Vista vs. Leopard
The two OS heavywights step into the comparo ring to slug it out.

At its recent WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), Apple sought to steal some of Microsoft's thunder by releasing just enough details of its next OS (operating system), Leopard, to make an early comparison to the forthcoming Windows Vista possible. Staying true to form, then.

It seems as though we've been talking about Vista for ages, and although RC1 (Release Candidate One) came out in September, it's likely to be February before most of us see the finished article. However, its features and general look and feel are fairly common knowledge -- and now we have something tangible to compare it to.

Implementation strategies Leopard is an upgrade to Mac OS X, whereas Vista replaces Windows XP almost entirely. Both Apple and Microsoft released OSes in the autumn of 2001 -- Apple's was OS X Puma; Microsoft's was Windows XP. The difference is that XP is still the current version of Windows, while Apple followed up Puma with Jaguar, Panther and Tiger – Apple has a lots-of-incremental-upgrades philosophy, compared with Microsoft's big-upgrade-once-in-a-blue-moon approach. The two major service packs for XP have been relatively feature-light.

Leopard looks to be idiosyncratic and entertaining in a way it's hard to imagine a Microsoft product being. The first major Leopard feature demoed at Steve Job's WWDC keynote was Time Machine, a backup utility that lets you step back to earlier versions of your system and files. This is not a revolutionary idea -- and Microsoft is planning a vaguely similar function for Vista -- but Time Machine's UI (user interface), which involves windows flying through space, is quirky and fun. By contrast, Vista has no strong sense of personality.

We're not saying it's always good for an OS to be playful -- we know people who gnash their teeth even at the way Mac OS X Dock icons bob up and down when it's alerting you to something -- but this contrast has become a defining difference between the two products.

Read all about it here, courtesy of ITworld.com:

-Eric