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Nothing puts a geek into a frenzied state like operating system bashing; so let's rile the e-thugs of the area up! Microsoft recently made Windows Vista available to the general public, receiving a lot of positive reviews. However, these reviews seem to be relative to past versions of Windows and not indicative of the current overall state of operating system technology. I do not mind people making comparisons for the sole purpose of showing what has been upgraded, but they fail to give an adequate perspective to the larger picture of what is and has been available to consumers for years now.

With the release of Vista, it has now added features that bring it only up-to-date when directly compared to Apple Inc.'s OS offering, Mac OS X 10.4, "Tiger." What Vista essentially does is ride that technology gap and throw it into a nice plastic box. If you wanted to run Vista, you could have done so back in late-April 2005 when Mac's OS X "Tiger" was released. Certainly some people must run Windows, or even prefer it, but as far as technology advancement goes among operating systems, it is lagging far behind.

I recently attended the Windows Vista launch event at Cobo Hall in Detroit and sat through a representative's speech to outline the details of what makes Vista desirable. I followed the speech closely, watched the demos intently and waited to be sold. Unfortunately for Microsoft, I realized that my current OS ("Tiger") was already doing a fantastic job (and has been for two years) of providing me what Vista has to offer.

Vista offers a new searching method that will quickly index all of your files, and then present search results in an efficiently categorized way. In Mac OS X, this same feature is called "Spotlight." The Microsoft camp also included "Sidebar," which allows users to implement handy micro-applications on their desktop such as weather, RSS aggregation, and system monitoring. Apple released this same concept two years prior in "Dashboard," providing users with "Widgets" instead of Microsoft's cleverly named "Gadgets." You really can't make this stuff up any better.

The examples don't stop there. Microsoft also has a near look-alike for Apple's calendaring application, "iCal". Microsoft's Vista Explorer looks strikingly like Apple's Finder. When Apple presented "Tiger" to the world, they had a banner at the event stating "Redmond [home of Microsoft], start your photocopiers." It appears to the technology-informed among us that Microsoft listened very closely.

Microsoft spent five years developing Vista, only to catch up to technology that is two years old. Sadly for Microsoft, Apple is around a month away from releasing their newest offering, Mac OS 10.5, "Leopard". With the release of Leopard, Vista will look even more antiquated. Microsoft has nearly unlimited resources and some of the most brilliant programmers in the world at their disposal, yet continue to provide the status-quo. Microsoft needs to once again lead innovation as they did for almost two decades, and start providing advancement instead of imitation. They can do better and their faithful deserve better.