CUTC Day 1 – Microsoft Pavillion
Posted by Skrud at Friday, January 13th 2006 at 9:00am
Throughout the conference, Microsoft set up a number of PCs outside the main ballroom so that delegates can check their emails, surf the web, kill time or whatever. The cool thing about these PCs though is that they’re running a beta build of Windows Vista. So we get to play around with whatever Microsoft has been cooking up over the last 6 years or so.
Last night, they even had a presentation in order to show off the new features of Windows Vista and how it differs from previous versions of Windows. The upsetting thing about this presentation is that there are very few features of Windows Vista that I think can be called “new”. Anthony Vranic is an excellent speaker and knows how to keep a crowd interested – but when he said that “Internet Explorer now has a brand new feature and that’s Tabbed Browsing” the audience erupted in laughter.
The point isn’t that there’s nothing very original in Windows Vista. It’s not about who came up with what first. The ideas are out there, and people will use them. However it looks to me like Windows Vista is nothing more than Microsoft desperately trying to catch up to Mac OS X and even Linux. It’s almost similar to how OpenOffice.org is always trying to catch up to Microsoft Office. Windows Vista really just addresses these features that have been missing from Windows while Mac OS X has had them for the past 5 years at least. For example: window compositing is delegated to the GPU, built-in parental controls let you customize which apps certain users can run, there’s a “new” Alt-Tab feature that lays out all the windows on the screen so you can cycle through them, you can search for apps and files on your desktop, there are widgets that float around in this “sidebar”… You can navigate your file system based on metadata, you can tag edit and play with photos…
There is nothing in Windows Vista that makes it even marginally more interesting than Mac OS X Tiger, and it’s not even slated to be released until around the end of this year – Tiger came out last April. With their near infinite budget and depth of talent, Microsoft is surely capable of not only catching up to their competition but pushing the boundaries of operating systems. They have the resources to develop something completely new, and possibly even better, than where the rest of computing is right now. If companies like Apple and even open source projects like Linux can implement all the features you see in Windows Vista on much smaller budgets, Microsoft should be able to actually innovate instead of just follow along.
For the sake of hilarity, there are a sequences of videos, Re-introducing the Real Windows Vista, that actually use the audio from a Windows Vista presentation synced to a demonstration of Mac OS X Tiger. It’s pretty damn funny.
Microsoft has a near-infinite budget and an excellent talent pool, and along with the fact Microsoft is lagging behind in a few markets in the past few years points on something interesting. I think that Microsoft is getting old, and now they eats what they cooked for theirselves since the beginning of the previous decade; Microsoft asked everyone to hate them, and now many indeed do hate them. So it is not easy for Microsoft to gain a public appeal. It is not easy for them to gain appreciation, no matter what new feature they introduce. (and usually they don’t introduce new features, they just re-invent the wheel. See Internet Explorer, Windows Messenger, Windows, DOS, Word … This makes it much harder to connect with the public when introducing new products).
I never really got what’s so great about “Tabbed Browsing”, so my taskbar is less cluttered, whoo-de-doo.
What I DO like in FF is middle-button-one-page-forward, and if anyone can tell me how to get it to work with my lappy (doesn’t have a middle button obviously) I’d be thrilled.
Although microsoft has budget and talent, they are drop dead boring. Their innovation doesn’t exist in the OS dept. because they refuse to be creative. They tend to make products for themselves, and expect normal users to find it advantageous.
*sigh, tiger > vista… atleast for a couple years