David Pogue Takes On Vista 533
guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.
Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or in other words... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable - it pretty much boils down to "Well, it looks spiffy, borrows a lot from OSX, and seems to be a worthy upgrade, but none of this really matters as we'll all be using it in a year anyway". Sadly enough, i think that's more or less right.
User Account Control (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess which feature the majority of users will disable.
Seriously, I hope there is some sort of privilege separation, only requiring password authentication for applications that need escalated privileges, otherwise this feature will be ignored left, right and centre.
Re:Or in other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Okay we get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple navel gazing (Score:2, Insightful)
A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack. "
This stuff sounds like the google desktop search that sits in my coworker's taskbar as well as the toolbars that have been attached to everyones' browser for years; not some ripoff of the MacOS per se. By bet is that MS was likely looking at heading Google off at the pass and keep them off the desktop.
Re:Or in other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course they love Apple. Without Apple, they would have a desktop monopoly.
According to antitrust law, Microsoft and Apple are not competitors.
News for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
A summary of the fine article:
Sigh.
With a little effort, Microsoft could fit the David Pogue Takes On Vista review onto a sticker to put on the retail boxes. Until then, let's hope some enterprising Slashdot reader downloads a copy of Vista and offers something more substantive for discussion.
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is precisely why the summary here (which let's face it is all a lot of people are going to read) being so unfavourable is so disappointing.
I appreciate that this is essentially Taco and Malda's hobby writ large, but even just a passing nod towards reality in the headlong rush to rubbish Vista as much as possible would be nice once in a while.
Re:Or in other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah - they are competitors even in the eyes of the courts / law, but that doesn't meant that MS isn't a monopoly for legal reasons...
No, they're not. Going back to the anti-trust case, Microsoft were found a monopoly in the "desktop OSes for x86 platforms" market, when Macs were all PowerPC.
Even today, from a market definition perspective they don't compete. Microsoft sells Operating Systems, Apple sells computers.
Remember, a dictionary definition of "monopoly" is not the same thing as the legal definition as far as anti-trust laws are concerned. MS's 95%+ of the desktop market is "good enough" for them to still be considered a monopoly in the marketplace even though they are not the "exclusive" provider of operating systems.
In no legal fashion or finding, are - or have - Microsoft and Apple ever been competitors. Apple's existence has _zero_ bearing on whether or not Microsoft is(/was) considered a monopoly.
(Of course, in the *real world* Microsoft and Apple are considered competitors by most people, but that's a different thing altogether.)
Link ok, video broken (Score:2, Insightful)
F***. Learn from Youtube or Google video, or better yet, post the video there...
Re:I Like It! (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait, no I don't.
Corporate environments (Score:4, Insightful)
Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?)
If you add Exchange to the mix, Windows really shines in the shared environment. Sure, for "grandma's" use and other special applications the Mac is a bright and shiny object, but it's just not a good team player.
Apple didn't do EVERYTHING first... (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple often does things *better* than other companies (with the exception of Dashboard) but they usually don't do it FIRST. This makes the claim that everyone rips off their stuff from Apple pretty silly.
Lets look at some of these claims in the article regarding what Microsoft is "stealing" from Apple:
1. Glowing Min/Max/Close Buttons
Ugh, I'm sorry, but this is not an Apple first thing. I've seen this in Windows custom UIs (WindowBlinds for example) for a good long while now, not to mention game UIs and a bunch of Flash applications. This is a very nice design element, and yes Apple did it well, but they didn't do it first.
2. "Instant Search"
Yes, I know... you're trying to compare it to Spotlight and the traditional Sherlock tool. Guess what though, well before Spotlight there was Google Desktop which gave you the in-frame search box. I like Spotlight a lot, it makes navigating files on my system a hell of a lot easier, but it's not new, and all similar search systems aren't instantly copycats of it.
3. Sidebar and Gadgets/Widgets
Like I said before, the Gadget/Widget thing has been around a LOT longer than Apple fans like to think. Dashboard was the first attempt to integrate them straight into the OS as a bundled feature, but it was pretty poorly implemented. Apple in this regard was several years late to the party. The MS Sidebar is also a fairly poor implementation... so I guess if anything you can accuse MS of stealing some of Apple's own bad design work.
4. The bundled apps "Photo Library" "DVD Maker" "Chess Titans" etc...
Umm... ok... I'll give you Apple folks this one. With the way MS broke apart the Outlook features into individual apps is a little too close to the iCal, Address Book, Mail.app scheme. This one is probably a straight-rip from the Apple playbook.
5. Flip3D a poor man's Expose
Bull. Flip3D is a cheesy way to show off the 3D capabilities in the desktop layer. It has nothing to do with Expose and the multiple ways to display everything currently running. I think Expose does things way better. Flip3D is a gimmick, nothing more. If MS wanted to ape the Expose design, they could have easily done it better.
There are a lot of things Apple does well, and the article does admit that Apple borrows, often even from Windows, to get its feature set. However, the claim that these features were taken from Apple as opposed to being taken from wherever Apple themselves snagged them is presumptuous.
