With the release of Windows Vista not quite 2 weeks ago, Microsoft’s operating system takes its next progressive step forward. I’m still of the mind that Vista is little more than Windows XP with loads of eye candy & fluff — and Vista’s The "Wow" starts now! slogan does little to dissuade me.

But then again, the same could’ve been said for XP — internally it’s known as "v5.1," whereas Windows 2000 was "v5.0" — but I’ll readily concede that Windows XP is superior to 2000. So I’m sure that, in due time, I’ll come to love Vista too... in spite of the tremendous horsepower (don’t you dare believe the meager minimum system requirements touted by Microsoft) needed to do practically the same things that XP already does, but with less flair.

Clems & I were talking about all of this earlier this week and neither of us understand the harsh criticism that XP gets. We’re all the time reading hateful rants about how unstable and buggy the OS is, yet we just don’t see it. In fact, having used every prior version of Windows made, I think XP is, well, da bomb! Anyone who has serious complaints about XP should be relegated to working with Windows 3.1 in a networked environment for a week. That’d shut ’em up!

And in case you don’t recall just how far Bill & the Redmond gang have come with this stuff, Steve Wiseman over at IntelliAdmin has a brief writeup on The Many Faces of Windows.

For reference sake, here’s a glimpse of Windows v1.0 in 1985:



...and the gorgeous Windows Vista now:

Labels: software, technology