Apple versus Windows again

Apple Vs Windows again?

With Apple planning to unviel its new desktop Operating Snow Leopard and Microsoft also planning to release their much proclaimed Windows 7, is the war between these two companies is taking a new shape? People have already started speaking about Apple already loosing the battle from market share perspective. This time it appears to be the challenge from Microsoft's side from the innovation perspective as the experts have started saying, after 20 years, it has been able to match that of Apple, for a change.Most of the reviewers who have seen both of them have a feeling that they seem like just two different flavours of the same GUI.

Most of us who have been using Windows Vista would have seen the problems that were faced during its initial days and the amount of patches that we received for it. It was no way a good replacement for Windows XP, which is considered as one of the stable OS when it comes to Microsoft since Windows 95. It is a well known story that during its Windows Vista release, Microsoft did experiment too much with the features that were to be included between builds. This could be one of the reasons for the instability that we found in Windows Vista. It is also known that this could be the reason why Microsoft was looking to push Windows 7 so soon, into the market. Even my two laptops were down graded back to Windows XP from Windows Vista, to get a better performance and avoid resource hogging.
However, with Microsoft exerting continuous improvement process in its Core OS development, it seems that this effort has really worked out this time.

However, we may want to recollect that Apple has been always controls its hardware on which the Mac OS runs and we can find MS Windows on every other OEM hardware available. Where as the Mac OS is specific on the hardware that it can run, with the flexibility in this front so far, MS Windows is expected to run on every other desktop hardware that is available in the market. The proclaimed stability of Mac OS is purely because of the controlled hardware ecosystem that it runs its OS on and the device management, which is quite different when it comes to MS Windows. In case of MS Windows, most of the crashes which people complain about is mostly because of those dodgy device management code (driver) or the problamatic hardware bit, which is expected to work as soon it is plugged, despite of hardware compatibility mis-match. Windows improved on this front as well with something called Windows Hardware Quatlity Lab test, which started assuring the quality of the driver and the hardware compatibility with the Windows operating system. This improvised over a period of time.

To summarise, my feeling is operating systems are very similar to automobiles or the mobile phones, which share some common functionalities. Although Mac OS is more suited for running  a handful of applications, we have our versatile windows which can run any number of applications at any time and looking at the Windows 7, which has really has won my heart, to start with, after a long long time, (of course since windows 95, nt 4.0) :)