I think you have your rose colored glasses on. I have nothing to say about MS Bob, but I can certainly attest to Vista and IE6. IE6 was the best web browser in 2001. It supported things like AJAX, which
Netscape Navigator didn't. The fact that you had people using IE6 10 years later, but no one using Netscape Navigator 10 years later should show you that IE was pretty darn good.
Likewise, Vista, for all of its problems, wasn't anywhere near as bad as OS X was in the same time frame. Where Vista had slow file system access and poor video driver support
due to nVidia, it never had the
BSOD issues like Leopard, or glaring
data loss bugs like Snow Leopard did. Actually, for Vista Microsoft re-wrote the entire graphics stack without breaking compatibility.
Last but not least, Microsoft supports their older OS's, and works to
make them backwards compatible*. Something that Apple doesn't care about at all with OS X.
*About 1/2 way down, search for SimCity without the space
Rose colored glasses? Me? Did you see all the negativity in my post? You are the one with the rosy outlook.
IE6 was not good for it's time, it was missing many things, it was riddled with bugs and way too many of the things it did support it rendered incorrectly. The statement that it must have been a good browser because it is still being used is
ludicrous.
MS has shown to have really, really bad adoption rates (partially because of their backwards and sideways steps with successors like Vista and Windows 8), XP is still at 30% of all OSs, Windows 7 is at 47% and Windows 8 is at 10%, that is
bad. MS also isn't very good at educating their users so many people don't know that they should upgrade. Due to it somewhat existing internally, MS has also had fear of change flourish within its users.
IE6 also didn't have a auto update system (which I don't hold against as those really didn't exist when it came out, newer versions of IE desperately need/needed it though).
All of these factors combined with a giant marketshare of its OS and itself and MS waiting
5 years to release a new IE version have caused it to stick around, not because it was good.
Vista was
known for having bad compatibility, blue screening and being a mess (seriously, look at the
control panel). Personally I really liked Snow Leopard and its problems were nowhere near as bad or is widespread and severe as Vista's.
Supporting your 12.5 year old OS
is a very bad thing (fun fact, XP is pre 9/11, that is insane!), from an innovation point of view and from a business point of view it's a not good at all. Apple not supporting OS X 10.1 is a good thing (do you seriously think that they should be doing this?). Apple is pushing things forward by dropping support for things that are dying. Apple doesn't need to support old OSs as much because they're very good at educating their users and making it easy to upgrade. I mean look at their
adoption rates, 10.9 is at 47% of all Mac OSs, in comparison windows 8.1 is at 3.4% of Windows OSs (10.9 was at 5.5% in 24 hours).
Also if MS is so good a supporting their old OSs, why did they stop making new IE versions for it 3 years ago? From your point of view, they're abandoning their OS with 30% marketshare.
For the SimCity thing, am I suppose to be impressed? I don't think MS should have done that, it's making a OS level workaround for bad coding practices. This reinforces my point about MS not moving forwards. Although not changing, not educating their users is one of the ways that they keep customers. In many ways they're afraid of change and innovation making them not so good at it at times, this transfers over to their users which does help them keep customers longer, but it alienates many of the smarter more forward thinking users.
That's extra cool since I’m running Win7 in a VM (that’s running VS2010, MS SQL), and on the native side Safari, Mail, ST2, Pow/Anvil servers (3), Postgres, several shells, visual JSON, Cyberduck and iTunes (which is serving up EPs of a show to the main TV+AppleTV across from my office), supporting both the internal display and an external 24”.
