Interesting insight in Paul Thurrott’s latest Vista article. Paul is someone who I’ve often had resentment for, simply because of his (apparent) steadfast love of Microsoft and all things Bill. Turns out that he’s a bit more fair and balanced than that, and I apologize for the misgivings I had for him. Of course, maybe I just like him cause he’s bashing MS 🙂
Basically it sounds like he’s sick of apolagizing for microsoft. He points out that Vista has gone through far more turmoil than it should have, has gained and lost features in the process (WinFS anyone?) and seems to be lifting features from Apple and Linux, not the other way around.
Shame on you, Microsoft. Shame on you, but not just for not doing better. We expect you to copy Apple, just as Apple (and Linux) in its turn copies you. But we do not and should not expect to be promised the world, only to be given a warmed over copy of Mac OS X Tiger in return. Windows Vista is a disappointment. There is no way to sugarcoat that very real truth.
He also addresses one of the HUGE warts I saw in the last build I installed…. the User Account Protection. Think of it as what MacOS does when you need to install an application into the system directory, or how you don’t actually create a root account in Ubuntu, but instead are asked for your user password when you do a “system” type operation.
The last Vista build basically pops up (yet another) badly worded dialog box asking you to say ‘yes’ because something is accessing a system file. This is good right? When spyware installs itself into c:\windows\system32 you’ll see that keygen.exe is doing something naughty and say no, right? Yes and no. Seems that Vista pops this up for almost anything. Changing the wallpaper and doing such innocuous operations. I can very easily see people simply clicking “Yes” all the time because they do it so much. The beauty of the MacOS way of doing this exact same thing is that you hardly ever see the dialog, so when it’s there you know that something is going on. In my year or so with a powerbook I can count the number of times I saw this on two hands, and this was mostly for installing Apple or (ironically) Microsoft software 🙂
It’s good to see that even the hard core microsofties are not so hardcore that they ignore the warts that seem to be more and more apparent all the time, and the now hugely obvious “hype hype hype” campaigns that have been there since the Windows 95 days (remember trying to make the choice between Windows 95 and OS/2 anyone?), and have been going on for a couple of years now by Microsoft.
Anyway, it’s a great article, go read it.