They did it before, they can do it again! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome.
Windows is usually a total mystery even to those who have mastered unix to the point of, say, writing kernel-level code.
Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics.
Maybe if your view is from the orbit occupied by people who get confused when two or more windows are on the screen at the same time...
Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.
If you're using ports (or portage) the difference is still just semantics.
Heck, even if you're sucking files out of the developer's SVN repository and compiling it yourself, it's *still* just semantics. You're still just a "whore" beholden to whomever is writing the code.
Re:User Account Control (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, I can't see this improving actual security much beyond the time it takes malware to incoporate AutoIT or the like.
Finally, as it's just ANOTHER "Are you really sure?" box, with no real indication what it's asking to do, why it's bothering you, or what's trying to do it (it just gives program names IME with the RCs, which often aren't that helpful to non techies) it fails the same as everything else. Users will just click until the "thing" they are trying to do works.
At least with a password based dialog, they can't just click ok ten times and have it go. And having it be optional means the slightly savvy will just turn it off as it is annoying.
Overall, I'm not sure UAC is useful - and I don't think you can set up "rules" like you can with coreforce or ProcessGuard which would then actually make this more than an annoyance.
So the big new feature is "search"...? (Score:2, Insightful)
So is that because Vista is good or because XP was so badly designed...? (Everything in a single menu???)
"A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack."
Where has Microsoft been for the last 12 years? I had that in IRIX back in the early '90s.
Still, the most insidious thing of all has to be the five different versions, with all except the "Ultimate" being crippled in some sneaky way that you won't figure out until you've paid your money thinking you've got the operating system you need. By the time you notice it, you've already gone to all the trouble of installing Vista, finding drivers, etc. so you'll pretty much be forced to pay for "Ultimate" - at $400 a copy.
Re:Or in other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft arrogantly believes that they are the IT Industry but they've always made a product that's just good enough to be tolerable. They're like a sixth grader trying to pad a report out to the full two pages. Or a Bush administration that won't go away after 8 years in office. Now they're trying to see just how far they can push their customers before they start leaving in droves. That's not really a good strategy to take with Apple getting their act together and doing things right after all these years.
Re:Without Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:User Account Control (Score:3, Insightful)
However, taking away the need to type the password is the problem. If all they have to do is click OK, then they will just do it. It's like the dialog box for deleting a read-only file. People just click OK, and are done with it. If they have to type their password, they might stop and think about why it's asking for their password.
Historical evidence would suggest the practical difference is zero. People blindly type in their password when prompted. Heck, I've frequently watched numerous people type in several of their "standard" passwords until they hit the one that works.
I could even see lots of instances of the dialog popping up and the user just accidentally hitting enter.
This won't happen because the default button is "Cancel".
Possibly because they were typing in some other window, and the form stole the focus. Taking out the requirement for entering the password removes all good points about this feature.
The prompt (when in focus) darkens the rest of the display to near black and makes it quite obvious something "different" is happening. Functionally, it's no different to sudo prompts.
Re:Without Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is exactly why we need competition. It's not just because Windows is teh suxor, or Gates is the devil. (true as that may be
Re:Without Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks Cool... (Score:2, Insightful)
Where can I download the DVD iso's so that I can try it on a spare PC?
Huh? I have to pay for it? Oh. -- You mean like I have to contribute to a user group for the cost of the blank media, Right? -- No prob. I'll give 'em $5 and bring donuts to the install party.
What?! They demand a larger contribution?! How Rude!
Does MythTV 0.20 install OK on it? Once I get it loaded, I can just type 'yum install mythtv-suite', and I'll be set, right?
Huh? It doesn't use RPMS?! No prob, I'll just install the
What?! -- There aren't even any package repositories at all?!
You mean I'll have to build everything from source? -- Well, OK, I can see the benifits of that. -- No problem, I'll just download the Tarballs and type 'make'
Huh? I doesn't include a compiler?!
Frankly, I don't think the mirror sites will get much traffic for this distribution!
Re:Apple didn't do EVERYTHING first... (Score:3, Insightful)
For example,
Again, true, but kind of incomplete. I remember Konfabulator, and before that I remember various Windows standalone utilites, and before that I remember System 6 Desk Accessories for the Mac, and before that I remember Workbench applications for the Amiga that did much the same thing.... see what I mean?
Again, I'm not trying to detract from your point. I agree with you. But it begs the question, when is a user interface method or widget truly 'fresh'? Apple introduced most of these conventions on a wide scale; I suppose in marketing-land it is the combination of implementation and slick packaging/selling that makes one an 'innovator'.Re:Okay we get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I would not call AppleTalk a failure either. It did a lot to help people who were trying to network groups of Mac systems together. For its time, it was a good system. The fact that the industry standardized on IP does not mean AppleTalk was a failure. In fact, the whole ZeroConf effort comes out of trying to bring discovery that AppleTalk had from the beginning to IP networks.
