Windows Vista Beta 1 and Tiger

[edenwaith]

Windows looks into the future by reviewing Apple's past

The thing that struck me as funny, is just how blatantly Microsoft is once again ripping Apple off. Search bar in your Explorer Windows? Check. A system wide search bar with easy accessibility? Check. A subtle gradient shading on the windows. One more check. Large, beautiful icons. Check.

From the screenshots I did see, it appears that Windows Vista is keeping along the similar appearance that XP started, but not quite as gaudy looking. So, it could even be possible that Windows Vista could be one of the best versions of Windows since Win 95 or 98. Windows 95 was an obvious leap over that gawdawful Windows 3.11, but I feel that Win98 was more polished and complete (whereas Windows Me was several steps backwards).

 

[makeme]

Yuck

I saw some Windows Vista screenshots and I thought it looked like crap!

I just had to say that.

 

[jeriqo]

Keep in mind folks, that this is the forward step for MS Windows for the next several years.

I can't even begin to imagine the mac innovations during that time.

Second half of 2006 is not in several years

 

[Lacero]

Didn't Mac OSX Cheetah toy with translucent windows and drop-down lists? As far as I know, the translucency had been scaled back in Panther because it affected productivity in a negative way. Glad to see Windows taking the metaphor quite literally. <smirk>

 

[Tamer Brad]

Second half of 2006 is not in several years

He means that this will be the version of Windows used for the next several years.

BECAUSE KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!

 

[BenRoethig]

I think Microsoft Vista's slogan should be "Making your Windows eXPerience... more Mac like."

I'm think more along the lines of "Who do we want to copy today?"

this is the only way i would end up getting a box from microslut, and then anyway, i would loose the box

If she was my delivery person, Microsoft could send me whatever they wanted.

 

[yg17]

The windows UI will be eternally inferior to the Mac OS X UI no matter if they call it Avalon, Camry, or Celica.

Heh, I didn't even realize MS was ripping off the name of the GUI until you started listing Toyotas. I'm surprised they didn't call it Supra instead, as long as you're stealing names from Toyota, at least steal the name of what is hands down their best car.


Ripping off the GUI, features, name. How pathetic. Oh, and don't forget they'll probably ripping off the people who buy Vista too.

 

[MegaSignal]

So please tell me why dragging a device to the trash ejects it instead of deleting the data on it?

By the way, you start activities through the "Start" menu, so that is a perfectly logical place to go to start the process of shutting down.

Good point - and I believe taken care of since at least 10.3.x (or earlier - I'm not sure) when the "trash" basket icon changes into the universal "eject" icon when dragging discs or other peripherals toward what was once the trash icon. Clever, clever, clever. And iconically correct, IMHO.

True on the second topic, but only to a point, as long as one "Starts" to shut down or "Starts" to reboot ones computer - it seems redundant. However, IMHO, it is very clumsy to actually label said icon with a word in English if one wants international appeal of this OS. (BTW - I haven't seen any iterations of Windows in other languages - is it still called "Start"? If so, my case in point.)

This is precisely why, I believe, Apple used a universal icon to denote an area where more utility-type, machine-general commands could be found.

Nit picky? Yes I am; do I hate Windows? Not at all (except maybe a little bit of malice toward Windows95). I just wanted to point out my surprise with this vestigial leftover showing up on the Vista screen shots. Why not simply use the Windows icon?

For me, this attention to detail is no doubt indicative of details elsewhere, within the GUI, and under the hood.

 

[MegaSignal]

Priceless.

If we can use the "Start" button to "start the shutdown process," why not have a redneck version of Windows with a "Fixin" button.
I'm fixin' to shut this here 'puter down.

Brevity is indeed the soul of wit.

 

[remingtonhill]

Comming? Bleh. As in this decade? You wouldn't happen to be a "reincarnation" of myappleseeds, would you? I'm curious what this "revolution" is, since the only thing really revolving is some APIs and interface changes. Got anything for us to bite on?
-Chase

I suspect the screenshots of Vista represent the finished product of windows vista as much as the intel developer powermacs represent the finished product of the next generation intel macs.

You guys are losing credibility dissing Vista based on a couple of vague screenshots that really don't show you very much at all.

y'all don't want to look like a bunch of crazed mac cultists do you?

 

[rendezvouscp]

I suspect the screenshots of Vista represent the finished product of windows vista as much as the intel developer powermacs represent the finished product of the next generation intel macs.

