Windows 7 is now with us. Too early to tell whether we have received this with a bang or a whimper, but if ever there was a time to watch with interest the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft it is now.
Now I speak from a somewhat unique position. As someone working in the creative industries you would think I was a die hard Apple devotee. And in many respects you would be right. But I also use a PS regularly, and appreciate that there are certain things that they do better than Macs. Notice that I referred to things 'they do' and not ' how they do it'. Because I think that this is the key distinction between the two OS's, but one that has become a little muddied lately.
Apple, in part due to their consistently great design has all too often been seen as the only way to produce great creativity, with the ugly old beige towers of the PC's being far too monstrous to behold to produce anything of beauty. Which is nonsense. If you accept that these are just machines, the end product being constant (bear with me here!) then it is the processes that these machines make you use that really set them apart. The applications are almost all commonly available on both Windows and OS X, and so what really is left as the distinguishing differences?
Well, let's for a start look at the two most commonly used operating systems for them both at the moment. For Apple, Leopard or OS X 10.5 to give it it's pedigree name, and Windows Vista.
Both of these system were launched at approximately the same time and both were met with luke warm approval. Apple launched Leopard with a view to supporting both its native UNIX clients, but also vitally supporting those newer machines fitted with the Intel chip. A move which angered many of its followers as this has famously been the chip underpinning PC users since Windows began. Apple was seen as abandoning its roots and losing the one key differentiator between it and the beige boxes, the fact that Apple software ran on ONLY Apple parts. Vista launched with a number of key features new to this system, all of which seemed to be lifted directly from Leopard. The dashboard, widgets and the 'Aero' style of GUI all seemed remarkably similar to those of Leopard, and seemed to bring the two systems closer together in the minds of users than either party would have wished.
The negative publicity surrounding Vista was there from the start and stemmed from a bloated OS, requiring far too much RAM to run even the simplest of native applications. Driver support was scant due to a lack of faith in manufacturers that this system was (a) suitable for their ancillary products and (b) that it would even be around long enough to warrant them releasing a Vista version of the driver / plugin. The message was clear - too much time spent on making the OS look good, and not enough time spent of making it quick, responsive, and easy to use.
Leopard on the other hand ran well - the myth of the 'hackintosh' became a reality with users building 'PC's' from Intel components and installing their beloved OS X into bege towers. IT managers were startled to turn on their Dell and be met with the distinctive dock and dashbard of the enemy OS.
So neither system necessarily met with a huge fanfare. Windows had released a damp squib of a system far too sluggish for purpose, and Apple an OS that hardly made a huge difference to the previous, and moved them ever closer to their arch rivals. The OS itself didn't deliver jurassic shifts in their offerings, and so what would be needed to deliver the killer OS? The one that makes headlines and gives share prices the spike the investors want.
That would be answered by the next releases.
Apple release Snow Leopard. Same cat you might say. Not a Cougar or a Lynx? No. Because as Apple said ' It's the all new, exaclty the same operating system' Mmmmm. Sounds even duller than Leopard. But no. And here's why. They realised that the prime reason people liked their OS had nothing to do with dashboards or docks, or programmes they were offering bundled in. It was that the system was quick to respond and didn't crash. This due to the UNIX language underpinning the entire system (Windows uses BIOS) and the Finder (their equivalent if you will, of the Windows File Explorer) Nothing at all to do with programmes available, widgets, sidebars, drop shadows on windows or transparent window address bars. It was the bare bones reliability and speed of the system to respond. Snow Leopard was exactly that. A massive system tune up to Leopard. No real additions that anyone but a developer would notice. Snow Leopard made things faster. Startup and shutdown, applications responded quicker, and gigabytes of unnecessary clutter were wiped off you hard disk on installation meaning that altogether this was a leaner, meaner system from the word go.
Windows 7, unsuprisingly promises us the same. It is slimmed down and tuned up. No great offerings that weren't in countless previous iterations of Windows, but this time the key focus is on performance, responsiveness, and just plain geting things done (something so painfully lacking in Vista, a hugely sluggish and frustrating system)
Therefore it would seem as if the main players have learnt a few lessons in the development of their respective OS's. Software nowadays is so often free and therefore licensing revenues are gone. Cloud computing has meant that so much software now isn't ever hosted on desktops, and so their futures won't lie there. Runtimes such as Adobe AIR have meant that software will run on either system. So could it be that OS's, as before need to ally with industry for their market share to soar. It's an interesting point because it seems that this, once the most powerful alliance for Apple, has now fallen by the wayside.
Take for example the sad tale of Internet Explorer. The world's most popular browser and installed as standard on all new PC's. Oh, and the bain of every web developers life. As browser numbers soar, and as Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome and Camino all co-exist happily, using a common rendering engine and working on creating more friendly, usable, functional interfaces, Internet Explorer has refused to benefit from this synergy, has used it's own rendering engine and kept it's code a secret. Not for them the benefits of Open Source code, with thousands of people across the web improving, bug testing and compiling 'nightly builds' of improvements. No. Developers are still building websites and HTML web applications, and then having to put in place hacks to ensure the pages work in IE. They are creating work arounds, something typically associated with redundant technologies being phased out, for the most widely used and longest standing browser technology in the world.
Compare also with the adoption of Microsoft browser, and to that extent OS technology. Dell are still shipping with XP Pro, and OS now 13 years old. An OS superceded twice now. This as a direct response from customers, many of whom will be some of the most powerful IT consumers in huge global companies, all of whom have no faith in their technology until it has been tested to breaking point in the market for, well 13 years probably. These are the same companies who refuse to upgrade the browsers on their client machines from IE6 to the current standard IE8, as they still fear the security implications this might bring. So again, there is a lag of two revisions.
And thus to our title. Apple seem to have the early adopters in the palm of their hands. Snow Leopard sales on the day of release were the highest ever. Apple users don't fear change, as they know they are using a stable, secure system and vitally one that is built on a technology that is human shaped in it's approach to user-interface. It recognises that software and hardware are interchangeable, but focusses on productivity and making actions as simple and quick as possible. So what if they never install a programme onto the machine as long as they have it, they will make it as easy to perform task as possible.
Windows on the other hand have a lot of ground to make up as successive systems remain as crash-happy as they ever were, and with the expense of the OS's and software so often incompatible with new releases, it is very expensive to be an early adopter of Microsoft software. With Dell and big business still two iterations behind, all the signs from industry are to hold off. Don't buy yet. Don't even think about buying until we do. And with Google launching their OS based on the popular Chrome browser, it would appear that before too long, even we won't ever need to pay for an OS ever again.
- : #win7my does this to you for staying free for the trial period. Sigh. Hard to keep the romance. 
