Being a Macintosh SE, iPhone, iPad, PowerMac, PowerBook, home built PC, Windows using web, Flash, print developer that has working in the training development, corporate marketing, and software development industries for too long… I couldn’t read Steve’s letter without calling BS. Read this with an open mind and consider the end user, not the corporations. I want Flash, my kids want Flash, why because some developer’s do amazing work on this platform and we should have access to it. Content is king. Enjoy…

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new proprietary, Mac only, Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years, hoping to keep them from helping Microsoft take our Design and Publishing customers from considering Windows as a viable platform. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience and I abandoned them, and Adobe was able to expand into the corporate market with their products, and deliver all their software to our Microsoft Windows competitors. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests because we can’t control what Adobe produces, or who their target customer is.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to monopolize our App Store – but in reality it is a complete monopoly on all our products, and has been for a almost all Apple’s existence. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash content is freely available on the internet, and both Apple and Windows developers can choose to develop on this platform, but in fact my truth is far more insidious. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open” (notice it’s in quotes, because we are secretly injecting proprietary content into these standards).

Apple’s products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Apple, and Apple has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available and able to run on any computer OS on the market (even Linux) , and the creative output from these products has created an ecosystem adopted worldwide, both free and commercial. Because Apple is the only producer of the hardware, operating system, development platform, and distribution system for their products, controlled entirely by Apple and available only from Apple for use on their hardware. By every definition, Apple is a closed system. Apple controls what content their customers’ can consume; no flash, no un-Apple-approved apps, forcing developers to add proprietary tags to their web sites to properly display their content on Apple controlled products, requiring developers to register with Apple to even have access to the information to develop their content for Apple’s products.

Apple only  produces proprietary products. The operating system for the Macintosh, iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open, and sprinkled with Apple proprietary tags like those in legacy browsers. Rather than use Flash, an industry standard development and publishing format, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript – all open standards that are not supported by the largest user base in the world: Internet Explorer users. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with embedded batteries, proprietary cables and conectors, and support for only one transfer software iTunes, we chose to avoid all available industry standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is a completely open but marginally supported, or implemented standard, because the largest internet user group in the world cannot consume it, which makes Apple very happy to an opportunity to pull users away from Microsoft.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has seeded the browser market with a rendering engine that restricts developers ability to customize their pages, because Apple has specific opinions about how forms should render, as well as giving us hooks into a larger population of browsers. And the world needs open standards, and products like this.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video, 90% of kids social/gaming sites, 50%  of educational software, 90% of corporate training materials, etc… on the web and corporate intranets is in Flash. What we’re not saying is that some of this video is being re-produced in order to cater to our ever growing market share in another format, H.264 (a non-opensource format), and now it’s viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube developed a Apple approved app, to deliver their estimated 40% of the web’s video, to bundle on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others all developing apps in our closed system in order to maintain market share in this ever changing market. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video, but they are missing out on games, training, music sites, creative content, and entertainment developed and delivered in this long standing industry format that we can’t control.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free, and Apple makes money off ever single one of them even if no one buys/downloads them. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world and we love all the cash.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted that the internet has the worst security records in the history of computing. Almost any site can inject your pc with viruses, Trojans, worms and rootkits. It’s only a matter of time before HTML5 and CSS3 are exploited too. In fact Apple has been delivering Quicktime for years and it’s a fantastic medium for redirecting users to viral sites with embedded URL bookmarks. It’s only a matter of time before Apple products have enough markat share for hackers to start developing targeted attacks against our consumers. We also know first hand that Macs crash, they have been crashed by too many inits, too many installed fonts, poorly programmed applications, websites, and drivers. Heck they are computers after all, and I can’t name one computer that doesn’t crash, except for one that isn’t plugged in. We have been working with Adobe to help our computers run Flash better, but our system issues  have persisted for several years now. We just can’t figure out how to sandbox content in our browser to prevent it from crashing our systems. We don’t want to expose the un-reliability and in-security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices because traditionally the browsers on phones have sucked. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, but the only decent browser that could support Flash is ours so we’ve hobbled Adobe for a few years now. We love having all this control. Adobe shipped Flash on phones in 2006, and have continually improved their product since then delivering flash content world over to dozens of devices. We don’t think we can ever get our smartphone to support this technology that the Japanese have been supporting and shipping for around 4 years, we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath when we kept stumbling to deliver a reliable platform to deliver developer’s content. We know how it will performs on our competitors. Heck if we put Flash in then we’d have to add Java support too, and we have to carefully roll out our own proprietary Virtual Machine on Macs just to support this technology, what kind of havoc would the wreak on our iThingies.