You guys are losing credibility dissing Vista based on a couple of vague screenshots that really don't show you very much at all.

y'all don't want to look like a bunch of crazed mac cultists do you?

Well some of us ARE crazed mac cultists, so beware.

The quote you quoted me on, that was in response to another poster since he was claiming great things. As of right now, I'm not seeing great things. It's going to be five years between OS releases, and all I'm seeing are a few interface changes and API changes. I really am not seeing the beauty of this release; in fact, I think it's looking downright ugly.

When Apple first showed off Aqua, it had a lot more transparency and a few things just didn't look right. They spent another year trying to fix these things, and they did manage to get a lot of the really bad stuff that just didn't flow well (like the tiled Dock). Vista looks like it's XP with lots of transparency and even uglier colors. I wish they'd re-hire Fisher Price.

The APIs are changing, and that's a bit exciting for everyone who develops. There should be more opportunities for better apps in Windows, which is good for Windows. However, I'm seriously starting to doubt that Microsoft is going to get anything "right" in Vista. Their lack of responsiveness with IE 7 is getting to me too.

The biggest thing I think anyone can hope for is something more secure. Microsoft is never going to develop something as secure as Unix, but they can make progress. I just hope they get security right.

In regards to what you said, Apple is showing that they have a working version of Tiger on boxes that do work. That's showing progress. In Vista, Microsoft is not showing much progress, and that's what should worry any Windows enthusiast, or any Mac user that has to deal with Windows on a regular basis. BTW, it's definitely not the same either. Apple's showing a new tech in an old design, and every thing is working well for developers. Microsoft is showing new tech in a new design, but neither is very good.
-Chase

 

[thewhitehart]

Keep in mind folks, that this is the forward step for MS Windows for the next several years.

I can't even begin to imagine the mac innovations during that time.

Damn straight. Couldn't of said it better.

 

[BGil]

The thing that struck me as funny, is just how blatantly Microsoft is once again ripping Apple off. Search bar in your Explorer Windows? Check. A system wide search bar with easy accessibility? Check. A subtle gradient shading on the windows. One more check. Large, beautiful icons. Check.

Three boxes in the corner of each window? Check. Browsing metaphor in the file system? Check. Toolbars and sidebars on Finder windows and in open/save dialogs? Check. AES file system encyrption? Check. Hardware accelerated video processing on a 3D surface? Check. ACLs? Check. Minimizing windows? Check. Arbitrary metadata stream support? Check. Indexing Service with instant search, extensible file formats, live queries, saved searches, and a developer API? check.

Seriously, both Apple and Microsoft often implement features that the other has gooten to first.

Next time you're on a Windows box click the search icon in the toolbar of every Explorer window and you'll get a search box in the sidebar. Search boxes have been in Explorer windows since at least Windows 2000.

The windows UI will be eternally inferior to the Mac OS X UI no matter if they call it Avalon, Camry, or Celica. Why? Well, as you can see the graphic effects in the screen shots are re-rendered. There is no advanced processing going on there. Unlike OS X In which almost the entire UI is offloaded onto the GPU.

Windows Vista offloads far more of the screen to the GPU than OS X does. OS X basically only hands the compositing off to the GPU while the DCE/DWM hands off everything.

On one side, you’ll have Apple with proven functionality with iTunes and reliability, and on the other you have MS with their MediaCenter PC, more accepted DRM and some pretty cool partners. What I want to know is which environment will enable usage of HDMI cards or Cable/Satellite receivers on a card – to really make a Home Theater PC.

The Media Center 2005 update (Codenamed Emerald) due sometime in August enables those features. Apple has to do a ton of work before HD playback and recording becomes a decent option on the Mac. Microsoft is light-years ahead of Apple in that area because of DirectX and it's video handling abilites.

I just recieved Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 and IT IS A COPY OF SAFARI an absolute copy. for example the Google search is now integrated and is in the same spot as the safari. When the Search field isn't selected and is empty the Words "Google" appear in faded grey colours, and the Tabbed feature looks pretty familiar the only thing I can see wasn't copied was the RSS button (which is now in the main icons bar) which of course isn't as nice, and it seems that the ways the icon of the website shows up is in the exact same spot as it is in Safari.

Why doesn't Apple sue? this isn't the only time MS has copied Apple.

Safari is a damn near clone of FireFox. Opera had the search bar in the upper-right hand corner back in version 5 (2000). Most "new" features you see in web browsers today come from Opera or one of the IE shells. Tabs, Google search bar, RSS etc. all came from those browsers.

