There have been three blog posts written in the past few days that have really struck a chord with me. The one by Vic sounds like he’s trying to convince himself to be excited about what he is doing. The “buck up little camper” speech.
Vic Gundotra – In defense of the company I love
My Disappointment With Microsoft
Wright: ?Microsoft isn?t thrilling me anymore.?
I was an ardent Microsoft defender and user for over 20 years. Somewhere, I have an “Internet Explorer: Midnight Madness” t-shirt. I had to stay up until 2AM the night of the release of IE 3.0 so I could be one of the first to download it and get that t-shirt. I supported IE 4.0 in many forums against Netscape 4.7 defenders. I recently bought an iBook instead of a Wintel based laptop ( my first Apple purchase since an Apple IIE) and I’m looking at the Mac Mini lustfully, waiting for Tiger to ship so I can get Tiger pre-installed on the Mac Mini. I’ve pre-ordered Tiger, but can’t bring myself to upgrade my wife’s Windows 2000 PC at home and the only reason I’m running WinXP on the machine I’m using now is because I got it for free (gratuity for usability testing at MS). I’ll spend $99 on a new MacOS despite not having any problem with the current release; But I won’t spend $99 on Windows XP. Heck, just the other day I thought about rolling back XP on this machine and re-installing Win2K prof to get a little bit of performance back. I still use the .NET Framework; I’m still an ardent supporter of it. I think that for the platform it is designed for, it’s the best thing to use.
How did Microsoft lose someone like me? Was it the security problems. No, despite ALL of the security problems that have been patched in Microsoft products, I haven’t been a victim of a single one. I’ve run a hardware firewall at home ever since I got a broadband connection and I keep up with Windows update. Is it the stability? A little bit. I crash more frequently in Windows than I do in MacOS despite running just as much “shareware” and “third-party” software on both platforms. Either the quality of developers is higher on the Mac platform or OSX just handles crappy code better.
I think the biggest thing is what Jeremy states in his post. I’m pretty unexcited by the changes in Longhorn and XP doesn’t do anything for me either. I watched the keynote speech at WinHEC today (the streaming part, I wasn’t AT WinHEC). Microsoft was touting the performance increases of going from a 32-bit platform to a 64-bit platform as if they had something to do with it. But the Apple XServers have been 64-bit for how long now? That’s not really the point though. The point is that there SHOULD be a performance increase moving from 32-64 bits. It’s expected. It’s like being surprised that your V8 Mustang goes faster than your 4-cyl Ford focus.
The second “big thing” during the WinHEC keynote was the Longhorn stuff. I’m not going to compare the Longhorn features to OS X Tiger because to be honest, neither of them are really innovating. Unless by innovating they mean “incorporating third-party application features into the operating system itself”. Both Spotlight will provide the “smart folder”/”virtual folder” functionality. the ability. The “run applications from the search box” functionality is already available in Quicksilver on the Mac and Slickrun on the PC. Google Desktop, MSN Desktop, and Copernic Desktop all provide most of the search functionality that people need. The Longhorn “metadata” search still relies on user interaction, so does Spotlight. If you don’t provide the metadata, you can’t search it. Most of the “Aero” UI improvements already exist in Aqua and the Quartz engine. Plus they don’t really add much to the user experience. Stuff like the font/graphics scaling is nice, but the animated buttons and the XAML designs are just eye-candy. I look at drop shadows and transparency on my iBook every day. I know, I know. Some member of the Avalon team or someone who downloaded the beta from the LAST WinHEC will tell me that “it’s way different”, but I can’t see any difference and I don’t think 99% of the users will either.
What am I really getting from Longhorn? A built in RSS aggregator? I’ve got it now with Bloglines. The ability to search RSS feeds? Pubsub does that for me. XAML? Sure it’s a nifty way of defining a user interface, but it’s just a prettier way of doing the same thing that I do on the web. More stability? Ok, sure. Whatever. How so? Will the same applications that I want to run now that crash Windows still crash Windows? Windows XP seems more stable than Windows 2000. It’s SLOW as hell on my old machine, but it doesn’t actually CRASH. It just hits the swap file a lot. Isn’t WinXP good enough?
But the biggest problem is: I don’t care. I just don’t care. I don’t care what new features Longhorn will bring to me. I don’t really care if MS PDF….. Metro will let me make prettier documents. It doesn’t really matter much to me. What do I care about? I care about the new features in .NET 2.0. But only because they will make life a little easier at work. I wouldn’t say I’m EXCITED about them. I’m more excited about Ruby and some of the developer features coming in Tiger. I’m looking forward to writing some Automator actions. WinFS? Meh Avalon? Meh. I don’t really care if Microsoft listens to my feedback and makes changes. They’re on their own. I’m not angry at Microsoft, I’m worse. I’m ambivalent. That’s really what should worry Microsoft. For every angry voice they hear, there are probably three or four that just don’t care enough to give feedback.