“Frankly, there’s no other way to say this: Microsoft is stupid and Apple is not,” Jim Lynch writes for ExtremeTech.
“If you take a look at the history of OS design by each company, it’s pretty clear why this is so. Microsoft has historically made an unreliable, ugly, and highly insecure operating system based on its own spaghetti/Swiss cheese code. This is no secret to anyone who has followed the industry or even used Windows on a daily basis. If you are a Windows users you MUST have spyware/virus/malware prevention software or, sooner or later, your machine is going to get nailed,” Lynch writes.
“It isn’t Microsoft bashing to say any of this, it’s just the truth for Windows users each day of their computing lives,” Lynch writes. “Apple, on the other hand, decided long ago to ditch their old operating system and build one that was Unix based. Why did this matter? Well as people have begun to notice, thanks to its Unix roots, Mac OS X is a hell of a lot more stable and secure than any version of Windows ever released. Apple didn’t make this choice by chance, they thought it through and knew exactly what they were doing and why.”
Lynch writes, “Mac users simply don’t live in the same inherently insecure and fearful universe that Microsoft, through its stupidity and bad programming, has inflicted on Windows users. The difference is night and day, and anyone who has ever switched from Windows over to Mac OS X (or Linux for that matter) knows how liberating it is once you realize that are free and safe from debilitating viruses, spyware, and malware that plague the Windows operating system.”
Lynch writes, “Microsoft is stupid and will never get security right, Apple already has… Smart computer users are abandoning Microsoft in droves and embracing Mac OS X and/or Linux.”
“And, thanks to Apple’s skill at elegant design, Mac OS X is also much easier on the eyes and far more intuitive than Windows 2000, XP, or even the deeply flawed Windows Vista (which was supposed to be Microsoft’s best shot at catching up to Mac OS X). All Microsoft had to do, in terms of design, was to copy Mac OS X, but they couldn’t even do that right. So they ended up with an ugly imitation of Mac OS X Tiger and then promptly fell even further behind after Apple released Mac OS X Leopard,” Lynch writes. “Instead of the simple elegance of Mac OS X, Vista looks like a Frankenstein OS…bolted together and looking more and more like a stumbling, walking corpse of an operating system… [It’s] a second-rate clone of Mac OS X…”
Much, much more in the full article here.
Microsoft is the American car maker of software companies…
Ugly, uncreatively designed products, with horrible low reliability, stuttering performance and lousy efficiency by any standard, pulling most of the parts out of a parts bin strew with clunky pieces from models made a decade ago.
It always struck me how similar Microsoft’s technology previews and demos are to much like American brand show cars… they look exciting and different, and with innovative style and creative applications of technology… But when the actual product ships two or three years later… having been drawn through the design by committee shredder, it’s design, once innovate is not looking dated with key design elements watered down terribly or replaced with off-the shelf components, most or all of the promised technology improvements dropped entirely, and those that somehow managed to survive seem as it they had been sabotaged to protect the oil industry… and they wonder why the product fails, and only watered-down, beer swilling NASCAR loving uneducated losers buy them up (with the underpowered, underperforming, hardly efficient base model engine)…
Let’s face it folks… We are surrounded by rednecks… they buy American cars and trucks and Windows PCs at WalMart.
AND WHAT’s WORSE?
The poor fool idiot who has been brainwashed into only doing things a particular way.
So you try to help this imbicile do things a better way, to avoid problems and they HATE YOU.
“Why can’t I do it like before?” “It was so easy before you placed Safari on my PC”
“IE is responsible for all your viruses, why you had to pay $160 for someone to clean your machine to make it work again”
“But at least I knew where everything was before, now I’m lost”
“Well I can install IE and you’ll just have viruses and spyware again”
“But isn’t there a way to just clean them off”
“Yes, but it’s closing the barn door after the horses have already gotten out”
“What horses? Trojan horses?” “Where’s the BIG E now?”
Installed IE 7 today on idiots computer just in case.
For some reason it doesn’t use Javascript.
God help me, nothing on the web works without Javascript.
