In 2006, Microsoft released Windows Vista. It was supposed to be great but it was delivered years late, and when it finally released it was a slow, buggy mess that no one wanted to use. It wanted all of your memory, and it wouldn’t run well on the computer you already had without significant upgrades. People went out of their way to use its predecessor, since it was consistently faster and more compatible with their applications.

Let me type that paragraph again, with a few subtle changes: In 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0. It was supposed to be great but it was delivered years late, and when it finally released it was a slow, buggy mess that no one wanted to use. It wanted all of your memory, and it wouldn’t run well on the computer you already had without significant upgrades. People went out of their way to use its predecessor, since it was consistently faster and more compatible with their applications.

It’s now eight years later, and OS X 10.6 was just released to almost universally positive reviews. Many people who shout OS X’s praises from the rooftops don’t talk about its rocky genesis and growing pains, and tend to talk about the OS as though it was always the stable, feature-rich software that it has become.

The fact of the matter is that Apple took its not-quite-ready-for-prime-time operating system and refined, refined, refined, blowing through four major revisions in as many years and then settling into a comfortable stride of one major update every two years or so. The result is one of the most consistently snappy, usable operating systems on the market today, despite its messy genesis.

As you can see from the opening paragraph, Windows Vista was similar to that original release of OS X in many ways. It was intended to be the most major revision of Windows since Windows 95 started everyone up, but as months and years passed it buckled under the weight of its own ambition.

By the time it finally slipped out the door at the tail end of 2006, it was with a whimper, and expectations were built up so high that it couldn’t have succeeded even if it had been great when it launched.

Many of Vista’s actual ills have since been remedied by two service packs and countless patches, but it just hasn’t been able to shake its negative perception. As a result, businesses are still hanging on to Windows XP. New netbooks still run XP, nearly universally. Even if your computer’s manufacturer doesn’t officially support XP, a Google search will quickly reveal that you can make it run on just about anything eight years after its release, so hated has been Vista.

Enter Windows 7, due for release exactly two weeks from today: a new operating system that takes more than its fair share of pages from OS X’s book. Like an OS X update, Windows 7 is built on the foundation of what came before. OS X 10.6 is basically the same thing as OS X 10.5, but carefully tweaked and optimized to take advantage of advances in computer hardware. OS X 10.6 runs faster than OS X 10.5 on the exact same machine. OS X 10.6 ignores sweeping cosmetic changes in favor of under-the-hood tweaks.

Now, read that paragraph and replace “OS X 10.6” with Windows 7 and “OS X 10.5” with “Windows Vista.” That saves me the trouble of writing it out again.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has addressed nearly all of the major complaints that people had of Vista, namely speed (7 is much faster on the same hardware) and compatibility (if it runs on Vista, it will run on 7 99% of the time). The result is a very solid operating system, possibly the first version of Windows that I can recommend without hesitation.

It’s great that Microsoft tried the same ideas again instead of trying to offer up a product that was vastly different than Vista, a product that would have been subject to the same pitfalls and problems as any other vastly different product. It’s a strategy that has worked for Apple for most of the last decade, and I for one don’t mind that there’s a little extra Mac in my Windows these days.

Credit: bkwld.com

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