Yeah, I just descended into an “OS Wars” kind of a discussion on the Facebook Wall of a totally innocent friend. Sorry about that Ryan.
It all started because I spotted a reference to “MS folks” and couldn’t resist the bait. My friend was asking whether he would be able to upgrade his Vista Business license using a Vista Ultimate license, so me being a troublemaker piped in “Just get OS X – one version, does everything, lower price *ducks and runs* ;^)” which I think is pretty obviously said with tongue firmly inserted in cheek. However I did follow that up with a second comment regarding the apparent silliness of the many different versions of Vista available and the confusion I know that causes for many consumers.
From there things rapidly degraded into comments regarding comparative price points for products etc etc. All of which is very silly, and I was totally to blame for having taken the “bait” of seeing the words “MS folks” mentioned.
I have no idea whether I was actually having this conversation with an MS employee, it doesn’t really matter, other than the fact that it would be nice for people like MS and yes, Apple, Google et al to really sit up and listen to what their customers really want.
Do I want a desktop operating system that seems to take twice the resource to accomplish the same job and at the same time doesn’t seem to offer me any actual advantages?
From my own experience I would say that Vista has been less than a huge success for MS. Yes, I’m sure they’ve sold millions of copies of the thing. But how many of those are OEM licenses, bought with machines where the end user doesn’t have a choice? And how many were bought with a license enabling the purchaser to “downgrade” to Windows XP? How many businesses have bought in to using Vista on the desktop? How many people have, like myself, decided that it was one step too far and jumped ship to other platforms altogether?
I really made my decision to move over to Macs when I first played with a Vista beta. I couldn’t see anything there which was an advantage to me, and then I started hearing all these stories of god knows how many different editions of the thing. Add to this OS X’s reputation for security and robustness and I was ready to switch. I could have gone to Linux, maybe I should have gone to Linux – but I wanted to run Photoshop natively. That was my killer application. Want to run Photoshop, then it’s a choice between Windows and OS X at the moment, sadly.
The point of all this waffle?
Not sure there is one. Maybe frustration at big corporations (not just MS) not listening to their customers or seeming to take the piss with the prices of their products. I mean, £200 for a single Vista Ultimate License? What are they on? When I bought my first “PC compatible” the price of the OS was insignificant compared to the price of the hardware. Now the equation has jumped the other way. The biggest chunk of the price of a “bog standard”, “low end” PC compatible desktop is the OS. And all that does is enable you to start up your computer and run the things you actually want to use.
I’m very happy I made the switch to Macs 2.5 years ago, but to be honest how much of what I do day to day can be done in a simple web browser? Quite a lot of it.
Vista, OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, DOS… does it really matter any more?
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