Please somebody shoot me…
Not that I’m dismissing Apple’s design excellence, but I sure wish I could run OSX on something other than Apple hardware…
The thing I believe most people have missed is that Microsoft is no longer an operating system company. Oh, they have an OS, and they continue to develop it–at least in theory. But by insisting on backwards compatibility all the way back to Win95 (if not DOS 3.1) they’re doomed to continue shipping crap. Worse, they don’t care anymore. They care about games, advertising and search but not about operating systems.
Microsoft is trying to be all things to all businesses, and in the process they’ve allowed their primary competencies to wither. If the purchase of Yahoo! goes through Microsoft will be dead within 10 years. If it doesn’t, and Ballmer remains CEO they’ll also be dead–it will just take a little longer.
Per IndieFan at the ExtremeTech Discussion Board:
You may know a thing or two about computers, software, and operating systems, but if you do it certainly doesn’t come across in this article. I use both Mac and PC, and I constantly get into debates with Apple-heads about which is better. First of all, I find Macs to be far less reliable than they claim. However, even assuming they are completely reliable out of the box, you seem to miss a major point of why Macs are, while good machines, simply a trendy, followers machine. Like all Apple products, you have to pay an insane amount of money to get all the swell features Mac brags about, and you are limited to only using Apple products with it. Your rant about virus, spyware etc.? Idiotic. I can buy a $2,000 Mac for its OS stability, or buy a $400 PC that will have the same stability after $30 in software is installed….let me think….
Mac used to be the only way to go for audio, video, and graphics applications. However, it lost its edge ten years ago. You can get a good, custom PC with all the bells and whistles you want, great software, and great stability, for less than half of what you pay for a Mac. Macs are the Rolex of the computer industry. It tells time just as well as the cheap Timex, but trendy idiots will insist it’s worth the ridiculous markup.
And your claim that Microsoft is stupid and their coding sucks? Guess what? Microsoft owns part of Apple, writes much of their software now, and Macs are now using Intel processors. Macs are just PCs in Mac clothing and you pay 4 or 5 times as much for them. What you get is less versatility for upgrade, software choice, and expansion….oh, but also your choice of super-pretty colors!
So who’s stupid?
This is a typic PC user response. This person is either really young or has been out of touch with computer since the mid 90’s.
MS does not own Apple. Those were non-voting shares. Do some homework.
MS does not write Apple’s software. That would be done by Apple. Do some homework.
Only limited to Apple products? Oh, you mean like USB, eSATA, Firewire, MS Office, Adobe Suite, Internal and External drives? Right, didn’t think you knew what you were talking about.
Macs cost 4x or 5x a PC? The cost is NEVER that different and, if you had comparable specs, the PC is roughly the SAME cost.
It’s PC people like this that makes me GLAD I charge PC folks to fix their never-ending malware issues. Apparently, only PC people buy my Macs. For that, I say thanks!
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I loved the article. But Microsoft is not second-rate, it is tenth-rate or worse.
Anyone who remembers M$ Bob knows that ‘Microsoft innovation’ is an oxymoron.
The reason M$ is “worth” $300B+ is that people are basically stupid, i.e. they are so easily influenced. After all they voted Bush into the presidency, drive SUVs, drink bottled water in plastic bottles, thought Iraq was responsible for 9/11 and believe the earth, sun, moon, the stars and all life on this planet was “created” whole as we now know it. M$ bid of $44B for Yahoo is like the owners of the Titanic buying new deck chairs. But M$ will not die gently, unlike Yahoo, it will try to convince us that we need to still own a horse & buggy even after the road in front our homes becomes free and we have free and immediate access to wherever we want to go.
Come on Zune Tang! Stop that WoW Raid that you are on, and chime in. We Macsheep need your clear, well worded, reasoned rebuttal to this.
MS is the 800 pound gorilla moving on momentum only. The reason they have 300 bil in cash is because they had nearly a 20 year stretch w/o significant competition, mostly due to a lot of unethical business practices. It takes time, but eventually you can’t run on momentum alone.
Vista is the first really visible public failure. For the first time companies are refusing to upgrade to the latest MS OS. That is a huge statement. Meanwhile Apple gains record market shares.
