Another person has added to the list of reasons that Windows Vista is now looking more like the infamous Windows ME than the future of Microsoft‘s. I have many posts about Windows Vista (see the tags below) but this is the most important one of them all. Microsoft has turned on itself.
And Dave Jewell in his article Vista-End of the Dream says it’s got a simple reason: un-maintainability. I agree with the conclusion, but before reading the article, I have to admit I was highly sceptical about his claim. But, being a code geek myself, I think he may have a point. There are many reasons as I’ve said before — even many of the people in Microsoft are opposed to Windows Vista and the disaster it represents.
I want to throw out something in support of Mr. Jewell which he missed upon, and it’s important. He mentioned Apple and their multiple releases of new versions of operating systems. That’s great. However, he got the logic wrong, and that logic supports his arguments. Over the years Apple has totally and completely abandoned their old operating systems and re-written them from the ground up: the biggest and most famous was ditching OS-9 in favour of OS-X — however it happened when they went from ProDOS to GS/OS which introduced resource-forked files and it also happened between OS-6 and OS-7 when they introduced colour (wow) and multi-tasking where more than one application was actually running at once (multi-finder). This is an oversimplification, but it gives you something to look at.
Apple isn’t afraid to throw everything away, tell developers “here’s our new path” and then they boldly (and sometimes stupidly, I shall admit) go marching down that path without ever looking to see if anyone is following. Apple has a fantastic success rate with this sort of thing. It’s coming soon to the iPod line if you want to know my opinion on the matter. And Apple isn’t stupidly building DRM into their entire operating system — it is built into specific applications which requirement and not shoving it down everyone’s throat regardless of the conditions.