Friday 6 July 2012

Struck by a comment

made by a reviewer of the new Google Chromebox on El reg.

Google isn’t unique in moving the goalposts with the tried and trusted models. I’m still grappling with Mac OS X Lion’s quirks and, rather than bend to Apple’s current vision of doing things, I’m constantly looking to find workarounds so I can do routine tasks as quickly as before. Having an OS that nags you because it woke up after an upgrade and now thinks you’re stupid, is a tedious affair, but I digress. linky


Nice to know I'm not the only one who sees things this way. I'm still debating whether to ditch OSX and move in a different direction, or whether I'll be able to bear returning to Windows. Microsoft seem to have made such a mess of Windows that I really don't know, and am seriously considering a Linux build with Office running under Wine for work. My biggest misgiving is that Linux frequently doesn't connect well to things, and that printer drivers are clumsy and limited compared to the windows equivalent (something OSX also suffers from, since it uses CUPS too).


In all honesty a MBA is looking more likely, since the basic hardware is OK and the pricing is more than competitive with non-apple stuff right now.


While I'm talking about this, it seems that Apple has been taking back the OS market.

In 2004 there microsoft had an installed base of 56 machines compared to every apple device. The ratio is now 19:1 for conventional computers alone, and 2:1 if you include mobile computers like iDevices. Working against apple is the fact that in *many* cases if a household has one iDevice then it will have many - partly due to the interoperability of the walled garden, partly down to the wealthy fanboi effect. Working against microsoft is that much of the installed base is gently obsolescing, and there is a danger that it will be replaced by something else.

Microsoft has taken steps to try to protect its market share with the UEFI boot code requirement for hardware manufacturers (where PC hardware will only allow signed software to boot) to lock out 'free' OSs like linux etc. Not a real problem on PCs where there already know solutions, but supposedly a problem with ARM devices like most non-apple smartphones and tablets. There are people gathering with pitchforks and torches over this, except it's likely to be a non-event, concerned that they will be locked out of rooting their phone (running a different version of their preferred operating system from the standard one).

So it seems that evil microsoft has returned, but whether they can become dominant again remains to be seen. In some ways having the M$ monopoly was useful, in that EVERYONE knows the only form for a document to be universally presented was in office format (.pdf is pants because it's not readily editable) and all the other 'open' formats look different in every word processor & spreadsheet program.

Back to the original point, I wonder if anyone has though of designing an OS that tries to work with the user to give them optimal efficiency, instead of the user having to learn workarounds in order to be able to work with the OS?  That might be novel - remember your read about it here first!