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies, because it has such a huge market base.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained. What we’re not saying, but it’s obvious, this new hardware decoder is better than the software decoder and now that Flash, and our products have this compatability we’re running out of excuses fro supporting Flash.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all, effectively cutting out any enhancements in interactivity that Flash offers. They just play the video stream in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any interactivity, or dynamic content that users can contribute to, heck any web 2.0 support at all in the video delivery. That’s ok  for Apple because on iPhones, iPods and iPads we can wrap marketing messages, and interactivity in our proprietary apps effectively cutting out the rest of the market because corporations need to advertise and monetize.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers just like the rest of the internet, because touch devices didn’t exist in any quantity to support. For example, most websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface can’t support rollovers so every interaction on websites has to be rewritten to support touch . Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to update their Flash websites, why wouldn’t they want to start over from scratch? Ironically, our mobile devices are forcing JavaScript libraries to rewrite whole portions of their code to make it small enough to fit into the small cache on mobile products, as well as stripping out all the mouse events we can’t support.

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that the Flash development platform is monetized and proprietary, just like everything Apples sells, has major technical drawbacks for our hardware and software, and doesn’t support touch based devices yet, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash software engines to play video and  our inability to support non-Apple interactive content from websites, but Adobe has also provided developers a means to deliver Flash apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that without tight control over all third party software, and hardware products, letting someone else have access to our platform, the ultimate result is our products look shoddy, buggy and over priced. We like to distribute sub-standard apps, like iFart, iBurp, and iVomit, without the hindrance of not profiting on the delivery and development process. If developers grow dependent are allowed to use third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features, and we can’t control the development process. This would cut off one of our revenue streams, and might illuminate any inadiquacies our development tools have, they the third party tools don’t have like the ability to deliver to multiple platforms simultaneously. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party illuminating our platform’s shortcomings by opening our development platform to non-Apple developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party would not add touch features to mouse driven versions, supporting enhancements from one platform because they are un-available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features, ours. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where we can’t block developers from using our competitors innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps, allowing their developers to make the most out of their development costs. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms, because Apple has such a small market share in the desktop arena. Why would they spend development dollars to support a minority share of the delivery market. Why not aim to meet the needs of the largest customer market in the world. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X. We’re glad they finally bit the bullet and pour millions of dollars into supporting 5% of the market.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide a tightly controlled environment available only to our developers, and we want them to stop standing on the shoulders of other platforms to create the best apps the world has ever seen, because we can’t make any money if they do. We want to continually enhance the platform preventing developers to continually re-write more of their code, pay additional royalties, providing a formidable revenue stream for Apple. We win – we sell more devices because we control the best apps, developers reach a more Apple centric audience and customer base, and users are continually upgrading their hardware support the latest batch of proprietary  selection of Apple controlled apps not available on any other platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the iApple era is about proprietary devices, touch interfaces and Apple web standards – all areas where we don’t want Flash.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that the market is trying a new delivery mechanism to monetize their content, whereas Flash was the old method to watch video or consume any kind of rich interactive web content. And the 200,000 fart apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create crappy paid for applications, including games.

New open standards being created regardless of the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on all devices, and platforms, forcing us to inject our proprietary tags and standards into the world wide web. Hopefully Adobe will not focus more on creating great HTML5, and multi-platform tools  for the future, and continue wasting time criticizing Apple for trying to control it’s ever growing market share.

