Lazycoder

Vista vs OS X is not important

“Vista Re-Introduced (as OSX)” vs. “Developers, Developer, Developers..”

: “But this stings a bit… Three short videos of from Bill Gates’ Windows Vista demonstration at CES. Well, it’s Bill’s voice, but the video has been replaced with demonstrations of the same features on Mac OSX, which was released back in 2002.”

Vista Could Be So Much Better:

“From reading other blogs, it seems many developers are unimpressed with the sheen of Windows Vista, the next version of the Microsoft operating system. “

I’ve seen the videos that Jon is referring too, they are pretty funny. Not all of the features shown were in the version of OS X that was released in 2002. In fact, most of them (Dashboard, Spotlight to name two) weren’t available until Tiger. The live previews and Expose have been around for a while. When you use OS X, these features get so ingrained into your workflow that you start to hit the keystrokes no matter what system you are currently working on. I’m always hitting F10 on my WinXP Pro machine at work and expecting it to do something. I know there are third-party apps out there that simulate Expose on Windows, I’ve tried them. They run like 2 legged dogs compared to the real thing. It’s just not the same.

See, it doesn’t matter what features are in OS X or in Vista. It doesn’t matter if Microsoft demoed desktop metadata search before Spotlight was ever announced. It doesn’t matter if “Aeroglass” looks better than “Quartz”.

Microsoft’s biggest enemy is itself. Even if Apple did copy Spotlight from Microsoft, Apple shipped it first. I know it’s “hard to turn the battleship”. The users don’t care. I don’t care. I know you have to test every new feature against every language in the world. I don’t care. The users don’t care. If you are second to market with a feature, you look like you are lagging. Even if internally you conceived the feature years before your competitor. You look like a copycat. Microsoft needs to change it’s shipping mindset. It needs to be able to turn around features faster. Apple users buy a new version of their OS for $129 almost every year? Why? Each version has new features in it. For both developers and end users. 10.0 brought Cocoa for devs, protected memory for the users. 10.1 (Puma) brought DVD playback as well as significant performance increases. 10.2 was a biggie. Quartz Extreme, a new Finder, Rendezvous , support for Windows networks. 10.3 had Expose, iChat AV, and Filevault to name a few. 10.4 brought several “Core” technologies to the developers. Core Data and Core Imaging. Users were treated to Spotlight, the Dashboard, Smart folders, and the Automator. In that same amount of time, Microsoft has shipped 1 version of it’s flagship OS, Windows XP, to it’s users. (I know server 2003 came out too, but is your Aunt Tilly or Uncle Jed going to run server 2003 at home?). Name the big user facing improvements to Windows between Windows 2000 and Windows XP? More stability, security (well with XP SP2 at least), and the Luna theme. All of the applets, as Jon notes, have stayed about the same. Vista will add in RSS all over the place, about a year after Tiger. Still nothing about podcasting support, either creation or consumption. While Apple is shipping updates to their iLife products that enable Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jed to put our the “how to bake a pie” podcast. How many Apple users will actually USE that stuff? Probably not many, but more than if it wasn’t present and they had to cobble together a solution from third party tools.

Sure Apple has a tiny, small percentage of the market that Microsoft does. But ask yourself, who’s users are happier with their choice? Why, because even if they just care about making money it APPEARS that Apple cares more about their users. They fan their userbase like a small flame and try to grow it. They ship features that are user facing much faster than Microsoft, or almost anyone else for that matter. It’s the one thing that has impressed me the most about Apple products. The focus on the consumer and the ability to quickly turn features out to the public. That’s something Microsoft needs to work on.