First you lose the evangelists...
When you lose evangelists like Chris Pirillo from the Windows camp, it's a bad sign:
Do I recommend Windows Vista? Not a snowball’s chance in………..I’m waiting on Apple to release Mac OS X Leopard. As far as I’m concerned at this point, Microsoft is taking a huge hit. The future of Windows, in my opinion, is inside a Virtual Machine or BootCamp on a Mac.
Sure, there are going to be a lot of people running Windows for a very long time - but the "bleeding edge" crowd isn't part of that crowd anymore. Microsoft Windows is now part of the background - commonplace, but not terribly interesting.
Hat tip Rob Fahrni. - and don't miss what he says about the appropriate choice for your non-technical friends/family who need a new machine:
The most obvious choice is Macintosh, period. If your parents already have a Windows box and $600.00 they can score a Mac mini and hook it up to their existing monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Apple pays very close attention to the user experience, everything just works.
Could not have said it better myself.
Comments
[Tom Sattler] September 28, 2007 13:42:19.342
Uh ... has the "bleeding edge" crowd ever been on Windows? I'd argue that they've migrated to Mac OSX or Linux a long time ago. Remember Windows 95, when one of the real big advantages was that you could finally create filenames greater than 8.3 in length? Big breakthrough, that one....
[Tom Sattler] September 28, 2007 13:46:55.672
.... of course, Mac OSX really IS Linux, just with a gussied-up gui sitting on top of it.
[Tom Sattler] September 28, 2007 13:48:09.237
Sorry, mistyped there. It's not Linux. It's BSD.
Win95 Was A Big Improvement
[W^L+] September 29, 2007 1:12:42.925
If you came from DOS/Win3.1, Win95 was a big breakthrough. The taskbar and start button, for example, were miles ahead of having your desktop covered with program icons. If you got Win95 OSR2, you got larger partition sizes (FAT32) and built-in TCP/IP. It was great.
Win98 and Win98SE were both incremental improvements to Win95.
WinXP has its share of problems, but mostly everyone who has used it has liked it to some degree.
Microsoft is all enterprisey now
[Mark Miller] September 29, 2007 16:55:34.981
My problem with Microsoft is they've totally shifted to the enterprise space. They used to be about "developers, developers, developers". Now it seems they're all about "architects, architects, architects". All they talk about now are Sharepoint, WCF, and WF, and their "Live services". I remember going to a .Net Framework 3.0 demo last year and wondering if I was in the right place. I asked if I was in the right room for developers. I was, at least that was the intention. The first couple presentations were all about system architecture and system administration issues. The next one was about their Expression suite. They did ONE development example. It was neat, but I think the signal was clear: Despite what they told me, I was in the wrong place.
I get the feeling what Microsoft is doing is taking what used to be developer tasks and turning them into commodity IS functions. IMO they're leaving the developers behind, not the other way around.
Secondly with the internet, OSS, and fast computers, their languages, which used to provide "bang for the buck" on slow hardware, now look like training wheels. They've been slow to upgrade the power of their development platform to utilize the more powerful hardware and meet the demands for powerful languages and architectures on the web. For example, had they introduced Linq 4 years ago as good as it's promised today (it's still not in final release yet), they probably would've won me over. Had they introduced the DLR 2 years ago with something like IronPython to go with it, that would've made it even better.