I was asked to write a guest piece for Alternate Interior, a tech blog by a good friend. The following is an appropriate piece that’s going to be posted on Alternate Interior later today. Give it a read and I hope you enjoy it!

I’ve never been one to bash on Microsoft. I believe that they used to manufacture a great operating system, but over time, I have come to know Microsoft and Windows as typical.

Microsoft has some competition, not much, but some from Apple. OS X is a great operating system and while it has it’s own problems to contend with, it is surely an operating system designed for now as opposed to then.

Windows Vista, the latest release from Microsoft, is due out to consumers early next year. Windows Vista is boasting all new features and security. The marketable, “this will make your life more clear” type of jargon is now starting to be spread everywhere. This is what I call typical.

Microsoft has essentially lost the ability to be creative. This does not go to say that the people working within Microsoft are not creative, but I believe they are being held back. Vista boasts a glass effect, similar and along the lines of the plastic look and feel of OS X. The windows are translucent and from time to time tends to be intense on the video card. No biggie, that’s what they are there for. A lot of the features from OS X have been implemented in Vista, all be it in different ways. Gadgets, Calendar and Search. Search is integrated into a small space in the start menu, Calendar used to look like iCal, now its bloated and will not likely gain a lot of use and Gadgets take space on the sidebar; valuable real estate on the desktop. At least Dashboard is hidden until you need it in OS X…

Though, I bet there is an auto-hide feature on sidebar.

While Vista does boast some new window animations and transparency, it really doesn’t offer me a reason to switch. Personally, I think Media Player is broken, along with Movie Maker and Mail. OS X offers iTunes with a store that just works, iMovie is a fun way to design home movies VERY quickly (it also has DVD authoring built in) and Mail keeps getting better and better. iCal is just a calendar, not a task list manager and also, the iLife suite is very usable.

Microsoft knows this software package and in Vista, they have tried to duplicated it and make it “better” in their eyes. By better, they have managed to bloat it and remove the simplicity that once made someones life easier.

It’s difficult to distinguish what these new applications do in Vista. Most of them look the same, but they really don’t throw an indicators as to their purpose. In iPhoto, you know your looking at photos. In iMovie, you feel like your working in a cutting room. In iTunes, you know your listening to music, but in each Vista application, you feel like your working in the Explorer window. Not very friendly to me…

The upper hand Vista will have is with gaming. Gaming is huge on the PC and with DirectX as the Microsoft cash cow, you can bet that there will be reason to upgrade. Vista will not debut with DirectX 10 and will later be distributed as a package, similar to the way DirectX has always been distributed.

The upgrade will come with Shader 4, which will offer vast improvements over Shader 3. Not even OpenGL can top what DirectX gives to the consumer and the developer. Microsoft is smart to keep DirectX in heavy development mode.

I know I’m being pretty rough on Microsoft here, but it’s justified. Microsoft needs to size down the Windows team and make it a very competitive environment. Additionally, they need to lose a lot of the project managers and hire creative team leaders. Internally, there needs to be a drive for creativity and usability that blows the socks off Apple and everyone else who thinks Microsoft has lost it.

Don’t be afraid to be like Apple, Microsoft; you already are.

I’m not certain what is actually wrong with the computer other than the charging mechanism that transfers power from the adapter through the motherboard and to the battery is not working. An internal component, none the less. Both my father and step-father have the necessary electrical equipment needed to diagnose the situation, so it’s really not an issue. I’m almost certain it can be fixed.

I’m not mad at my girlfriend for “doing-in” my laptop. In a sort of mafia type of way, it needed to sleep with the fishes. In all honesty, it did great for many years. I received the laptop as a birthday present my senior year of high school and it’s about 3-4 years old anyway. The processor inside the laptop is an old pentium-4, not a mobile version. The graphics card is an old GeForce 2 MX and it has 512MB of DDR400. The memory is actually still worth something. The processor too, but I’m sure no body would pay over $50.00 for it.