And calling MacOS a failure? Give me a break. I suppose DOS was a failure. And the Apple II. And the telegraph.
You are an ignorant Microsoft fanboy.
Re:Or in other words... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So the big new feature is "search"...? (Score:2, Insightful)
That wasn't a feature of XP, it was presented on Windows 95. Maybe 11 years ago it was a good idea, now it seems like it didn't work (either that, or people abused it). Anyway, who are you to say what's good and what's bad design? You, or your company (whoever you are), don't spend the kind of money Microsoft or Apple spend in research. Yes, there's a lot of research, especially in usability and UI design. Even in simple things as "fonts" (www.microsoft.com/typography).
Last time I used KDE, it contained everything in a single menu. If it's such a bad design, then why does KDE, and many other window/desktop managers come with a "single menu" and a "task bar" and "icons on the desktop", things that seem to be a capital sin to "UI designers", that is, some guy with a blog who thinks he's better than the UI teams from Microsoft and Apple. Why do they copy Microsoft's way of doing things? I guess because it's a "good", or "good enough" design. I don't want to think it's because they are just sellouts...
I gotta go lunch now, I'll keep going later, when someone answers "duuuh! that's because people are familiar with windows so they have to make it like windows or people won't switch!!".
And of course Microsoft hasn't dealt with security (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately Internet Explorer, Active X, and the Desktop are still the same incestuous codependant family, with he least competant member... the HTML control... left in charge of security.
The level of integration in applications that use the HTML control is so great that it's inherently impossible to prevent cross-zone attacks. I can only categorize their continued use of this bankrupt approach
Re:Broken Link (Score:5, Insightful)
I burst out into laughter in the middle of my office. This OS is the most blatant rip-off from Apple that MS has done in years.
Re:Or in other words... (Score:3, Insightful)
I worked pretty extensively with the Mac OS from 7.1 to 8.5. Anything from 7.3 to 8.5 was inferior to pretty much everything Microsoft has put out except for Windows Me and first edition Windows 95 in terms of stability and usability. The 10 series of Mac OS X is relatively stable as a UNIX operating system, but I daresay that because it's UNIX, certain tasks just aren't in the GUI and that's where MS is succeeding right now. The "Do this" Wizards of Windows OS might be pervasive and annoying to techies, but they cover most bases in terms of pretty much anything you want to do with a system. The registry edit or direct profile manipulation is rare these days (unless you're an admin).
Some good, some bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, although the Mac OS X kernel uses BSD in its subsystems, it is not "mostly BSD." The kernel is a hybrid of Mach 2.5 with BSD subsystems available. But you don't even need the BSD subsystem to use Mac OS X. The BSD subsystem is an optional part of the OS installation. Just in terms of raw bytes, the majority of the OS resides in the frameworks. The lowest-level frameworks like Foundation and ApplicationServices were originally developed by NeXT and are brilliantly executed. The choice of Objective-C may seem like a strange choice now, but it's lean, easy to learn, and makes software development far simpler. If NeXT/Apple only ever used what they could get out of the Darwin project, there wouldn't be very much to excite us about Leopard. So frankly, Apple is far more innovative than most Windows fanboys think.
The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.
You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. The kernel source is just endian-agnostic, it's not rocket science. There wasn't anything much deeper than that to build Mac OS X on Intel. But where they deserve serious credit is in making the developer tools, the headers, the excellent developer documentation... and providing it all for FREE and nicely ahead of their OS releases. Microsoft doesn't come close in its support of developers, nor in having the courage to revisit and rip out the crumbling foundations of their OS.
I agree that technically Windows in the 90's had some better things going on under the hood than Mac OS 7 through 9, but I still preferred Mac OS during those years. The main thing that kept me on the Apple platform was the consistency, aesthetics, organization, and manageability of the OS. Some of the things that bothered me about Windows at that time were:
- The centralized and cryptic registry (vs Mac OS Preferences folder)
- DLL Hell (vs Mac OS Extensions folder)
- BSOD from several fronts (vs Mac OS mysterious lockups)
- That flat, gray feeling (vs Mac OS sleekness)
- Inconsistent menus and interfaces (vs Mac OS well-established Human Interface Guidelines)
- Inconsistent text editing behavior (vs consistent Mac OS text services)
- Ugly font rendering (vs Mac OS decent typography)
- The word "Microsoft" preceding everything (vs no market-speak in Mac OS)
Meanwhile, there were some things that bothered me about Mac OS at the time:
- Mysterious lockups, requiring several long Conflict Catcher sessions
- Rare use of threading in software, system-modal dialogs
- No free developer tools
- No protected memory, often making software development into a reboot-fest
- The best VM system was third-party
- Expensive! hardware
- Not even an option to show the folder hierarchy in a Finder sidebar (Apple should copy MS here)
- Mac OS toolbox tedious to use (but lots of cool APIs and SDKs)
- The dark years (3rd-party licensing, dwindling marketshare, Copland...)
But all that is behind us, thank goodness! The future is in Unix and Unix-like systems with all the great strengths we had only been dreaming of all those years.