Now that Microsoft has renamed Longhorn to Vista, they have an interesting task ahead: convince consumers that upgrading to the new version of Windows next year is a good thing to do. Most people don’t want to mess with the hassle of an upgrade, especially if they have everything working “just right”. Witness the number of people (and companies!) still running Windows 98 if you don’t believe that.
Anyway, I found a list of features that will be included in Vista. Here’s a quick rundown:
- new search mechanism
- parental controls
- “better” home networking
- translucent windows
- IPv6 network support
- encryption of entire disks
- automatic hard drive optimization (read “defragmentation”)
- secure boot
There are a few other eye-candy sorts of things, I’m sure. In the end, though, the list is completely laughable because– you guessed it– both Apple’s OS X and Linux KDE and Gnome desktops already support all of these features. Microsoft should consider changing “Vista” to something more apropos like “Yesterday” to represent the fact that their fancy new features have been around for (in some cases) years on alternative operating systems.
Innovation. Hmph.