I don’t intend on parting it out, mostly because the money maker in it is the motherboard. If there is an electrical problem, the most I can make off of it is $150.00, but working, I could get close to $300. It’s not in mint condition, but it’s a good laptop for watching DVD’s and surfing the interweb. I know one individual who loves to buy laptops just for this purpose.

In it’s recent passing and hopefully upcoming resurrection, I will have already moved passed the unfortunate circumstances in which it died and present myself with one future option: an Apple MacBook Pro, 15″ laptop. I’ve had my eyes on this product since it was released and held off on upgrading until they moved from the Core chipset to the Core2 chipset. It’s not that Core was bad, but it wasn’t where the Core2 product was going to be in 6 months. Take my word for it, waiting was well worth it.

This will end up being my first Apple computer purchase. I’m not bent on switching, because I play a lot of video games. If my girlfriend finds out that Half-Life 2 isn’t natively available on OS X, she’d probably replace my current desktop with a Mac today! I know that I can boot camp the damn thing, but the video card I want isn’t supported under OS X (yet) and I don’t feel like running two versions of video just to indulge my sick obsessions. Besides, I’m not made out of money!

I figure I can work the deals and score the laptop with AppleCare for about $1500 – $1700 dollars; well under the MSRP. Of course, being who I am, there are various ways of scoring equipment so cheap, but I’m not at liberty to discuss it. Also, I don’t feel like sharing it; I’m the one who spent my high school education expanding my career and proving that a 4.0 grade average doesn’t mean your going to make millions.

With the recent opening of our very own Apple Store here in Albuquerque, it has quickly become a hang out spot of ours. On average, we visit once or twice a week. There is no schedule for visiting, it just sorta happens. My girlfriend has never used a Mac and she’s the perfect person to own one. Her habits on a computer are music, pictures, MySpace and some Office. Not much more than that…

I introduced her to OS X and threw some software at her. She’s been learning tricks and has been growing fond of the platform. She doesn’t complain about Windows and is all about ease of use and thus, OS X is a better product. Once we get the laptop, I in-vision having to fight over it.

It’s likely once our lives begin to carry on and we are further and further out of debt, we’ll own more toys like this. We have other priorities in life and shockingly enough, they have nothing to do with computers. It’s likely after Christmas, I’ll purchase one of these things. I am waiting to see if they offer a rebate on the laptop for a free upgrade to the new version of OS X due out next year.

Oh, before I let you go, here’s some Apple goodness.

I’ve been looking forward to Windows Vista since it was announced back in 2003. I’ve seen the many iterations of the Vista look and feel and am overall impressed with where it ended up.

I recently read an article by Paul Thurrot, famous for his Windows Supersite. Paul has been writing about Microsoft for years and has been closely following Vista and it’s coming release. The latest article from Paul was entitled, Part 5 – Where Vista Fails.

I had seen this article around blog websites such as Slashdot and Digg, however I rarely take them seriously due to the large, Linux/Unix fanboy base. In my eyes, why should I read an article or a post that is laced with 15 year old kids raging on about how “M$ sux0rz” and “M$ is going to die!”?

As I sat down to my desk this morning, DailyTech, another blog feed I visit daily had a post on the same Paul Thurrot article. DailyTech is a quiet place to get geek news. It isn’t updated as much as the other sites, but honestly, I prefer it that way. It tends to keep the fanboys away.

DailyTech’s post on the iterative build of Vista linked to the previous “blunder” article which lead me to Thurrot’s website. There, I finally decided to read the “Where Vista Fails” article…

I entered the article thinking this was just another Thurrot raving post. Either he is going to bitch about the release schedule Microsoft’s been following or it’s going to be something else that doesn’t interest me. However, Thurrot argued a very strong point which has put me in a very difficult position…

Thurrot started the article off with a blow to Microsoft’s management structure. In it, Thurrot describes middle men with power that cannot make simple decisions. As a developer, this is very, very, frustrating! How can a project move forward when your project managers cannot make decisions for themselves? The answer is, it really can’t…

In his next statement, Thurrot jabs at the promises made by Gates that failed to make the Vista release. These features include the long awaited, WinFS, a storage system based off SQL Server which theoretically increased searched capabilities and what not. However, what we get is another “indexed” type feature, which compared to the capabilities of Spotlight in OS X, looks like a turtle against a jet plane.

