James Heath's Blog

I have recently spent the last couple of days watching videos on some of the problems, home users and manufacturers are experiencing with the new Windows Vista operating system from Microsoft. I often find people saying that slowly the casual computer user and perhaps even Power Users will eventually get used to Windows Vista and that the frustration being felt with Vista now was also prevalent when Windows XP was first released.

I was yesterday watching Chris Pirillo doing an interview for some of his watchers, and I think that he raised some exceptionally valid points.

Windows Vista is indeed a very different operating system to Windows XP. A different “beast”, as Chris put it. Vista looks, feels and is very reminisce of Windows XP, and allot of people have said that it feels as though Microsoft has just thrown shiny gloss over Windows XP and added what some might call ’severe’ security measures with the implementation of the UAC.

Whilst the blame for most of Vista’s issues doesn’t actually fall on Microsoft, one wonders, why in todays technological world, one of the leading Operating System companies couldn’t pull off a major release without first ensuring that the operating system was going to have a minimal number of issues, especially with peripheral compatibility.

Now, I can’t comprehend the difficulties involved in developing an entire operating system, but after this long, and judging on competitor performance, Microsoft really could have done allot better. The release was rushed and poorly prepared. Allot of peripheral and chip set companies didn’t actually start developing Vista compatible drivers until the operating system was available to consumers.

Microsoft was of course pushing consumers to upgrade to Vista sooner rather than later, and then there was the “Vista Ready” dispute between computer manufacturers and computer buyers. Although manufacturers did ensure drivers were available for the systems retailed with Windows Vista, there was a plethora of issues with incompatible and out of date drivers that would not function correctly with different combinations of hardware and software.

Whilst all this has happened, I have sat back and considered the benefits of buying a computer from a company that builds software and hardware and then puts the two together. The obvious company (when it comes to personal computing), that I am talking about here is Apple. I believe a computer is only as good as it is user friendly, and when driver issues arise, these issues clearly directly affect the usability of the computer system.

Apple has kept it’s OSX operating system clear of standard computer manufacturers such as Dell and HP. And I think the company has directly benefited from this decision. By keeping their operating system close to their hardware they can easily ensure that their products won’t fall over on their customers, and even if an issues arises where Apple hasn’t checked a driver under a certain condition, then they can easily have the issue rectified by simply issuing an update providing the issue itself doesn’t concern any connectivity hardware.

Maybe Apple had the computing and design ethos right in the first place? Are we getting to a point where we have simply to many peripherals and different computing machines, that manufacturer consolidation is the only choice we have left?

Only the future will tell.