Houston H. Haynes

I’m an unapologetic Windows Vista power user. I have been quietly using Windows Vista for audio production since (and to a certain degree before) Vista’s initial release. It hasn’t been as smooth as I would have liked, but compared to the Apple slam dance of the PPC-to-Intel transition, it was a picnic in the park. The two main reasons for the outcry over Vista and the gleeful cheer over the MacIntel seems to be a combination of the sheer number of users affected by the Vista rollout,  and conversely the cult of personality that Steve Jobs and Apple seems to enjoy.

I’ve watched the unbridled Windows bashing for months now – wondering when people (particularly power users) were going to notice that it’s actually a pretty decent operating system. Granted, there was a lot of homework to do for vendors to come up to speed building drivers for third party devices, but I know people that are *still* waiting for Mac Intel drivers for their audio devices (well, ones that work reliably, anyway) on the Apple side of the fence.

As usual, the hype has far outstripped reality, with snarky Apple slacker TV ads smirking at a Windows geek falling all over himself – Apple panders in a way that would make P.T. Barnum blush. Everywhere you turn, Steve Jobs creates a kind of group amnesia – then the love fest continues as Apple is given a free pass on everything from poorly designed devices to web services that don’t deliver as promised to undercutting third party developers as well as numerous other anti-competitive practices. They get a free pass because of their relatively small portion of the personal computing market, and through that they’ve stirred up a relative perception that is so far from reality that it’s almost funny.

So the Mojave Experiment has been a little breath of fresh air. Notice that I didn’t say “dose of reality” or some other nonsense. But it’s hard to ignore the irony that people are so enamored with “Mojave” right after declaring the Vista was “awful”, “buggy”, and is “too slow”. It’s a bit of a straw-man presentation – but then again, Apple has been getting away with straw-man tactics for years, it’s time that Microsoft grew some stones and ripped off more than Apple’s Fisher-Price warm and fuzzy UI.

Food for thought.