Vista vs. Mac OS X (InformationWeek review)

John Welch of InformationWeek has a great article today comparing Microsoft's Vista with Apple's Mac OS X. Given that I'm covering it here, you can already tell which OS he finds superior. :-) In his words...

While Vista is indeed a major update to Windows, there's a lot of it that is, quite frankly, just Microsoft making up for lost time. The last non-server release of Windows was in 2001 with Windows XP, with only a single major interim update in service pack 2. In the same time, Apple has been steadily releasing updates to Mac OS X on what was a yearly schedule, now around every 18 months....

Microsoft had two serious issues. First, they had to make this update of Windows revolutionary enough that it came close to justifying the delay. Second, they had to come up with something that would stand up well with its main competitor in the desktop OS market, Mac OS X. Have they succeeded at both? I'd argue that the former's almost a non-issue: Vista will sell well, because the world won't have a choice. As far as the latter, well, probably, but you'd be hard-pressed to say Vista's better than Mac OS X.

In a nutshell, Vista vs. Mac OS X is Revolution vs. Evolution. It's about a massive, long-delayed upgrade that has to account for almost 6 years of progress by its competitors, versus a well-executed strategy of regular updates. While updating an operating system is never something that can be called easy, Apple's strategy has been the better one for keeping their OS on top of things, something Microsoft has admitted to in a roundabout way.

This is critical, and often overlooked (outside the Apple camp, anyway). Microsoft's release late and not-so-often mentality means that its users are half a decade behind the Mac world (and Linux, in some areas). Microsoft, because of its massive installed base, arguably has a harder time moving to a "perpetual beta" release mentality. But others, like Google, have shown that this objection is more perceived than real.

Here are some of my favorite snippets from Welch's article:

Mac OS X...[is] the classic English butler. This OS is designed to make the times you have to interact with it as quick and efficient as possible. It expects that things will work correctly, and therefore sees no reason to bother you with correct operation confirmations....

Windows is...well, Windows is very eager to tell you what's going on. Constantly. Plug something in, and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you're on a network that's having problems staying up, you'll get tons of messages telling you this. It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout...who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans. This gets particularly bad when you factor in things like the user-level implementation of Microsoft's new security features.

An OS should just work, not tell you that it's working. An OS is largely infrastructure - Windows tries to be more than that. It wants to be furniture that walks around and chats with you, but really it just needs to be happy with being valuable furniture, and let its applications (and others') chat with the customer.

Welch also talks up the consistency of the OS X user interface:

This consistency that has been a centerpiece of the Mac OS is something that, even with Vista, Microsoft still can't manage to pull off. Although there are many different UI styles available in Mac OS X, even within those different styles, there is a consistency that Windows just can't seem to hit.

Even with Microsoft applications, there's a feeling that, by and large, the only UI guidelines that Windows applications adhere to is "what we feel like." (I know Microsoft has a lot of UI guideline information, but since no one seems to follow any of it, I'm not sure what the point of it is.)

Welch has other complaints on the Vista UI (it's harder to find some information you need, like network connection details, for example, and the name changes that seem to have been made only for the sake of showing that things have changed), but his complaints about the new security feature, User Account Control, seem more weighty. UAC doesn't offer real security enhancement, in his view, and (in his view) is...
...going to be called "User Annoyance Control." You get what is essentially an "Okay/Cancel" dialog that most users will hit "okay" for without thinking, you may or may not get useful information as to what is going on, and you get locked out of your system until you deal with this. I have a problem with seeing how annoying people is enhancing security. When I say "annoyance" I really mean "infuriate," because you get UAC dialogs all over the place, and you're never sure when or why you're going to get them.
That said, it's a tough problem to solve. How do you give users control over security settings that they won't necessarily understand? I'm not sure how Microsoft could have done it differently, but I do know that I don't have this same problem with my Mac. Not at all.

However, as Welch concedes, it doesn't really matter if Vista is better than OS X. Microsoft only really needs to worry about whether it's better than XP, so as to convince its user base to upgrade. Welch thinks it is (and I do, too, from what I've seen - that said, I hated XP, but liked Windows 2000 quite a bit). As for how it compares to OS X?

However, is it significantly, or even slightly better than Mac OS X? Maybe in a couple of low-level ways, like the randomizing memory address usage function, or being able to use USB memory sticks as additional RAM, but at the human level? Not even close.

I've yet to see anything in Vista that blows away the Mac OS, even a version of the Mac OS that's over a year old. Microsoft still can't manage to make something simple and easy to use. Vista reeks of committee and design by massive consensus, while OS X shines from an intense focus on doing things in a simple, clear fashion and design for the user, not the programmer.

Which, I think, is why I've managed to convert nearly 10 people to the Mac in the last two years alone. Now if the rest of you Mac people would just do your jobs, we'd have world domination within the next few years.

Source: infoworld.com