That and "supposedly MS has been talking up the C word A LOT over the last year. Compartmentalizing segments of code so, again, theoretically crap like blaster can’t happen again. Time will tell if this is the case and if they really have made progress on security.

Windows Server 2003 is built like that and it wasn't vunerable to many of the big attacks like Sasser so they've already proven that it works. SP2, Windows Server 2003, and IIS 6 are pretty damn good as far a security is concerned. If Vista continues on that trend then it will be pretty good as well. From what I've seen in vista and what I know about current OSes (win2k3) Vista should be extremely safe. I'm not so sure about the ClickOnce thing but other than that it looks all good.

Windows "Vista" has lost a lot of the functionality that was supposed to make this the "Best Windows Operating System of all time." Like the folks on the TWiT podcast said in episode 14, "Vista" is becoming a bigger joke than ME, and we all know how ME was. And the rumor that you are supposed to have a "digitally signed monitor" to have "the best media experience" is a big joke. The next gen filesystem is gone. This is why I am switching to the Mac. Mac OS X will keep building on where Windows has fallen short. I'm sorry Microsoft, but you lost a user a long time ago.

Why would that make you switch to something with an even worse file system? HFS+ is horrible and all the stuff Apple is doing to it now are just hacks to keep their 1984 filesystem semi-current. NTFS6 is far superior. BTW, WinFS is still coming (beta next summer/fall and final in 2007) and all the "searching" stuff that they promised is stil there as is the virtual file system. WinFS just takes the idea much much further.

More info for anyone that wants to read about WinFS in depth:
http://www.freshpatents.com/Storage...t20050303ptan20050050054.php?type=description

Fine. Great. Now, I wanted to do some semi-pro audio editing, burn some red book compliant CDs with crossfades, edit some video (without the disc fragmenting almost immediately), and then begin to look for some software to exract previously encoded movies (my own) from earlier DVDs for further editing, and download more than two files at once on my browser.

$1200 later, all I can do with my PC (OK - I'm stubborn - even to the point of throwing good money after bad) is surf the web (safely, I think...) and...well...that's about it.

Don't get me wrong - I'm keeping my PC, it works OK for what I do with it - but being stuck with this bill has me very disappointed with XP's offerings; it doesn't look like Vista will alleviate this, either. So far, OSX: 1; XP:0.

Vegas Movie Studio does all of that and more. It's far better than iMovie and GB unless you need midi/instrument support. Acid Studio will handle that if you want. You can get the whole Studio Set (Acid, Vegas, Soundforge) for $199. The edu price is about half that.

 

[BGil]

Why can't you download more than one file at once in IE? Maxthon is the best browser in the world IMO and it's free.

Back on topic:

The screen shots of Vista were very informative. However, from the looks of things, nothing much has changed from the persepective of the GUI; more interesting to me will be if there are any changes to NTFS, whether or not there will be integrated security systems, and finally, how much overhead is required to run the new system.

Thanks for listening.

GUI: The file browsing metaphor has changed to something almost completely virtual. It's pretty damn cool and better than anything in any other OS IMO.
NTFS: There are a ton of changes to NTFS in Vista. Transactioning, built-in volume shadow copy, built in backup and restore etc.

Look at the screenshot on this page of Vista's virtual folders, it looks very similiar to tiger's Smart Folders.

Vista Virtual Folders

They should look similar because Microsoft implemented grouping, preview panes, and columns with relevant metadata a long time ago. Nothing in 10.3 looks like Tiger's smart folders or the Spotlight window but any folder in XP with Show in groups looks pretty similar.

To those of you who think Spotlight is half-baked... wha???
<snip>

Spotlight is half baked because you can't make a smart folder from the Spotlight window, it's got a lot of bugs and moves slowly sometimes, it can't index a database (which is why Mail, Addressbook, and iCal store everything as individual files now and why Entourage doesn't work with Spotlight), you can't have more than one importer per file type, it doesn't save settings related to external drives, you can't apply a metadata to more than one file at a time, the metadata isn't available in list view (columns), it doesn't index anything it can't write to, you can't add actual keywords, authors, ratings etc,. to a file only Spotlight comments, smart folders don't actually act like folders in that you can't drag something into one etc. etc.

Meanwhile Apple is producing the best eye candy on the planet and already backing it up with actual technology like spotlight, core audio, core data, etc. All of which are a little rough around the edges right now, but certainly usable in their current state.

