Mojave: The Other POV

Microsoft has a new set of commercials for Vista in which they ostensibly have shown an unsuspecting audience a new version of Windows called Mojave. The upshot is that the people in the commercial really seem to love it... then they are told that it's Vista and they are all amazed.

So, let's analyze this. From the commercial that I saw, you don't know what they were shown. What applications did they see? Were there any non-Microsoft applications? How real-world was it? Now, Microsoft does have a web site called www.mojaveexperiment.com. Unfortunately to get the full extent of what the site has to offer, you have to download and install Silverlight (another MS program).. There's a non-Silverlight version, but when I ran that under IE 6 on a Windows XP system, I could not see any of the videos. I don't want to download yet another non-standard MS plug-in to my system; especially something in Beta mode. We'll discuss my concerns about this later.

Anyway... Let me give my perspective. Vista looks great. It does run. I played with pretty much all of the Beta versions and even some of the alpha versions. I really was looking forward to using it when it came out. So, I can imagine sitting there in front of a Vista machine and coming away thinking that it's really cool. I got a new PC in at my company and I purchased Vista Ultimate when it first came out. I loaded it and yes it ran and the eye candy was extraordinary. Then I tried to find things. Some things were actually pretty easy to find, but others were not. For example I was trying to find the button/link to either reboot or shutdown Vista (can't remember which) and I couldn't find it. Eventually. by going through some non-intuitive paths, I located it. The new names that MS had given to some of the common things that people have done since Windows 2000 were puzzling.

And then came the apps. Probably at home, these are not major issues and in truth some of them are just as much the fault of the manufacturer of the application as they are of Vista's. I had to have a special version of Acrobat reader and a special version of Norton AV. I could not run IE 7 out of the box in our environment, even with our normal tweaks. At least one of our major applications would not work at all. The bottom line is that there was just no major reason to move from XP to Vista.

SP1 has helped some of these things, but again... here is just no major reason to move away from XP. One of the MAC/PC commercials makes fun of the fact that PC running Vista has to ask for permission to do just about anything. Now, that's a slight exaggeration and in fact OS X does the same thing, but to a much smaller degree. It's one feature that I have mixed emotions about. On the one hand, it's annoying. On the other, it's a good idea because it's helping to keep the PC safer.

Vista didn't make massive improvements over XP, it may be safer, but an XP Service Pack may have been able to address those issues. It changed too many things for no apparent reason, it was not compatible with many current versions of applications and hardware, and there was no real reason to release it except that MS hadn't released any new OS for what they considered way too long. Vista reminds me a Windows Me, but with a cool looking interface. And the behind the scenes, under the hood things, that would have made the OS something worthwhile from a technical standpoint never made it into the product.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing Windows 7... hopefully MS has learned their lesson and the new Windows will really be something to buy.

For me, though, I've moved on. I'm an Apple Convert. I really like OS X and the Apple hardware. It's not perfect and there's always the issue with getting good applications that will run under OS X. I'll work with Windows 7 when it comes out because it's my job and I really like all things technical. But I'll be more interested to see Snow Leopard and keep looking forward to the day when all applications are made in both Windows and OS X versions.