What a bunch of assmasters the people in Redmond are. According to David Kirkpatrick's article, Jim Allchin, some cheesehead at Microsoft, says Longhorn will be much better than previous versions of windows. At the start of the article, he (Kirkaptrick) writes "Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide." And he's proud of that fact!
So what? So what if your company is so big it can cram its product down the throats of millions of unaware customers. So fucking what? All the things Longhorn supposedly will do (like automatically reconfigure its network settings when you move from office to home), Mac OS X (even with its sucky-assness compared to OS 9) has been able to do for years. "If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen"? This is a feature? With its armies of engineers (and a year and a half to go), this is the best fucky Microsoft could come up with after decades of stealing other's ideas? Losers.
"Longhorn will automatically clean up, or defragment, your hard drive, if it is required." Whoopdie-fuckin' do. Mac OS X's filesystem rarely requires defragmenting. But my old housemates shitty home theater PC choked on its own excrement if he did defragment daily.
Longhorn will show me the first page of a document instead of an icon? BFD. Been there, done that. I can put the same file in multiple places on my drive? Been there, done that.
"Microsofts research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items." That's because Microsoft has never encouraged any sense of consistency among its legions of third-party developers, and because Windows' window management is piss poor, at best. No wonder people have a hard time finding things on windows. It's a direct result of the design of the UI. (More like LI…"loser interface").
Allchin talked about an upcoming 64-bit release of Windoze. Kirkpatrick writes, "For Allchin, this is a very big deal for businesses and individuals. The reasons are technical, but the bottom line is that 64-bit computers will be much faster. They should also be more secure." Is this what Allchin is spouting? Sorry, wrong and wrong. Not even the 64-bit Tiger will make your computer faster or more secure. Application developers will have to re-build their apps, and even then, most of what you'll get is the ability to address more memory. Which will probably mean that developers will create even more resource-hungry apps, creating additional burden on our already-overtaxed I/O subsystems.
And, I should point out, that the G5 is already a 64-bit processor, and Tiger ships this weekend, as opposed to "the end of the year" in Allchin's predictions.
Windows "Just Works"? Give me a break. Windows seems to go out of its way to prevent the user from getting work done. What a joke. And to those blind cattle who use windows: you suck, too. It's your fault Windows is as wide-spread as it is, and it's your fault computers suck as much as they do. Windows even pulls down the Mac (which, despite being utterly superior to Windoze, sucks too). Sure, lots of people use Windoze. Lots of people believe in a god, too, and look where that's getting us.
And Kirkpatrick, as a Mac user, you're way to upbeat and positive in your story. Afraid you'll lose future interviews?
Figures.