Steve Jobs Joel Cory
May, 2010

This great new Microsoft browser will only be available for Non-Windows XP users. So the largest install base, the customers that are still running IE6, will continue to run IE6 because they can’t update to IE9. In my mind there is no hope for standards in IE. Here’s why. Most users will stick with what they have, XP. They will stick with it until they can’t get support, a year or two from now, and they have a major OS failure. In the meantime, IE9 will come out and the largest audience on the web, XP users, won’t be able to use HTML5, or CSS3, forcing most companies to ignore these new standards, and continue building to support IE6+.

Microsoft has an opportunity to release a browser that would bring them up to speed with the rest of the browser world, drag the XP users into web 3.0, and finally allow developers to have a more level playing field. Instead they are going to relegate standards to the fringe group of early adopters, continuing their trend of innovation at the expense of the industry, and the users, just to sell copies of Windows. They did it with Halo 2 and Vista, couldn’t play unless you upgraded… I’m not surprised, but I am sickened.

In pondering my Google analytics I discovered that 26% of my IE readers this last month still use IE6…WHY? I thought there might be a lot of Windows 98 users still bouncing around the interwebs. After all computers are expensive and XP and Vista are hard to find. Hmmm.. That can’t be it. Here are some facts:

• Internet Explorer was released on August 27, 2001 near the time Windows XP was released
• Safari 3, 4, and Firefox 3 support CSS 3, IE6 partially supports CSS 1
• Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2 in late 2006
• Secunia counted 20 unpatched security flaws for IE6
• PC World rated Internet Explorer 6 the eighth worst tech product of all time

So the question comes down to why are you 26% still using this clearly outdated, unsecure, poorly updated, soon to be banned browser?

It’s not because you’re running Windows 95, 98, or ME… Here are the stats:

1. 97.14% of all visitors running Windows are capable of running at least IE8.
2. 1.7% of visitors cannot run IE7 or IE8
3. 24% of visitors running IE6 are capable of running IE7 or IE8

So what’s the problem? Anyone running Windows XP or Vista should be running at least IE8. Period. Its faster, more secure, supports the latest web technologies and standards and its FREE! Why not upgrade? It’ll even transfer your settings. You can get tabbed browsing, anti-phishing security, support from a vast community of users and companies.

Additionally many companies and services are going to drop support for IE6. Why because it costs them money. I spend half of my time trying to hack CSS to get it to work in IE6. Basically develop once for standards compliant browsers. Then develop all over again inserting extra tags, and styles to get everything to display the way it does everywhere else. What a pain. These 26%ers are literaly holding back the world wide web. We are all slow pedalling to let you keep up with the rest of us.

It’s time to move on. Knowing that only 2% of my visitors are completely incapable of using a modern version of IE (they could use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera…) gives me no reason at all to continue wasting my time catering to this lowest common denominator. Now all I have to wait for is IE8 (9, 10 maybe 11) to support CSS3 like their competitors.

Good news for all. But it’s still too early to tell if this will be enough. There is still the issue of IE not embracing early adoption of CSS 3, and HTML 5. Most other standards based browsers have started supporting these future thinking standards and primed the web with example implementations and preparations for the inevitable switch.

What ever happened to “keeping up with the Joneses”? Let alone trying to pass up your competition. Heck Microsoft doesn’t even market a browser for Macintosh,the second largest growing operating system on the market. It’s even lost the browser wars on mobile devices with Safari (webkit) recently taking that crown.

It’s with these thoughts that I ask, is IE even worth the trouble? Maybe it should just go away and leave the innovation to the more relevant competitors on the web.

What’s amazing is that there aren’t problems with systems other than Vista. Not XP, 98, 95, Mac, Linux etc… If Microsoft was aware enough of the problem to create a hack to work around it…why didn’t they just fix the damn problem? Besides being years behind schedule, and millions over budget, would you rush your flagship product to market with as many bugs and incompatabilities as there are? Were they expecting users to miss, or overlook these glaring mistakes? Now Microsoft has loosed this beast on the market and they are taking a beating over it.