In another blow to Vista, Thurrot nails “UAP”, User Account Protection. Real quick, this is already a practiced implementation in both *Nix and OS X. In OS X, whenever you update the system or do something potentially dangerous, first your account is checked to see if you can even perform such a task. If you can, then you are prompted for your password. This is fantastic! You cannot screw your system up unless you tell it to.

Thurrot describes UAP from the Microsoft perspective as this…

“Let’s look a typical example. One of the first things I do whenever I install a new Windows version is download and install Mozilla Firefox. If we forget, for a moment, the number of warning dialogs we get during the download and install process (including a brazen security warning from Windows Firewall for which Microsoft should be chastised), let’s just examine one crucial, often overlooked issue. Once Firefox is installed, there are two icons on my Desktop I’d like to remove: The Setup application itself and a shortcut to Firefox. So I select both icons and drag them to the Recycle Bin. Simple, right?

Wrong. Here’s what you have to go through to actually delete those files in Windows Vista. First, you get a File Access Denied dialog (Figure) explaining that you don’t, in fact, have permission to delete a … shortcut?? To an application you just installed??? Seriously?”

That’s terrible!

Thurrot’s article continues on to other realms such as the glass window effect and Windows Media Center. He complains about the active and inactive windows as annoyances as well as Microsoft adding crap to Media Center, making it difficult to use. I agree with him on both points, but they do not get to me as much as the other stuff talked about earlier.

I reacted to this article strongly and also reacted to the upcoming Vista negatively. Honestly, the only reason I keep my PC around is for gaming. If it wasn’t just for that, I would feel way justified in purchasing a Mac, which brings me to the difficult position I previously mentioned…

Intel has been ramping up production on the new Core processors. They are impressive chips to say the least. They run super fast, super cool and with super low power. What more could you ask for? I’m asking Apple to put them inside the new “Mac” desktops, most likely to be dubbed, “Mac Pro”. One day, hopefully this year, they will be.

After reading this article, my consideration to purchasing a Mac has gone up substantially. Even more so with the later release of the “Mac Pro”, I have the ability to expand the components such as video and memory. My close nit friends understand my reluctance to purchase a Mac, however in light of the upcoming OS release by Microsoft, I don’t see the need to keep upgrading a PC to handle any new OS features. I just see the need to future proof it 5-7 years, so it’s still adequate to play upcoming titles from Valve and Crytek (Ubisoft, FarCry). The money that could be spent in those years to keep a good computer around would be better spent on a Mac that would cost a lot up front, but would ensure that it would still be a top notch computer 5 years down the road.

In closing, my reaction to Windows Vista is really just a comparison between the PC running Windows and the Mac running Windows and OS X. My work OS would become OS X, while the Windows install would be strictly gaming. You can’t compare OS X to Windows Vista right now, OS X is still leaps and bounds ahead. I’m not too sure if Vista has the capability to push Apple to make Leopard, the next release of OS X, just that much better… But from how it looks, probably not.

To finally close this, I must say the bottom line of what pushed me to this point. With each release of Windows, not including ME, Microsoft has release a superior product. Many people argue that it was not worth upgrading from Windows 2000 to XP, however the networking capability in XP is more solid which makes a huge difference in gaming on the net. But, to stay on topic, each release has been better than the one before, however Vista seems to have broken that trend. It’s been over half a decade since the last release of Windows and for 5-6 years worth of work, I am not impressed in the slightest.

As Thurrot said in his article, “…The company is literally filled to the brim with some of the brightest, smartest, most insightful, and friendliest people…”, so why is the management of Microsoft holding these people down from making Windows a totally kick ass product [once again]?

I don’t know… All I know is that I work within that type of management model and if I can avoid other companies that follow the same, e.g. Microsoft, I’d like to stay away. I’d be happy moving my work environment to OS X rather than moving to Vista and be slowed down.