Damning With Faint Praise

Last week, an article came out on ZDNet, with the title ‘Why Windows 7 Won’t Suck As Much As Vista’.

Wow. That says it all.

Microsoft has shot itself in the foot, and didn’t have the good sense to see the doctor, trying to walk with a badly bleeding foot (Vista). If the company had either been a little quicker with the patches, or had some ‘user-stress rebates’, the problem might have been partially ameliorated. But no, Messieurs Gates and Ballmer kept insisting that Vista was better, we, the public, were simply too shortsighted to see the beauty that is Vista.

After the Mojave campaign, the completely ludicrous ‘I’m a PC’ campaign, and the Apple campaign insisting that it was verboten to say the ‘V’ word, Microsoft has that hurt foot just about ready for amputation.

Yet, somehow, they manage to convince some of their biggest supporters (ZDNet, PC Magazine) that stories extolling the vaporous virtues of the upcoming ‘7’ are what is needed. After all, these guys need something to write about.

We must stimulate the economy, you know.

The article about ‘7’ tells us that many of the changes that users requested, after using Vista for a while, are being implemented. It’s almost unnecessary to state, at this juncture, that Windows 7 will not have the hardware compatibility problems that Vista had. All the bases are covered – except the one that has the story of why Apple, and now, some of the Linux flavors, always seem to get the ‘user feel’ right, because the designers pay attention to a large group of regular users, instead of the captives at Redmond.

After this many years of Windows, and the many years of Mac interface refinement, why can almost any child walk up to a Mac with no training, and do almost any job requested on the machine, yet that same child on a Windows machine must guess, try, and check the (still inadequate, when not totally defective) help files to accomplish the same sort of tasks?

Does it even merit faint praise?

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Quote of the Day:
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
–A. Whitney Brown