StyleMac.com

Microsoft released its latest revision of the Windows OS on January 30th, 2007 to great fanfare. Even after a year and a half of beta testing, Windows Vista still suffered a few opening day hiccups.

Right out of the box you can see that once installed, Vista looks a lot like a certain other operating system on the market that features widgets and an extremely user-friendly interface. Indeed, Vista’s AERO interface does look, and feel, like Mac OS X’s Aqua interface. Whereas AERO, which invokes images of “air” has a glass-like presence, Aqua naturally invokes a watery feel to it.

Speaking of AERO, to get the full Vista Experience, including AERO, you have to buy one of the more expensive versions of the OS. Unlike XP, which had two versions, Vista comes in a total of six versions. The versions depend on the market in which the OS is being sold. The Vista Starter Edition will not be sold in the US, but only to so-called “emerging markets.”

In the US, there’s Home Basic, Home Premium, and Vista Ultimate for the normal “home” user. For business, there’s Vista Business and Vista Enterprise. In the European Union, there’s the “N” series of Vista that does not feature Windows Media Player 11 due to certain anti-trust laws in those regions.

The possibility of further anti-trust lawsuits looms closer everyday as several software manufacturers have been pushed by the wayside, as Vista already includes programs similar to, or identical several other offerings.

First and foremost is Windows Defender, an anti-spyware tool. Anti-spyware has long been the domain of companies such as McAfee and Symantec, but now, not only has Microsoft beaten them to the punch, until Symantec released Norton Internet Security suite 7, it was incompatible with Vista due to a scripting error in Internet Explorer 7. Again, Vista comes preinstalled with a firewall, well, there goes Symantec’s offering.

Windows Vista also comes with the capability to burn DVDs right out of the box. Doesn’t Nero does that?

In the end, it seems as though Microsoft is slowly trying to bully software developers out of business.

After having disappeared for a rather long amount of time, stylemac.com is back online. I apologize for not having been able to take care of this earlier, but I’ve had serious problems in my life, and thus needed to force all my energies on real-life problems. I won’t have too much time for stylemac.com within the coming months, but I’ll try to give it some more love.
At least Safarilicious and Tagbag are now reachable again.

Greetings, Benedikt