Gosh, Windows…!

So Win­dows Vista will come out (when it does) with 7 dif­fer­ent ver­sions. My first thought: “[Groan] Oh, that’ll be just great for sup­port, try­ing to fig­ure out which peo­ple are using and why ‘fea­ture X works on my other com­puter but not on this one…’.” How can Microsoft tout usabil­ity and sim­plic­ity? Because most peo­ple don’t know any­thing else. For exam­ple, since switch­ing to Linux, I use a filesys­tem that does not need defrag­men­ta­tion. It’s out there, but all Win­dows filesys­tems (don’t know about the upcom­ing WinFS, which appar­ently won’t be ready in time for Vista’s release any­way) need defrag­men­ta­tion. So, users have to remem­ber, man­u­ally, to defrag­ment their hard disk peri­od­i­cally or suf­fer a per­for­mance loss. (Win­dows does not auto­mat­i­cally add defrag­men­ta­tion to their Sched­uled Tasks.)

Sec­ond thought, from one of the com­ments at the Slash­dot link: arti­fi­cial lim­i­ta­tions. Win­dows is mak­ing all of this stuff, but they’ll only give it to you if you pay more. This doesn’t even sound like a good busi­ness model, let alone the fact that GNU soft­ware is sim­ply free: Word and Out­look, widely used appli­ca­tions, have lim­ited imi­ta­tions in Win­dows by default (Word­Pad and Out­look Express), because they can’t give away the major draw – MS Office – with the OS. Gosh.