Businesses are hesitant to adopt such an expensive system architecture. Gamers don’t want to sacrifice their framerates and hardware for the sake of a couple nifty rendering effects. Existing users are being warned away because their old hardware isn’t supported. Even pundits are backing away slowly because Microsoft is dragging their feet to resolve these issues some nine months after release. It’s only the new computer buyers that are being forced to upgrade because, with the exception of Dell, all the OEMs were held at gun point encourged financially to sell new systems with Vista only. Microsoft in the meantime is sitting back trying to spin the whole thing with positive sales numbers based on some skewed comparison to the adoption rate of XP. Speculation is that the Vista sales numbers are also including the licenses sold to OEMs as well as end users. Either way they seem to have done a bang up job at screwing up a very promising operating system.

My second point has to do with the next generation of DirectX. According to Microsoft this cutting edge API can only be supported by Vista. There are several companies already cracking and reverse engineering DirectX 10 for support on XP as well as Linux. Honestly do you think if it wasn’t possible that these companies would bother setting up shop to tackle this problem? Do they really know something about DirectX that Microsoft, the creators, don’t know. Highly unlikely. Microsoft is painting themselves into the greedy bastards corner, even more then usual.

The final straw for me was an article on Slashdot pointing to this survey from Valve. According to system statistics of the 1,092,762 systems in the survey only 2.31% were DirectX10 Systems (Vista with DirectX10 GPU). After nine months of public consumption only 2.31% of the usually bleeding edge gamer market were even bothering to upgrade to Vista to run DirectX 10. Even more telling were that 7.99% of the users were running Vista. Even gamers running Vista weren’t upgrading to DirectX 10 in the droves that Microsoft would hope for. Pathetic. Moronic even. There were more than twice that many users running DirectX 7 than DirectX 10 (4.97%).

You can draw your own conclusions from this survey, I believe this is a direct indication that people are skeptical of Vista, and DirectX 10 for gaming. Everything I have ever read, and experienced in gaming is that frame rate is king. If you bog the system down with background processes your game will run like crap. Vista requires so much additional hardware that I made the decision to not upgrade. Why would I cripple
my kick ass gaming rig by installing a system that requires twice as much RAM, Double the graphics power, and more CPU speed? If my current system plays 99.99% of the games on the market, why would I want to upgrade at a significant cost to play the other .01%? Especially when that game is three years old! I’m not in any hurry to burn my cash on upgrading my system. Heck I could buy an Xbox, with keyboard, mouse, and Halo 2 for less than the cost of the video card upgrade. Or I could borrow an Xbox from a buddy for a week and pay Microsoft a dime…Hmmm, that sounds even better.

As most people know, Windows is a double edged sword, it seems easy at first but there are lots of potholes on this road. Windows 3.1 seemed to become corrupted almost weekly, and I was constantly re-installing it. Windows 95 was more stable, but you always had to exit into DOS to get some applications to run. Windows NT 4 suffered a similar problem as 95, and was drastically different in terms of system administration. Windows 98, and ME were really only patches to 95 to support USB and a few other technologies. And then finally windows 2000. Stable and robust like NT 4, but more inline with the workstation user than NT 4 which really felt like a server environment. I really liked Win2K. Even after XP came out, Win2K was better because it was just as stable as XP, but could be run on half the computer that XP required. Half the RAM, drive space, and video card. Eventually XP’s bells and whistles won me over and I switched. It made some tasks really easy, and the improvements from day to day were enough to convince me to switch. When I built my new PC I wanted to move XP onto it, so I had to decide whether I wanted to shell out for another license of XP, or try something more daring. I settled on trying Linux.

