It’s astonishingly bad. Everything about it. Windows. IE8. Windows Update. Microsoft Update. Automatic updates. Windows Geniune Advantage™. MSN Messenger. The Desktop Cleanup Wizard. Everything. I can’t believe how many people use Windows every day, and how much collective aggravation, wasted time, and damage to our industry has been caused by Microsoft’s sloppiness.
Even with every little trick I learn, shortcut, “off” switch, etc., Windows remains insanely maddening. There has got to be something structurally wrong with Microsoft as a company. They have smart people, I know this. I’ve met them. There are some things they do reasonably well, like some facets of their enterprise products, that I wouldn’t even know how to approach with Apple products. Now, that is probably more attributable to the fact that I’ve never worked in an enterprise sized Apple environment, but I’ll give them credit that it seems to work most of the time.
Furthermore, I haven’t used much of Vista or 7, but the bits I have used suggest that Microsoft hasn’t realized that their issue is not in their features or appearance, but behavior. They’ve fixed some of the obvious stuff, but other stuff has cropped up. It’s like they don’t trust their users to know what they want to do, and how to get there.
You get inured to it, though. If I’m using nothing but Windows all week, it’ll take me a little time to settle back into the Mac way. There might even be a feature or two I miss, like using Copy/Paste in the file structure. But the difference is that when I’m using my Mac, it knows how to stand back and let me work like a grown-up.
