You gotta love the software business. There are -- excluding Wall Street bailouts, of course -- very few industries where you can get the consumer to pay for your mistakes.
Case in point: this year’s new operating system releases from Apple (Snow Leopard) and Microsoft (Windows 7).
An OS is the basic underpinning of a computer’s software serving as a kind a middleman between the hardware and other applications. Both companies had pretty good operating systems on the market a few years ago. Microsoft had released Windows XP in 2001 and by 2005 a series of service packs -- the term the industry uses for major-but-free software overhauls -- had cured enough bugs to make it efficient and reliable. Also in 2005, Apple rolled out Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger,” which was highly regarded for user-friendly feature sets and good performance.
Then in 2007 things went wrong.
For Apple they went slightly wrong. Its 10.5 “Leopard” system added a variety of features such as built-in backup and (catching up with Windows) a center for playing multimedia. It also offered support for 64-bit applications -- the previous standard was 32-bit -- which allow computers to run faster if they have processors with that capability.
The problem was the Leopard supported both Macs with Apple’s old PowerPC processors and newer units with the new Intel processor technology. Leopard consumed a great deal of disk space and users who upgraded from Tiger commonly experienced degraded performance. Macs that had been zippy with Tiger were slow to boot up and sluggish in loading applications. In my testing, I found that PowerPC users should avoid it.
While Apple has never admitted that trying to bridge the two processor technologies had compromised the OS, the fact is that the Intel-only OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” released earlier this year is a speedier and more reliable system on an Intel Mac. I recommend the upgrade, especially since Apple gave it a modest price: $30 for a single Mac; $60 for a family pack to upgrade five Macs.
Windows is another story.
Long delayed (to the point of forcing company reorganizations and a few executive resignations/firings), the Vista operation system appeared on the market in 2007 as well.
And bombed.
Reviewers panned it for being unreliable, buggy, and appallingly slow. It was a huge hardware resource hog, which made those who upgraded older computers regret that they had done so. Users found that applications or devices on their PCs were constantly at war with Vista. Corporate users, always a prime market for Microsoft but especially so for Vista because it was designed to fix major security flaws in XP, stayed away in droves.
New PC customers started ordering units with XP instead of Vista and continued even after Microsoft attempted to discourage the practice.
So in October, Microsoft released Windows 7, which is for all intents and purposes a debugged incarnation of Vista. Some major reviewers have given it glowing marks, which leads me to wonder if some of my colleagues live in a different plane of reality from ordinary users. In my testing, Windows 7 fixed the most annoying problems with Vista but was not as spectacular an improvement as some testimonials would have you believe.
In an upgrade installation, I found that Windows 7 ended the handful of software and hardware incompatibility woes that had cropped up over time in Vista, but didn’t make the test system noticeably faster. A “clean” installation of Window 7 on a wiped hard drive produced a little better performance -- but that’s pretty much true of any clean installation of any OS ever made.
While it boots up faster than Vista did, Windows 7 is still slow in launching applications. It has some nice interface touches -- for example, in giving you a preview of what’s open in other applications when you are switching from one to the other. It also supports touch-screen PCs. But the fact is that with respect to productivity, a PC running Windows 7 and Office 2007 (Microsoft’s other flagship product) offers very little advantage over the Windows XP - Office 2003 combo. This is not my idea of progress.
Windows 7 also has lawyer-inflicted quirks. Because of the various antitrust actions against Microsoft, the company does not include email and other small applications on the installation DVD. This is apparently to ensure that PC makers feel free to install non-Microsoft software. If you want the Microsoft versions, you need to download them from Microsoft’s website.
I would certainly recommend that purchasers of new PCs go with Windows 7. It is more secure and more modern than XP.
Upgrades are a more difficult call. Microsoft has set hefty pricetags on Windows upgrades. The current street prices range from just over $100 for the Home Premium upgrade (the version most non-corporate users will need) to $200 for the top-of-the-line Ultimate edition. Also, while Microsoft allows for “in-place” upgrades (that is, changing the OS while leaving data and applications undisturbed) for Vista, you have to start from scratch with XP.
My advice to XP users would be to stand pat until you are ready to replace your PC. But if you have Vista, get rid of it. Just don’t pay any more for your upgrade than you have to.