The first time I ran Linux I tried Suse 9.2. It installed easily and ran well on my older P4 1.8Ghz. One day I decided to upset the apple cart and re-install Windows just to get my ATI All-in-wonder running to be able to capture video again. (The Linux support for this is little more than a hack and it was really a pain in the butt at the time) So back to Win2K. It ran well for about six months and then about two weeks ago Media Player stopped working. So I went to uninstall it, and the Add Remove programs popped open with a gray bar down the side of the window, a string of text across the top, and no icons, or menus. Crap! Now what. I could re-install windows, but clearly I didn’t have a really good opinion of it after it just finished crapping on me. So the only logical choice was something free, robust and simple. I’ve reading a lot about Ubuntu Linux, Beryl adding Vista-like enhancements, and knowing that Linux ran well on this box before.

I burned the Live disk, booted into Kubuntu (the KDE desktop version of Ubuntu, still Ubuntu but a different X-windows interface) and clicked the Install Icon on the desktop. A few questions later the desktop popped open, I installed a bunch of free applications, and I was running again. Just as windows is a double edged sword, so is Linux. It’s easy to install, easy to run, and there are now lots of ways to keep it updated and running. The downside is it isn’t Windows. So there isn’t a vast selection of applications, games, and hardware support. My video card, for example, is more than capable of handling OpenGL screen savers, but the Linux drivers that come out of the box cripple the video card to a staggering level. But if all you are looking for is an OS that’s easy to install, can run Thunderbird for email, Firefox for the web, and enough security to keep hackers, and spyware out of your life, why would you bother paying Microsoft for a license of Windows? Now if only I could keep myself from trying to squeeze more juice from the video card and other hardware and end up breaking the damned thing I’ll be just fine.

Read a random sampling of reviews and you’ll get almost a fifty-fifty split on the value/trauma of switching to Vista. Clearly the product isn’t ready. There will always be detractors, anti-Microsoft, pro-Linux, zealous Mac users. When the mainstream Microsoft sympathetic press, and IT departments are saying, “avoid this product like the plague” in a heated and equally divided debate, that is something to pay heed to. It is a clear example that Microsoft failed to deliver a product that would meet the needs of their intended audience, and their lack of quality control has resulted in consumer doubt that no amount of marketing hype can overcome. The only way they can fix this problem is to fix the product, lower the system requirements, and the cost. After all who wants to pay $150 for a cool screen saver? (read 3D alt-tab program switcher)

The problem with Vista is simple, why bother?

The only reason to upgrade software, especially an OS, should be some compelling improvement over what is currently available. Microsoft claims four areas of improvement over XP; security, ease of use, more entertainment, and better connectivity. (No, really, I got this straight from their site).

Security
“New” features were to be introduced resulting in a truly secure system, that is after all one of the most prolific complaints about Microsoft Windows, and purportedly the highest initiative at Microsoft over the last few years. I feel that the biggest gap in security with Windows is IE, and the methods employed by Windows to access the internet. For example you can visit a web site that can run a script that will install software on your system. This is a problem, as anyone who’s had malware or spyware installed on their systems can tell you.

Vista’s new security features have addressed a problem, but not this problem. Microsoft’s security solution is the UAC, or User Access Control. Every operation that should require an Administrator’s control prompts the users to “accept” or “deny” the operation. So when the hackzors try to plant a Trojan on your system the system asks if you want to allow this operation. Unfortunately, by the time the user gets to this point with their system they may have already been conditioned, in the Pavlovian sense, to just click “Allow” inadvertently. The unfortunate implementation of UAC prompts users to allow or deny even common tasks like moving files on your local hard drives conditioning them to click allow on a regular basis. Another flaw with UAC is that once a user allows an installation of software, that software is given Admin rights to the system. Oops. Now hackzor’s app can pretty much do anything it want’s because Microsoft trained it’s users to “just click Allow.” So much for security.

One of the first articles I read was describing why the Vista’s hardware requirements were to be so high. Microsoft really believed that users wanted more safety with their systems, and data. Protect users from themselves by providing safeguards to prevent them from inadvertently deleting their system files. The rollback feature was nice, but they wanted to lock down the system even more to prevent users from hosing their own computers, and in the event of some delete key catastrophe, a really easy way to restore their system back to a pre-oops state of Vista goodness.

The other advertised features are Defender, backup, and parental controls. While these are great features, if they work, they are already available for XP.

