No before you start saying that it is bad for me to steal Vista, I haven’t. We have access to it at work, because the state is a partner with Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, we still pay for it, but it is a reduced rate per license.
As I have been playing around with it, it is a decent OS, but there are some things that are just too obvious in it as just complete rip offs. They have stolen gadgets from Apple’s Widgets and Google’s gadgets. They even put it in a sidebar like Google did. They stole the search function from OS X and most of the visual effects from it too. The new MS Photo Gallery is just Picasa without the Picasa branding and an AutoFix instead of “I’m feeling lucky”. The new transfer dialog moves away from the “Microsoft Minutes” timer and puts the OS X style transfer up there. To me it just feels like they went for OS X with some Google and Linux thrown in. To me it feels thicker when I am using it too. Like there is a lot of stuff running on my machine and I don’t really know what much of it is, or why it takes up so much memory doing it. 512 megs just doesn’t seem like enough anymore.
I am also working with Office 2007 some and in here it really does feel like they have moved down their own path some. The “Ribbon” style of menus does seem like it will be helpful in finding features in Office. The new blog post feature in Word might actually help me make my posts legible and keep Mom from telling me that I should really proofread what I write. J They might even have trimmed the memory footprint down some, as right now it Word is only taking up 16 megs of memory. I don’t really work with Office too much though, so I am probably not a good judge of its features in terms of usability.
Well let’s see how this post looks when it sends to my journal.
