Actually, it seems that Microsoft can barely keep up with the competition these days, in both technology and web standards; the latter being supported by its crippled release of IE7 to the world. Microsoft has also announced that its release of Outlook 2007 will support fewer standards than its predecessors, back to the 2000 version. This is due to their decision to stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead rely solely upon the archaic and proprietary Microsoft Word rendering engine.
Aero Glass is just a pretty face
Just because Microsoft’s new interface, dubbed Aero Glass, looks and feels a lot like OS X doesn’t mean its engine runs just as smoothly. Windows Vista is so resource intensive, it requires a minimum of a 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB free, and 128 MB of graphics memory, according to a MacDailyNews article.
Most of us don’t even own or are barely beginning to buy computers with this kind of power, especially in the realm of 1 GB of RAM, which is only recently becoming a standard minimum among new computers. Now it will have to be the minimum.
Why does Microsoft keep doing this to us?
Because they can. The grip that this company has on the market share is unbelievable. So much in fact, that when I recently attempted to purchase a new laptop, I couldn’t find one modern notebook model that wasn’t out of stock, online or in the store. As I learned, this was due to manufacturers around the world halting production in anticipation of the Windows Vista release.
It used to be that Microsoft was an innovator, a pioneer, and boasted itself as such. Today, this company is struggling to even step on the heels of Apple, a company that is doing everything right. Still, Microsoft will never cease to amaze us — but when will it be in a good way? Time will tell.
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