Score: Vista 0: XP 1

Ease of Use
Search, Photo Gallery, Flip 3D. Wow. Lets sum this upImproved search, already have a perfectly good gallery, why would I want something fancier than alt-tab??? The real detriment to ease of use is that they changed many of the ways that Windows used to operate to “improve it”. Users now have to relearn how to use the same operating system they’ve been using. Not a step forward, more sideways.

Vista 0: XP 1

More Entertaining

Now the gamer in me comes out. I like to play games on my PC and Microsoft launched a new campaign this last year called “Games for Windows.” Vista was to be the crown jewel in this campaign as DirectX 10 is only available with Vista. New graphics potential unleashed that consoles could only support once the Xbox 720, or PlayStation 4 arrives. But Microsoft tripped as only Microsoft can, ten feet from the finish line. If you consider that neither the drivers nor hardware existed when Vista launched it’s hardly a selling feature. For an OS that was in development for five years, maybe they could have partnered with at least one hardware vendor to get these drivers and hardware released at the same time? Nah, why wait for hardware that functions out of the box.

As it turns out, many of the old games, hardware, and DirectX 9 are suffering problems in Vista. People can’t even continue with the present state of gaming technology while they wait for the next generation to arrive.

Now consider the real motivations for the Vista only DirectX 10 conspiracy. Halo 2 will only be available to Vista users. I would like to play Halo 2 with a keyboard and mouse but would have to upgrade to Vista in order to do this. I have no doubt that Microsoft will do it’s best to boost OS sales by forcing consumers to upgrade to play the new hot games they will be releasing.

Vista 0 : XP 1

Better Connected
This set of features is amazing…Would you believe revolutionary.. How about, of wait we already have two of these, and you have to have another Microsoft product to use the third, an Xbox. The other two fast boot and resume, and network connectivity to your home PC. These aren’t new features.

Vista 0: XP 1

Where does this leave us?

This inspires a string of great questions: Many of the new features are only available in the more expensive versions of Windows, will the people who really need increased security buy the Ultimate or Premium versions? If security was such a primary concern why would you want an OS to allow a browser to install anything? If Vista isn’t anything other than a shell to allow people to buy more Microsoft products, what is it? Lastly, if almost every single feature is already available in XP, or through a third party application, why in the name of all things capatilist would you buy a product that doesn’t offer you anything new other than vapor?

If Microsoft’s goal was to create a more user friendly system why would they rush it to market without complete support for existing hardware? If a device already works in XP why in the world wouldn’t it work with Vista? Heck even Linux does a better job with devices than Vista; usually a base level of operation is available, if not the complete feature set for devices.

Now consider the goal and the requirements together. If the point was to create a more user friendly, “hold the user’s hand” environment, friendlier to grandma, why would you increase the hardware requirements? No grandma the bargain PC that you need to check email and print baby pictures isn’t powerful enough to run the “safe, easy to use” Vista. You need to buy the uber gaming PC with a mondo video card, and enough ram to open a 200Mb Photoshop file. Oh, and you can’t get XP anymore because it’s obsolete… Really?

Final score Vista 0: XP 4

Why Billy, why?
With all these glaring inconsistencies, who in their right mind would have released this software? Vista is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Computers have matured to the point where no one should release software that isn’t ready to support the current level of technology, and support the established base of hardware. The public should not be beta testers for the final release of software. An Operating System should be intuitive, secure, and operate transparently for the user. And a new version should never package existing features and claime that they are new, or improved, when they are old, and broken in the first place. Unless you wasted a bunch of money developing a product that didn’t result in a product that was actually what everyone hoped it would be.

What other people have to say about the new Vista Sucktastic state of stupidity:

ASP.Net developers and their installation nightmares
More problems
Microsoft incompatibility with itself
A Vista software compatibility list
Games problems from Computerworld
More gaming issues
Gaming issues listed on Slashdot.org
Information weeks 90 report card
Security holes in Networking stack
Ease of use for photographers, and more entertaining…