Someone sent me a link to the Windows Vista Wow Prize draw, where you get to watch three demos of Vista, then get free entry into a prize draw.
I needed a laugh, so why not?
Like Vista, you need to click endlessly on a sequence of buttons to get anything done, with an annoying perceptible delay after each click. The videos themselves are low quality flash video. They are buffered, but not long enough, so you have to endure frequent pauses, no manual pause button to let it catch up, and they take forever to begin.
Apple manage to get much higher quality movies with near instant start, so what gives?
Not a good way to start wowing me.
So after a couple of minutes I managed to watch a movie about “Digital Memories.” A sort of blurry version of iLife Quicktour (and of course, iLife has been around for years.)
Next, I watched a movie on “Productivity.” It stuttered through demos of Spotlight and Dashboard (sorry, desktop search and gadgets), showed the mail client “which comes as standard!” and then went on to show off Office 2007, but instead of seeing business productivity gains, showed documents like “Out family newsletter,” very reminiscent of iWork Pages.
Only one more to watch now before I get to enter the prize draw. I soldered on.
Next up was “Communication” which showed off Internet Explorer 7 with new, ground breaking features, like tabbed browsing, and Vista’s better security and parental controls. Better late than never, I suppose.
By now, I was feeling a “wow,” but in the context, of “wow, what a lame product launch.”
Good news though, I can now enter the draw! Clicking on the link, however, I was greeted with this:
Were sorry, but we were unable to service your request. You may wish to choose from the links below for information about Microsoft products and services.
In the interest of fairness and to see if it was a glitch, I went through the whole thing again, twice.
Still broken.
So I’m left a much lower opinion (and chance of purchase) of Vista, and no chance of winning a prize.
And I still haven’t got my Wii.
4 Comments
The one thing Vista does have than no other operating seems to have is a plethora of different versions. I think you’ll find that if you get a copy of “Vista for mac users, home edition” or “Vista for those who weren’t wowed by the wow competition, enterprise edition” all might be good. Personally I am going to hang fire for “Vista for workgroups, slightly less broken edition”.
I’m liking that on Newsweek recently Bill Gates claimed that Apple copied _their_ designs from Microsoft. Obv. because they’ve been banging on about Vista for, like, seven years and gave Apple a headstart.
Of course, because Apple rushed their ‘copy’ out quickly OS X is nowhere near as secure as Vista is^H^H will be proven to be. *ahem*
While it may be true that Vista has introduced some of the same features that has been in OS X for years, I’ve played around with it, and I think that Microsoft has managed to make these features stand out a bit more. Like the convenient way desktop search is situated, where you can actually “make” your own gadgets, and I think Office 2007 is the most best office suite I’ve seen in a long time. Nothing compares to the easy fluent “ribbonized” office app. they have. Sure Apple had done them, but have they done them well enough? I think MS just amp’d it up a bit. Either ways, people are still going to buy it.
Hasn’t stopped many of my friends (gamers, and therefore winblows users, not Mac Zealots) discussing about upgrading new vista machines to ex pee.
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