Vista Demo Reveals Lack of Innovation
Submitted by Josh on Sat, 2006-01-28 00:23.
The Silicon Valley Sleuth has a nice write up on the lack of new or innovative features present in Microsoft's Windows Vista. Of the new features shown at a recent Consumer Electronics Show, none are not already offered by free software or the competing Mac OS X. Sadly, most of us will still end up forking over roughly $100 for this new XP theme the next time we buy a computer.
In the interest of fairness, Microsoft has touted many of Vista's back-end changes that will supposedly lead to increased security and a more pleasant user experience. However, I still prefer an operating system that keeps me in charge of my own computer like Debian Linux.
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Vista
After looking over the Window's Vista website there are some cool features being implemented within the new OS. Tabbed browsing is old though and MS didn't catch up soon enough on that. One good example is the live taskbar thumbnails. That looks very awesome. Vista Features Overall I think MS will still have problems with security. Once you put something out there and call it more secure and have the OS presence that MS does people are going to hack it with fervor.
Pretty isn't Productive
The Vista interface does look attractive, and some of the features you mentioned are neat. However, I don't see them actually helping productivity much. I don't know a single "normal" user who uses alt+tab to save time, so I have trouble believing they'll use these fancy new application switching techniques either. Also, a lot of those features rely on near real-time rendering of "screenshots" of sorts from many different applications simultaneously. I don't know many businesses that are going to buy the type of high-end PC (by today's standards) that can take advantage of those features, especially considering that Vista requires a dedicated video card with Direct X 9.0 support. Most businesses buy the cheapest onboard card they can find.
One big question for me is why MS has yet to define clear support for multiple desktops. After using KDE for a year, going back to the single desktop MS controlled world of Windows is a truly painful experience.