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Bill Gates earlier this month had the opportunity to show off Windows Vista to the world. His keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show was actually the first time that the Microsoft chairman demonstrated the forthcoming operating system to an audience outside Microsoft – no developers or hardware engineers.
Surely a company will show the best features in a demonstration of this year's most important product launch at the world's most important consumer electronics show, before partners, competitors and a gathering of media from all over the world?
The pictures from his keynote show perfectly well what those features are:
A way to scroll through your applications in 3D – and while alt-tabbing your movies will be able to see your movies still playing and preview documents;
Next came sidebar, the idea that Microsoft stole from Apple's Dashboard, which stole it from Konfabulator.
What about the new photo editing tools? It allows Windows to do what Google's free Picasa application has been doing for years: organise photos.
And certainly don't forget the new user interface for your windows and applications like Windows Media Player. Because, really, its shiny black interface is the main thing that a user will see when he boots up Vista, and the only feature that's really new about the operating system. All the other "new" features are just rip-offs of existing applications that Microsoft copied. In the end, Vista won't do anything that Windows XP can't do already with a little help from third party vendors.
As a user, would these features make you stand in line to purchase a copy, some night in November when Microsoft chooses to launch Windows Vista?
Even Windows boss Jim Alchin seems to realise that his offering has become extremely weak. So in trying to justify he five years that his team spent on delaying developing the product, he is now touting safety and security as Vista's big feature.
"Even if [people] are not into home entertainment or in any of the specialty areas, they are just going to feel safer and more secure by using [Vista]," Alchin told Zdnet.
Cynicism has taken over in Redmond. Microsoft has taken five years to finally make a secure operating system and now wants us to pay for it. After Microsoft pulled every feature in the software, all that's left now are under the hood adjustments.
Put it in a box and slap a price on it, because Microsoft's monopoly days are far from over.
Windows Vista loses by knock-out (pictured: Bill Gates beats Steve Ballmer in a computer game at CES
Tags: jim alchin, bill gates, Microsoft, windows vista
28 Jan 2006
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