You do realize that DirectX already has all the features of Corevideo and Core Image, right? It had some CoreImage stuff when IE4 was released and the rest came in with DX8 and 9. CoreVideo is exactly what Microsoft started doing with DX7.
CoreData is nothing special. SQL Server Express and MSDE do nearly all of what CoreData does and their feature set expands much further.

+++
- everything on it seems to be ripped from Tiger! just take a look at the search symbol, it's 1:1 rip-off of Spotlight symbol!
---
- it's heavy as hell (3ghz proc minimum, wan't it?)
- everything on it seems to be ripped from Tiger! just take a look at the search symbol, it's 1:1 rip-off of Spotlight symbol!
Does anyone remember this picture from Tiger release spectacle?

Try opening the start menu on any Windows bx and you'll see the magnifying glass right there next to "search" or "find". It's been there since Windows 95.
http://toastytech.com/guis/win95startmenu.gif
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/winxp_rc_gallery_05.gif
So who's copying who?

The 3GHz thing is a rumored "recommended" spec not the minimum. Microsoft is considering that the minimum to play HD video (1080i) and HD-DVD so nothing lower than that gets the highest level recomendation (windows logo program) from Microsoft. Remember, it's expected that they're going to ship Media Center 2006 in every install of Vista and that HD delivery over the net or HD-DVD will become a popular thing in the Longhorn/Vista timeframe.

My guess is that Microsoft will recommend a 3ghz P4 or 3000+ Athlon or better, 512mb's ram or better, DX9 with 128mb's or better, Firewire, USB2, DVD burner, and 5.1 sound for Vista. I found a ton of PC's meeting those specs at Best Buy for less than $800. An E-machine met those specs at $500. Gateway currently is shipping dual core Media Centers for $800 fully loaded with 200GB's HD's, a gig of ram etc.
By November of 2006, even $500 emachines will have dual cores.

True, 10.1 was horrible. But OS X at it's worst was still better than XP at it's best. Now, there's jusst no comparison, because OS X has progressed lightyears while XP did what? Oh, I forgot, SP2.

Windows Media Player 9 and 10, Windows Media 9 (HD in 2002!!), DirectX 9 (does all that Corevideo and Image can do and more), Surround Sound decoding built in, High-Def audio now, Media Center (3 versions with the 4th in Aug.), Tablet PC, Speech and Recognition, Conference XP, MSN Messenger 5/6/7, Raw Image support, FULL 64-BIT OS AND API'S, 2 kernel updates, SP2, Windows Desktop Search, .Net, Tons of Powertoys, IE7, and upcoming:
Avalon, WGF1/2 (DX10), Monad/MSH, Indigo, Metro, XPS etc.

90% of the things Apple has done to their core OS in the last five years had already been done by Microsoft in 2000/XP.
More here

 

[slackpacker]

Maxithon blows,

Also Yes you can have your wonderful 64 bit windows which is basically a beta test as well.... Also Try to Run anything that requires drivers that are not
or 64 bit drivers are not ready yet you can't

At least the OS X 64bit implementation is working.....

Don't try to camp here and say Vista is all that because it ain't yet

 

[slackpacker]

http://www.pdjkeelan.com/duelmonstersexpert/vista.png


I had some free time and was just playing around, it was not a 'Mac better than PC' thing it was just a little joke about the feature set of "Longhorn/Vista". However where i originally posted this people didnt really get it

Cool Pic!!

But really...

with Vista there is no integration the "search" that everyone is talking about in vista is basically a really lame file index.... it can't find all the files on yer hd like spotlight.


One thing that Vista has ... I have to say is about a million ways to view and organize your files in its explorer file system... windows has always been better than finder at that.

 

[Passante]

After using Tiger for 2 months I'd say the upgrades are subtle but extremely useful. For example:

I rarely open the finder. I get to most everything between spotlight and the dock.

Server disconnects used to be a major pain. If I forgot to unmount the office server and opened my laptop at home I would get major hiccups until the server was unmounted (used to crash in Jaguar)

Family email photos all the time. Now mail allows me to do quick slideshow AND import the photos directly into iPhoto. Thats a big time savings. I use XP at work. The dang system can't even automaticaly fit the photos to my screen size.

Widgets are now an integral of my daily workflow. Have a dictionary, weather channel radar, and package tracker widgets available at a click of a button saves me having to open another tab, navagate to a web site and reduces the clutter of windows on my desktop.

These are a few of the subtle but extremely useful Tiger upgrades. Well worth the $99 price.

 

[BGil]

Maxithon blows,

Also Yes you can have your wonderful 64 bit windows which is basically a beta test as well.... Also Try to Run anything that requires drivers that are not
or 64 bit drivers are not ready yet you can't

At least the OS X 64bit implementation is working.....

