Posted 6/04/2006 04:12:00 PM by Douglas

For those of you that are waiting for MicroSoft's new OS to come out, don't say that you weren't warned.

Well, Microsoft just upped the ante on internal conflict with the release of Vista Beta 2. It boils down to this: The software giant is favoring security and IT controls over end-user productivity. Don't get me wrong, security and IT manageability are very good things. But some of the people actually using the Beta 2 Vista software describe their experience as akin to that of a rat caught in a maze.

Business and home users will be nonplussed by the blizzard of protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and "Continue" boxes required by the User Account Controls feature, for example. Networking functions and settings are scattered all over the place. The same is true of what Windows XP calls Display Properties. By default, the main menus (you know, File, Edit, View, etc.) are turned off on Windows Vista folders, Internet Explorer 7 and several other programs and utilities that come with Vista. Listing 20 things you won't like about Windows Vista was unfortunately all too easy. The question is: Why couldn't Microsoft see this coming?

They haven't made any attempts to obfuscate the fact that they steal all their good ideas from Macintosh, but I was really surprised to see the screen captures of Vista and how much it looks like Mac's OSX.

Get XP while you still can!