14 DAY TRIAL // As Microsoft's Vista creeps ever closer to completion and more and more people are beginning to look at it, the number of things that are less than satisfactory keeps rising.
In a recent article called "Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista," Scot Finnie, Computerworld's online editorial director, takes readers through a brief tour of the things that may be bothering them in the future.
As usual, on top of the list is the User Account Control, which has been bothering everyone that has tried the system and is the most widely criticized new feature. "It boils down to this: The software giant is favoring security and IT controls over end-user productivity. Don't get me wrong, security and IT manageability are very good things. But some of the people actually using the Beta 2 Vista software describe their experience as akin to that of a rat caught in a maze," Finnie reports.
The User Account Protection in Vista is not something new, and by now Microsoft has had lots of time and response from the community about it, they just haven't done anything. These problems were mentioned by Paul Thurrott in February in his review of Vista, where he described UAP as being "almost criminal in its insidiousness" and "hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months." Now, several months later, Finnie asks a simple question: "Why couldn't Microsoft see this coming?" Unfortunately, not only did they not see it coming, but even after receiving such a strong response from the public on the CTP build, they haven't done anything to improve it.
"Where does Windows Vista fit among many of the PC-based operating systems of today and the last couple of decades? With Beta 2 running on multiple test units, I feel comfortable predicting that Windows Vista will not outpace Mac OS X Tiger for overall quality and usability," Scot Finnie writes. "It's hard to beat Apple's top-notch GUI design grafted onto an implementation of Unix variant BSD. Mac OS X has excellent reliability, security and usability. That isn't to say that the user interface wouldn't gain if Apple adopted some other best ideas of the day, but Apple has the best operating system this year, last year and next year. It'll be interesting to see what the company delivers in its 10.5 Leopard version of Mac OS X. Meanwhile, I'm placing Windows Vista as a distant second-best to OS X. I see Linux and Windows 2000 as being roughly tied another notch or two below Vista, with XP being only a half step better than Win 2000."
While Vista has not yet shipped and Microsoft still has time to make the necessary improvements, if not even delay some more, however, time can only do so much, and, if the problems are still here, and they were not anticipated, what are the chances that they will be fixed in the foreseeable future?
"Everywhere you look, Microsoft has copied things that Apple has offered for quite some time in OS X... More than 15 years later, Microsoft is still following Apple in operating system design and bundled materials... I have no problem with Microsoft copying Apple's or any other company's best interface designs. We all win when that happens, and I wish Apple would steal the best things Microsoft does right back. What's really strange is when a company lifts good ideas and makes them worse, not better," Finnie writes.
The truth in Finnie's last statement is glaring? The situation is not unlike someone copying everything they can from the class genius and still failing.