More Thoughts on Vista

As some of my devoted readers may recall, I wrote a couple of short pieces about my opinions on the Microsoft Vista operating system both before its release and two more that were published sortly after it released on February 2, 2007 and again on Febrary 6, 2007. These were based both on my experiences testing Vista's long-running 'beta' version code-named Longhorn, and my long experience with Microsoft products. Among other things, I noted security expert Harry Erwin of the University of Sunderland as saying that,

I think they may have gone overboard on security. Their programmer productivity has reportedly dropped to a level that they won't be able to sell Vista at its price point. Mac OS X has been beating them on price for some time now, and this may make it worse."

Now Captain Ed Morrisey who is himself no beginner at using computers weighing in on the (dis)advantages of using Microsoft Vista. Writes Captain Ed,

Just FYI, I have been using Microsoft systems since CPM DOS on the Apple IIe, and used to build my own computers from scratch until it got so cheap to buy pre-constructed systems about ten years ago. I worked as a net admin for a Fortune 100 company for a few years as a second hat during my call-center days. I'm not exactly a novice at this. I'm figuring that this will be my last Microsoft based system ever. The low price simply isn't worth the hassle any longer.

I wholeheartedly agree. Like the good captain, I have become accustomed to XP, though I hate Microsoft's penchant for thinking that they know better than I what I actually want to do. this tendency is most marked in Word, which is constantly trying to auto-format my text, but it is latent in virtually every Microsoft product I have ever used. However, Vista's tendencies for weird behavior, coupled with the many levels and the insanely high price have made me a permanent convert to Apple's far more robust OS X (although I am highly irate with Apple's decision to change the Software Update so that I cna no longer work with it running in the background. Bad APple! Bad Apple!)

However, Apple is much less intrusive and far more permissive in allowing users (especially expert user) wishes to be fulfilled. I wish that Apple had shown more marketing and sales acumen back during the OS wars, but that battle is forever lost. All we can do is try to force Microsoft to actually consider their customers once in a while.