Breaking Windows with Apples
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Great hardware only accounts for half of the computing experience. There are many different operating systems out now, and all are very usable. The most popular is definitely Microsoft's Windows followed by Apple's OS X. Finally there are a few other stragglers such as Linux and BSD. But some cracks have appeared in Microsoft's Windows armor lately. What will the future hold?
Microsoft has dominated the OS market since the home PC was starting to make it big. As we all know Vista has had its share of issues and hasn't be as well received as Microsoft hopped. Apple has starting come up from the cellar and gaining ground. Could this be the fall of Microsoft?
Vista's Problems
I'm running Vista right now on all of my computers, and haven't had any real issues with it. Service Pack 1 was recently released, a little over a year after the launch of Vista. Many people say that SP1 should have been what was launched and Microsoft should have waited to launch Vista.
Vista, like XP, was a big change as far as hardware requirements. I think that a lot of the problems that are stemming from Vista are due to hardware issues. Many people expected to be able to buy Vista, throw it onto their five-year-old PC and get Aero and all the features of Vista running as fast as XP did on their machine. That is simply not going to happen.
XP faced these same problems upon launch. The big one for XP was memory. It required a lot more than systems builders had previously put in machines. Vista had similar problems; it needed a newer computer to work properly.
Adding fuel to the fire was the whole "Vista Ready" program. "Vista Ready" meant it would run Vista Basic, and many people thought it would run Home Premium. This issue is still in court, and it looks like Microsoft will probably end up settling with the people who bought these "Vista Ready" computers. Like XP, Vista left some software and hardware compatibility off, thus giving people another reason to hate Vista.
The biggest issue Microsoft is facing is that it has too many operating systems on the market. Vista alone has Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate, and Starter Edition. Now throw in 64-bit versions in all of the different flavors except Starter Edition. Customers need to do some reading and homework before they know what edition fits them best.
Continuing our look at the number of operating systems Microsoft has on the market, remember that based off of Vista is Windows Server 2008. And the software giant decided to continue support of XP for UMPC until the next version of Windows is ready. There's also Windows Embedded, Windows CE, and Windows Mobile.
Vista and Server 2008 share a similar kernel. XP has its own kernel. Windows Embedded, CE, and Mobile has semi-similar kernels. That is at least three different cores of operating systems that Microsoft has to maintain. Compare that to Apple; they have OS X, and that stretches from the server level down to the iPhone.
The biggest benefit I give to OS X is that it works on anything from a G4 to a dual quad core Intel processor; 32-bit, 64-bit, it doesn't matter. They are all on the same disc, so you won't get any unpleasant surprises, such as getting the wrong version and discovering the place you bought it from won't take it back. By the way, we are talking about two completely different types of CPUs, the Power PC and Intel's. I surely thought that Apple would have dropped Power PC support with the newest release, but they continued support.
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