Leinninger.com

As a MSDN licensee, I get to experiment with a bunch of Microsoft apps and languages. For the most part, I use the license to better understand the languages some of the other teams use which my team interacts with daily. However, I also get access to operating systems, office applications, etc. When I built my most recent PC, I partitioned 1/2 of the hard drive for use with Microsoft’s new operating system: Vista. I finally got around to installing it… well I kind of had to in order to debug an issue with IE 7. (I don’t want to replace IE 6 on my XP partition, since the majority of IE users still use it.) It’s pretty… but in a Pamela Anderson kind of way. You can tell there’s a lot of makeup to cover up years of hard living and abuse. It’s annoying: prompting me for every single task. It’s inconvenient: the apps I use most often don’t quite work with it and the drivers for my gaming keyboard are not compatible. This isn’t a big deal, because the only game I play underperforms on Vista.

At first, I was tempted to draw comparisons between the launch of Vista and Mac OS X. The new Mac OS wasn’t quite ready for prime-time at launch either. However, OS X was a complete re-architecture. Things were simplified, not just hidden. The user interface was modernized, not just glitzed up. Maybe Vista needs some time to set-in? As for me, I’m glad I kept my XP partition as-is, and I’m extra glad that my Power Mac G5 is there for me. I still do all of my real work on the Mac. I test that work and play games on the PC… and it looks like it will stay that way for a long time to come.