Don't try to camp here and say Vista is all that because it ain't yet

Maxthon is far better than Safari, Firefox and probalby whatever browser you use. The only browser on the Mac that compares is Omniweb everything else (not Opera) is basically a clone of Firefox.

OS X barely has any 64-bit at all. Very few if any of the API's are 64-bit and probably won't ever be on the PPC version of OS X.

And you're complaining that 32-bit drivers don't work on 64-bit? That's laughable as there are thousands of 64-bit drivers included with the OS and many many more available from others online. Windows XP 64-bit still supports more hardware than OS X does.

 

[BGil]

Cool Pic!!

But really...

with Vista there is no integration the "search" that everyone is talking about in vista is basically a really lame file index.... it can't find all the files on yer hd like spotlight.

What are you talking about? You do know that Spotlight is an indexing service, right? 2000/XP's index and Vista index can find more files and metadata than Spotlight can. It can also index FTP sites, websites, read-only drives (like HFS+ drives), anything with a UNC path, and programs with custom data stores like Thunderbird. Spotlight can't do any of that.

What files on your hard drive are you saying Vista/XP can't find?


Microsoft's Indexing Service (version 2000 in 2000/XP and 2006 in Vista) are far more robust than Spotlight's backend technology.

 

[Flux Harmonic]

Microsoft's Indexing Service (version 2000 in 2000/XP and 2006 in Vista) are far more robust than Spotlight's backend technology.

That's all fine an dandy, but we have spotlight NOW. That it isn't currently as versatile as what vista's search is -supposed- to be is irrelevant. I guarantee that apple is still working hard on trying to improve spotlight, and by the time that leopard rolls around, microsoft will again find itself in the dust.

 

[Evangelion]

Yep, and I had to restar my computer at least two times a day because Outlook and Word, combined with IE, crashes windows a lot...

I use XP at work. And my workstation has uptimes of around 3 weeks. After few weeks I reboot the machine because global IT pushes some changes to the machine.

As it happens, I had to do a forced reboot on my Mac Mini today, because I got a spinning beachball of death and nothing worked anymore.... Don't you just love anecdotal evidence?

Man, If Word crash Windows, both MS best-seller products, and they can't "stand" each other, what do you have to say to help this lame OS??

Like I said, I don't care much for Windows. I use it for tasks that it does well, which in my case means gaming. I also use it at work, where it works just fine. I prefer Linux for both ideological and others reasons.

Windows is crap.

Yes it is. And for most people, it's good enough. And it beats OS X and Linux in one thing that people care about: Applications. I tried to move my inlaws to Linux. No-go, since their apps wouldn't work anymore. Same thing with OS X.

 

[AidenShaw]

opening up the throttle on IE

Why can't you download more than one file at once in IE?

To change IE's throttle, copy the following to file named "download20.reg" and double-click it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"MaxConnectionsPerServer"=dword:00000014

(or, of course, update that value with regedit).

 

[StrangeQuark]

From the screenshots, the interface style is VERY Tiger-like, down to the font and logo styles. Not bagging it, complimenting it, it looks good, the taskbar looks heap better without the green button. But the close/minimise/maximise buttons - whose bright idea was it to shift them left?? I liked being able to just throw my mouse up the top right to close (which iTunes won't let me do).

Also, half on topic - when exactly did Longhorn change name to Windows Vista? I knew Longhorn was just a codename, just missed the announcement. Vista's cool, better than "xp-erience".

Well, I think I might know why it looks very Tiger-like. Not sure if this is some odd coincidence, but figured I'd post it anyway. Might be Apple isn't the only one that Redmond is copying these days.

http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/566

Note that the release date on this is late 2003. As I recall, this was well before we knew what Hasta la Vista's GUI was called. The glossy black shading looks pretty similar too. Take a look at the description on this thing too.

 

[RacerX]

Well, there were a lot more things that Microsoft took from Apple/NeXT.

Browsing metaphor in the file system? Check.

The browsing system that Apple uses in the Finder dates back to 1988 with the earliest versions of NEXTSTEP. I doubt you'll find anything that NeXT even considered worth looking at from Windows 2.0 back then.

Toolbars and sidebars on Finder windows and in open/save dialogs? Check.

