Tag Archives: Leopard

The Vista Puzzle

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I finally worked on a Vista computer with spanking new Vista Office. the verdict…

Hum… they were right; a lot of visual fluff and a lot of reworked interface. It was interesting at best when I had to sit in front a Vista computer to help out a client. It’s completely different than what you’ve come to expect from Microsoft, but not the fun type of different you get from Apple. It was messy.

For starters, I couldn’t find anything easily. It was an entirely new interface to learn. Close sources of mine have reported going through hell installing the beast, especially on laptops. I’ll believe that. The start menu has been completely reworked and finding things takes a little peck and hunting. Overall, once you get used to it, you still have to fight a decade of being use to where things were.

Vista Office was no pleasure cruise either. The interface is completely revamped and finding things was difficult. Gone were the traditional File, Edit, etc, top menus. Instead it is replaced with tabs and everything was rearranged under. Microsoft has never had the most user-friendly menus. It felt like most features were put one after the other with little thinking into conveniency. As time went on, they just added gimmicks but never mustered the guts to sit down and rationalize it all. I think they tried to do that with Vista and it seems like too little, too late. I’m burned, as many others are with Microsoft.

I can understand the need Microsoft has to try to “innovate” but frankly the company hasn’t done that in well over a decade. Even then, they took mostly from others. Vista has some interesting technical features but as far as home users are concerned it is OVERKILL. It is a resource hog and never mind getting the right hardware to get everything running. OSX Leopard is so frugal compared to this Dinosaur.

All in all, as always, I wish Microsoft would bite the bullet and completely overhaul everything, something Apple did 8 years ago with brilliant success. But alas, Microsoft has strangled its own market into a dead end street with backward compatibility issues and a will to smash competition. What is troublesome is the fact that they are moving to drop sales and support of XP. Since Vista has not sold well at all and is forced down user’s throats through the tried and true Microsoft path of forced upgrades, phasing out XP will be the only way they can get users to buy Vista and have computer manufacturers sell more hardware, to their great delight.

Ah, what a situation this industry is in. With a weakening economy, a stranglehold Windows market, Microsoft’s only chance is to conveniently report lower earnings than expected. This will give them reasons to drop XP, force Vista and have Dell and HP happy to sell more… PCs. And if that is not a good enough reason to switch to Apple, I don’t know what will.

4 Years With Apple, Long Beach

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Four years ago, as my aging but trusted MicronPC was showing alarming signs of impending death. I was very happy with Micron. It was as reliable as an IBM but Windows was still the weakest link.

I had grown tired, like most people of the endless stream of updates, vulnerabilities, security issues I had to be on top, crashes, slow starts, hangups and the eternal upgrade cycle. No more, did I want to give the Bill more money. After all, he has made enough.

So I took the bold step to leap across to the other camp and join the Unix fray, but this time with an Apple. I have had this 12″ genius PowerBook G4 fr almost 4 years and the only thing I did was to upgrade the ram and charged the hard drive a few months ago. I love it, I go home and plug it into my 21″ Sony and voila, big screen city!

It has been so wonderful, stable, no vulnerabilities. In fact, I still don’t run an anti virus and I would not want to give Norton more money than they scooped on the Windows security swiss cheese platform. I have the firewall turned on and I am careful.

I thought programs would be expensive but they turned out to be on par with their Windows counterparts. At least in the expense department, the ease of use, design and interface are still eon in front of Windows.

Long honeymoon apart, there are problems I foresee. For one thing, I am running Jaguar. While Tiger has been out for a while, Leopard looms. Most programs are now written for Tiger and worse yet, for the new Intel chip.

I feel I am starting to see the ugly days of Microsoft’s incessant upgrade marketing path. Switching to Intel might have been a good move considering IBM and Motorola weren’t delivering on the promises but it seems now, everything revolves around the new chip and OS.

To be fair, 4 years on a computer and no problems means it is a quality product and I still have plenty of programs I can use. It is still faster than my last experiences on PCs but I feel the squeeze.

Will Apple start to squeeze its users into upgrading? I don’t know. New products are better but do we always need to have better and faster products when this setup works just fine?

Oh yes, give me a new Apple latop in a 12″ version and now you’re talking. The new ones just don’t cut it for me and the talks of snafus are not what I have come to expect from Apple’s superb quality. I’ll wait.