Operating Systems: haters gotta hate

The first time I showed my MacApple obsessed friend the fresh install of Windows 7 on my computer, he may have fallen over when he saw how much the new taskbar looked like the iconic Mac OS dock.

Compare the Pair

At the time I was a fierce Mac objector - even in the face of what a steaming pile of fail Windows Vista was. In fact, the whole issue that I personally had with Vista was that it seemed like, somewhere along the way, Windows tried too hard to be Mac OS X and had ended up being like something akin to a Vegas Cher lookalike. It was inefficient, frustrating, and in a word my colleague coined specifically for these situations, "terribad".

Three years and several OS-related programming experiences later, what I slowly came to realise is that, after all, Macs aren't an evil hipster plague upon the technological universe - they're actually pretty damn impressive pieces of engineering. It just so happens that their intended use doesn't intersect with mine.

What I wanted to do in this post is have a stab at trying to pin down the mechanics of the standoff between Mac users and Windows fanboys and try to bridge the gap between them.

The main criticism that anti-mac users will have for Mac OS is how inflexible it is. Everything about the Macbook, from the Touchpad to the way 'Finder' looks almost exactly like iTunes seem like they dictate exactly how you're going to experience your shiny new machine.

That doesn't strike me as being a necessarily bad thing.

In the same way that good level design in a game intuitively and unobtrusively leads a player to the next waypoint or objective, the Mac interface is designed to tell the user how they're supposed to get onto the internet, or play songs, or make home movies, or a host of other things that, lets face it, 70 percent of the population wealthy enough to afford a computer will ever do.

The Macbook Touchpad - By far the best Touchpad in the market today

Apple knows this. And when Microsoft ported over Microsoft Office to the Mac OS, there's little denying the enabling power that a Macbook can bring to someone who wouldn't otherwise care about computer resource management or hardcore software development interfaces.


It's little wonder, then, that Windows tried so hard to tap into that intuitive interface market. Once upon a time, the set of killer apps for Windows were business, word processing and application compatibility - none of which are issues for Macs today. Quite a few Windows vs Mac OS arguments that I've witnessed in the past few months have basically consisted of the Mac user replying "Macs can do that too".

One would logically think then, given all this information (and that Windows at least seems to be following Apple's lead) that Windows is starting to trail behind in the consumer OS war, right?

Wrong - Windows currently runs on 82 percent of all internet access clients (see Wikipedia's article on OS usage share). That is, based upon data that your internet browser surreptitiously sends to magic databases, the 82 percent of all machines that access today the internet are running Windows.

OS Usage share. Note the Windows domination (From Wikipedia)

So, why? It's rather complicated (and possibly beyond my understanding) but I will try to distill it down to three things in decreasing levels of simplicity in explanation - Games, Working Flexibility and User Interface.

First, Gaming. Yes, I know that both Blizzard and Steam develop and enable games for Mac. But at the end of the day the Gaming community, (one that makes up a sizeable chunk of the consumer computing market) wants their Windows and wants their DirectX enabled graphics. Macs still have a long way to go to try to grab that market share.

The amount of noob pwnage that occured when Mac users entered Team Fortress 2 servers would only be topped when TF2 became free to download

Second, Flexibility - I talked before about how much effort has been placed into Macs' intuitive user interface. The problem with so much design going into intuition is that you leave little room for flexibility. That is to say, Macs are beautiful machines to use so long as you don't stray outside the bounds of what the Mac OS X developers had in mind. Again, I'm not denying that Mac is capable of many things. Graphics design, music production and even architectural software are all beautifully executed within the Mac OS framework.

The problems come when you get into the niche yet computer dominating markets - namely, engineering, software development and high end business. With the exception of some Unix distributions, Windows has the ability to integrate some of the most profoundly useful and elegant programming environments to work in (cf. Microsoft Visual Studio).

And the knock-on effect of this integration is that the software developers who make engineering software like Altium, AutoCAD and Matlab know that their chief users are going to use their products on Windows machines. Add onto this that Microsoft offers the best support for large corporations supporting massive networks of Windows machines and you have a business industry full of market sustaining Windows users.
 
And finally, where this post all started - User Interface. This is tricky. I complained before that Windows Vista was a pale imitator of Mac OS X. Windows 7 pushed that even further. But by fixing all the places where Vista went horribly wrong, 7 actually is a very nice and, dare I say, intuitive operating system to use.

Such is the success of Windows 7 that Microsoft have finally decided to retire the behemoth that was Windows XP (still, by the way, the most popular OS). And with the Windows 8 open beta out and receiving some very positive reviews, it seems like Microsoft are pushing in the right direction with user interface. It's not a Mac, but still nice to use.

The Windows 8 'Metro' UI is more touchscreen friendly than ever

Final anecdote - a rather persistent shop assistant  tried to justify the extra cost of a Macbook to me by saying that I was paying "for all the extra software features that make Macbooks easy to use". I stopped short of pointing out to him the conclusion to this post:

"You have no idea how I use my computer, and I don't care if your OS works better for you."

Hi. I'm a PC, and my best friend is about to become a Mac.





Post Scriptum:
Yes, I have seen the pictures of Henry Cavill in the new Superman suit. Its awful. But I will refrain from telling you all exactly why until I dilute the amount of Superman in my blog.