The sidebar is an implementation of the NEXTSTEP shelf within the Workspace Manager... as far as I know, Windows has never had anything like that. The use of a toolbar was first tried in NEXTSTEP 4.0 beta, but was dropped until the release of Rhapsody 5.0. The position of the sidebar comes from necessity as both the toolbar and the original shelf occupied the same place in the Workspace Manager windows. To have both, one had to be moved to a new position. As the sidebar acts basically like an icon well, having it run vertically made more since that trying to do that with the toolbar.

Three boxes in the corner of each window? Check.

Again, this was necessity rather than copying. Apple wanted to implement a new button for hiding the toolbar (which was a menu command before)... the three standard buttons had already been given stop light colors and the fourth was made purple... any combination of them other than putting the stop light colored buttons together didn't work, and they found it was needed to keep the toolbar button apart from the others. The interface was still not functioning as Apple wanted, so the purple toolbar button was remove for Mac OS X Public Beta. When the toolbar button returned in 10.0 it was the long clear button we have today.

Hardware accelerated video processing on a 3D surface? Check.

That has to go to NeXT and SGI first. Jobs used technology from Pixar to give special 3D abilities into the NeXT hardware and software. This gave the NeXTcubes and NeXTstations 3D abilities that were far beyond what their 68030/68040 processors were designed to do. NeXT kept the APIs with NEXTSTEP even after it was ported to other platforms, but the hardware linking was gone (made up for by the faster processors). This API was not ported to Rhapsody, which is why some NeXT 3D apps (like Stone Design's 3D Reality) were never ported to Rhapsody or Mac OS X. Those apps were tied very closely to the NeXT/Pixar APIs.

When I worked at the Geometry Center, the Center was developing a 3D animation tool called Geomview. This was originally made on SGIs (a platform with a very long history of hardware accelerated video processing on 3D surfaces that goes back into the mid 80s) and then ported to NEXTSTEP (the two primary platforms we used at the Geometry Center). The reason we hadn't ported it to any other platform back then was the lack of 3D support in them (including systems by Apple and Sun, which were other platforms we were using at the time).

We only had one PC at the Center when I was there, it was used for playing DOOM when we couldn't play on the NeXT systems (which was the platform DOOM was developed on) and running an early version of Linux.

Minimizing windows? Check.

That was part of NEXTSTEP from the very beginning. Same with IRIX and CDE. All of those predate Windows' use of minimizing windows as I recall. That is absolutely not a Microsoft innovation.

Indexing Service with instant search, extensible file formats, live queries, saved searches, and a developer API? check.

Gosh, I thought we agreed that you had conceded on this point as these were all part of NEXTSTEP's Digital Librarian and the NeXT APIs for letting the Librarian do indexed searches with documents of third party apps.

I still can't help but laugh at the fact that you thought that Digital Librarian was for dictionaries, thesauruses and the like.

Seriously, both Apple and Microsoft often implement features that the other has gooten to first.

Seriously, you need to get over your idol worship of Microsoft. Microsoft has always had a history of watching all the other companies in the tech industry innovate and then once the usefulness is proven, rushing in to stomp out anyone else.

R&D is almost non-existant at Microsoft. They have had a "watch and wait" and then steal, copy or acquire policy since the late 80s. They currently believe that litigation (and even settlements) are less expensive that R&D.

 

[beatle888]

RacerX you came just in time. just like in the cartoon speed racer. I almost bought all that BGil was saying. His post gave me a sinking feeling and thought i should open my eyes and embrace the dark side. thanks for setting him straight.

All i can say is, from my experience MS is better for business at this point. Apple doesn't really cater to business owners/operators. This is really a disappointment for me because i love the mac but find it frustrating when i need to do certain business tasks.

I look at the MS – Apple debate as one thats not really comparable. Apple does a lot less than MS so its not really fair to compare. Apple caters to certain needs VERY WELL. MS caters to a broader list of needs and does sort of O.K. at most and from what i hear very well at others. but its this massive undertaking that makes windows so frustrating for regular people. i dont think windows can win the hearts of the average computer user until windows makes an OS thats as easy to maintain as OSX. this was illustrated so perfectly by my girlfriends windows experience. she wanted to surf the web, burn cd's, watch dvd's... the basic stuff. but her pc system just kept getting in the way of her enjoying/doing the very basic tasks. her scanner just stopped working one day...why? who knows. we reinstalled drivers...tried this and that, nothing worked. shes been on her mac for almost a year and her mac can do everything she expected to do on a computer. everything runs without us having to really know much about how a computer works under the GUI. i think microsoft might get to this point and thats when apple will have to worry.


Anyway, i enjoyed both posts. keep at it.