Calling one stupid and the other not is a generalization, but it’s clear which company is the one building momentum now.
@ Amos
You think that people are basically stupid because they “believe the earth, sun, moon, the stars and all life on this planet was created”. How else do you think things came to be? The universe and everything in it didn’t just suddenly appear. Your statement basically says that our lives are just “accidents” and I don’t believe that at all. Please tell me you don’t think we evolved from monkeys.
Fistula, nuff said.
No, Kev, we didn’t evolve from monkeys. Their line and ours split off from our common ancestor a few steps back.
I really hope you’re being sarcastic.
What’s all the hoo-hah about playing games? I work all day on my iMac and then go ape with quake 4 which runs beautifully. Are these windows guys under the impression there are NO games for Mac?
“they were held back by the enterprise demands of legacy support, which explains why in Vista you can still run DOS applications”
You can run DOS applications on Macs and Linux as well it doesn’t mean anything, DOS has been emulated since NT 3.1 back in the early 90’s. The same argument was used to say x86 processes had too much baggage being backward compatible to XTs but it doesn’t seem to slow down the new Intel processors.
I also like how so many people say Windows is spaghetti code, we must have a lot of ex-Microsoft kernel developers here
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“But by insisting on backwards compatibility all the way back to Win95 (if not DOS 3.1)”
Mmm most of the complaints I’ve heard about Vista is that the backwards compatibility to XP sucks. As far as running Win95 programs on it I’d like you to provide an example, just one.
Wow quake 4, that’s serious. Did you guys get asteroids too?
There is no underestimating the gullibility of humans. Many still read the astrology section of their papers/magazines, buy fraudulent medical devices, or even special water. Fact is, trying to get Windows users to accept that their OS sucks is like trying to tell christians that there is no life after death. Both camps cannot fathom such concepts.
“Yeah Microsoft are so stupid they rule the world”
Nope, they ruled the world, just like IBM before them. What we’re seeing now is the first stages of their decline and fall.
IBM was able to transform, adapt, and become relevant again, thanks to Lou Gerstner. MS doesn’t have that kind of talent in the executive suite.
-jcr
Well, well what do we have here? Just a little something for you. I got Vista the week it came out. I subjected it to evry phishing site, trojan infested hole I could find on the internet. Guess what? Vista performed as advertised. Every infection was stopped before install, or was interupted before system take over. Do that with our little wannabes you call macs.
The truth is and will remain, until Apple throws off this mantra that we are God and PC is crap, that the script kiddies will go after Windows and OS 10 or whatever will go blissfully along at 3-6% of the market unmolested. Why because no one gives a shit for that 3-6%. Think about it folks, taking on the bully was much more rewarding than picking on the playground sissy.
A windows PC is CHEAP. That’s why they get purchased over and over. Most people would rather deal with virus and trojan problems if they feel like that haven’t spent much money.
“Heck, I only spent $250.00 dollars on it, besides my [insert family member or IT person] can fix it for me. Why waste a lot of money on a dang computer” – generic PC user
Quantity over Quality. I’m surrounded by it.
@Crash
I’m glad you feel safe surfing your porn sites with Vista.
long time mac user here, no problems… use my guitar, keyboard, just plug and play… no virus protection, just common sense. all wireless, 3 comps in home, all run flawlessly. if anything hangs over 30 seconds, WHAM! command/option/escape, i force quit, reload, and go. Even that doesn’t happen often! I have to fix 2 windows comps tomorrow from in-laws- both are down, totally inoperable due to virus infestation. also, a 3rd won’t even boot. all are less than 2 years old, and have had NOTHING but problems. Windows just doesn’t get it, unless the “it” is a virus, unfortunately. i am getting tired of fixing the blasted pc’s.
@John
As I noted in my post, your not getting it. The reason PC has the virus attacks is the script kiddies love the big audience. And quite frankly Mac does not have it, now if they ever get some traction, then you will see the attacks begin.
Google the internet on Mac DOS, or trojan or vulnerabilities you will find them. As quoted by some of the vulnerability professionals, Mac OS is really just a problem waiting to happen. The whole base is unstable and full of exploits waiting to be used.