Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, in his daily entry on ZDNet has written a few ideas about why Apple has gotten the upper hand in operating systems, over the brand that comes from Redmond, Washington.

He starts out assessing the fact that, with Apple, the operating system looks the same whether you have a Mac Book (any flavor), a midrange model, or top of the line model, capable of doing either database manipulation or serious number crunching. From the Air to the heaviest model, the operating system behaves the same way, the difference being how snappy it is. That snappiness depends on memory and CPU speed, but the user experience is the same.

For the Vista user group, things can be very different. Depending on the flavor of the operating system, you may have something that looks like Windows 2000, Windows XP, or something entirely new. This means that, depending on your hardware, you can have one of many experiences with Vista. One person might have a very good video card, but also included in his machine is a slower than standard hard drive, and perhaps only 1 GB of memory. That would mean that he could have the Aero interface, and be entirely exasperated with the experience. Another owner of the latest version (or so he thinks) of Microsoft’s new offering, labeled Vista Basic, might have a quad core CPU, a (comparatively) wimpy video card, and 4 or more GB of memory, and the latest Western Digital Velociraptor hard drive, making him think he has the fastest Windows 2000 machine he’s ever seen. Add to the mix, all the different gradations of hardware, along with the flavors of Vista, and you have easily a possibility of neighborhoods of people, all using Vista, that has no two  machines looking or acting the same way.

Beyond the Aero versus non-Aero interfaces, the building blocks, and capabilities of the Microsoft operating system are so different as to be confusing to the average user. For all the joking about the average Mac user, we must, as technophiles, realize that most people use a computer to get a job, or jobs, done. The reason for being is not the computer itself, no matter how shiny the processor, how powerful the power supply, or how large the hard drive capacity.

This makes it very easy for the Apple folks, because, through several processor changes, one or two architecture changes, and the ups and downs of the stock price, the operating system looks, and works, the same basic way.

This was the original idea behind Windows. Yes, for those that might be late to the party, that was what Mr. Gates had envisioned. In the very dark days of DOS, programs worked differently, looked different, and did not always play well together. Sharing the information from a spreadsheet to a word processing document was sometimes a point of great consternation, Keystrokes were different, and sometimes did things exactly the opposite in effect from two of the same type of programs. Windows, slowly but surely made all of those problems go away (along with the tendency of some software authors to make their programs look visually like angry fruit salad).

Each iteration of Windows was to have unified, and therefore simplified, the way we work with computers. For a number of years this was the case; it was easy to go from one machine to another to do your work. Now, with each iteration of Windows, Microsoft wants to veer further from that early path, making things so different as to require an extended period of reorientation when changing from one to the next. With the changes in Vista, this has been an impediment to the changing of many people, as Windows XP was around for so long, and its ways of doing things that much more ingrained in the user’s mind.

No one at Microsoft seems to realize this. In the drive to get people to change, the purposeful differences in the look and feel are some of the very things that  are so off putting.

Will this change with Windows 7? Probably not. Microsoft seems to be too keyed-in to change for the sake of change, along with different versions, with minor differences in utility, but with large (Microsoft) assessed differences in value. As long as these different revisions sell, there is no impetus for change. (if, suddenly, between now and the release of beta 2 of Windows 7, every copy of Vista bought was Vista Basic, and the copies of Ultimate, Home Premium, and Business sat gathering dust, Microsoft just might get the picture)

I can dream, can’t I?

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Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.Mark Twain