Some of you may know that I hate fanboys, whether they're Mac, Linux, Sony or whatever. I don't mind if your passionate about a particular company, in fact that's a great thing and if I startup, or work for a company, I'd be honoured to have such people. What shits me are those who are so blinded (or brainwashed) that they go around spreading complete FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about other people's products. I don't care if they say, "Mac rules!" on an obviously Windows forum and wait for others to put him/her back in place. What gets me are people who say, "Windows Vista is just as buggy and insecure as XP, and there's nothing new. Get a real and innovative OS like a Mac. Micro$oft is EVIL." It's obviously untrue, yet they still feel it's necessary to plaster it over every blog they come across. Geez, if your product's any good, you won't need to sling mud over at your competitors - people will want it as soon as they see it. There's a fine line between playful jabs at your competitor, as Apple does so bloody well with their advertising, and blatant mud-throwing, and unfortunately fanboys can't see the difference.

Why am I rambling about this? I was reading a slightly unrelated post over on Scoble's blog, and saw an exchange between obvious Mac fanboy 'rory' and Scoble in the comments.

No, it is *NOT* DOJ to ‘blame’ it is the ones who made the piece of trash called ‘vista’….

Sure, the extra SW is no fun, but easily wipeable…

Vista is warmed over XP, and has the same security issues, just with a new face…..

Comment by rory — April 6, 2007 @ 1:02 pm

rory: if you think that Vista is only warmed over XP, that demonstrates you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Vista has a completely rewritten networking stack. A completely rewritten audio stack. Substantial changes to UI. A built in search engine that actually works pretty well, unlike the ones I tried with XP, much better Tablet PC and Media Center features, and a ton of other stuff. And, it was completely recompiled with a new compiler that blocks buffer overruns. There’s a ton of security work that was done, too. Including that it’s not running in admin mode by default.

But, no, it’s just “warmed over XP.” Yeah, right.

Comment by Robert Scoble — April 6, 2007 @ 1:14 pm

Reading Scoble's reply made me realise what Vista actually did for Windows - it brought Windows on to the same level as Mac's OSX Tiger. With respect to operating systems, there is now a level playing ground. Vista now looks as nice as OSX, if not better in parts, works just as well, and now has the right infrastructure to build on to make it better than OSX.

Talk about Vista being just as insecure is complete crap. Vista will always have more security issues as Macs, because there are millions more Windows users than there are Macs and perfect 100% secure software is impossible for something this complex. Just because security issues on Macs aren't as widely publicised, doesn't mean there aren't any (check out what software updates you're getting - majority are security fixes). If in a parallel universe Macs and Windows swapped places, Macs will be in just as much shit. Of course, from a consumer perspective, they couldn't care less about the economics of things, more what they get from switching. And it's true then, that Macs have much less virus and spyware attacks. But what it's really doing is giving the user an excuse to become complacent about security. They're lulled into a false sense of security, and everyone knows a false sense is worse than no security.

We're worried about our physical security - we lock our front doors, have alarms & immobilisers installed in our cars, and have lighting to ward off potential crooks. Why aren't we worried about online security? Windows users are gradually being educated to be as vigilant as we are with our physical security. Macs on the other hand, give users an excuse to not be vigilant, purely because there are less of them. That's like saying Lexus cars don't need alarms and immobilisers because there's more Fords, Holdens and Toyotas out there. Sounds crazy doesn't it?

The one area that Macs have a one-up on Windows right now is hardware design. Macs are cool, well designed, and now, very competitive on price. I can't for the life of me understand why there's no cool looking Windows laptop manufacturers out there; surely Apple didn't hire every cool design engineer out there. Like I said in a previous post, people are now buying MacBooks then installing Boot Camp and running Vista on them. Another mate told me he bought a MacBook because he wanted something small, but in the PC world, the smaller the computer the more expensive it is. It's the opposite in the Mac world.

Until the next iteration of OSX, Leopard, comes out (in the next few months), both OSs are on pretty much even ground. Neither has anything particularly better than the other, and in that respect Microsoft has done a good job. Of course they need to start innovating very soon, but bringing XP up to speed with OSX was a big effort because OSX was leaps and bounds ahead of it. Apple has given Microsoft the jolt it needed. I expect Microsoft to release new Windows features more frequent now, so it can keep up and make Windows better than OSX. Whether they release a new Windows more often (as is the OSX trick), distribute/sell features via its Windows Update site, or distribute new stuff some other way I don't know, but they've laid the groundwork so the battle between Vista and OSX should get quite interesting very soon.

P.S. For another perspective on the differences between Vista and OSX, check out this article by an MSNBC reporter, who switched from a Mac.