The Lonesome Road

This morning I was up on /. , catching up on the news and one of the articles today was Longhorn Beta is diappointing. Now, the article by itself is pretty ok. The rub of the matter came in when I was reading the (normally erudite) comments posted by the /.ers.

It’s nothing more than a flame war with islands of reason in the middle. Now, I really can’t speak much on the issue simply because I haven’t used the mac - and that’s the main problem in the discussions as well. You have rabid MS and Mac fans who for the most part have not seen what the other side has to offer and simply tout what their side has to offer. Though, from what I have noticed, most MS users who cwitch from Windows to OSX usually have very positive things to say about it. The reverse - well didn’t see too much on that score.

What I found particularly annoying was the fact that people are making predictions and critiques based on a pre-release version of the OS. The main point of the debates - the new UI of Longhorn and how it looks crappy. Therefore the new version of Windows is going to suck. Dudes - let them release the new version - then knock it down. Anyway you guys have quite a wait - God alokne knows when Longhorn is finally going gold.

To a certain extent, I do think MS is playing catch up with Apple, but it’s a good thing in many ways for Windows users. And there is always plagiarism in the computer industry. Apple has not escaped it either. Konfabulator claims that the new widget based desktop is an idea taken from them.

My basic point is see both sides of what you are debating - then flame. There are a lot of problems with MS - the most basic being complacency. But that’s what happens when you are a (near) monopoly. Tiger and Mozilla are showing MS the repurcussions of this attitude. Now it’s upto MS to respond.

In funny news today, it’s been conclusively proved that snail mail beats ADSL - literally

It is now safe to shut down this post.

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