the tindog coffeehouse

Microsoft officially launches Windows 8 tomorrow. I won’t be upgrading.

On the surface, that’s not really that big of an announcement, but if you knew me, you’d know how significant it really is. You see, I’ve eagerly installed and run almost every version of Windows on my home computer since Windows 3.0, including Windows 2000 Server, Windows ME, and Vista. Not all of them have been winners (ME was by far the worst), but if it was the latest version, that’s what I wanted to have.

Until now.

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I’m not a Mac user, so maybe I’m not really qualified to pass judgment on Apple’s newest version of its OS X operating system, codenamed Mountain Lion.

But I can’t help but to laugh at all the negative reviews of it that I’ve seen in the last couple of days. It seems as though a lot of hardcore Apple fanboys just aren’t as impressed with OS X as they used to be, not because it’s not an adequate OS — which I’m sure it is — but because it’s only adequate.

If you’re keeping score at home, Mountain Lion is the ninth iteration of OS X (officially numbered 10.8) since 10.0 (Cheetah) premiered in 2001. Which means that OS X is actually older than Windows XP. Of course, a lot has changed since Cheetah, but maybe not enough. The problem is, since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has largely been coasting. Any new products have been merely a half-step better than their previous version, a gradual evolution rather than a bold revolution. Even the iPad for all of its success is really just a jumbo-sized iPod Touch, which is really just an iPhone without the phone part.

And then there’s Microsoft.

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Once upon a time, there was a computer operating system called DOS. It was a command-line, non-graphical OS that required users to type in commands to run the programs they wanted to run. And for a while, Microsoft Windows ran on top of it. Your computer would start up into Windows, but you could exit it and run DOS programs. Windows and DOS each had extremely different user interfaces and different ways of doing things, even though they both ran on the same computer.

Running the Consumer Preview version of Windows 8 is like living back in the days of DOS.

I’ll elaborate further, but suffice it to say, from everything I’ve seen so far of Microsoft’s newest OS, I’m not a fan. Windows 8 is designed first and foremost for tablets with touchscreens instead of PCs with mice and keyboards. It draws heavily from Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, prominently featuring the multi-colored tiles of its Metro UI, while pushing anything resembling a traditional Windows desktop as far away as possible. On a touch-based tablet, this approach makes sense (even if Metro itself is hideous), but on a laptop or desktop, this touch-centric paradigm is a train wreck. Microsoft has clearly bet the farm that everyone will be using only tablets in the future, somehow forgetting that the majority of its customers are enterprises that deploy thousands of laptops and desktops daily.

Here are my initial impressions after playing around with the Consumer Preview:

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I’m blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. Dyer began the book by trying to put technology in its proper perspective. Technology, he argues, isn’t neutral. As it changes over time, we change with it. What we view as new and futuristic today becomes normal (or “mythic”) to future generations, to the point where we no longer even think of it as technology.

Imagination.

In Chapter 2, he builds upon this point by looking at exactly what technology is, defining it in terms of a narrative:

Though we might not realize it, we compose these mininarratives whenever we encounter even the simplest gadget. If we happen to see a shovel, our minds can easily imagine the act of digging a hole, visualizing how the ground will look after we’re finished. This small effort of the imagination has a clear movement from beginning (the world before the shovel) to middle (the act of digging) to end (the world with a new hole)—the basic arc of any story. …

Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.

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Don’t call Google+ a social network.

Even though its users have profiles, follow others, post status updates, upload photos and videos, and “+1″ a bunch of stuff.

But don’t call it a social network.

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Website Hunch.com recently published a large and detailed infographic comparing Mac and PC users, based on questions answered by visitors to the site. The non-scientific study, which was republished on a few other tech blogs, basically confirms every stereotype about Mac and PC users: that Mac users are young, liberal, artsy-fartsy types, while PC users are old, conservative, spreadsheet fanatics.

I don’t know how much of that is actually true. Instinctively, I suppose it’s fairly accurate just based on the kind of image Apple has spent decades cultivating. Apple has always wanted us to see it as the anti-Microsoft, even going back to their infamous “1984″ commercial. But one area of the infographic that I think is entirely wrong is the Technology category, and more specifically this stat:

Mac people are 21% more likely than PC people to consider themselves computer-savvy gearheads.

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