CNBC this morning

I watched CNBC for about 40 minutes this morning. In that brief period, CNBC played clip of Bill Gates on the Today Show talking about Apple, Steve Ballmer talking about Apple, and some cell phone industry expert talking about, yes, you guessed it, Apple.

Yet another weak review of Vista

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The fun starts with the headline:

Vista’s pretty, but it’s a shameless Mac OS X imitator

Vista hardly rocked my world during weeks of testing. It’s a fine Windows upgrade, but it’s also a shameless rip-off (and not quite the equal) of another major operating system, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X.

That begs the question: Why not just use OS X?
…
So, instead of purchasing a Windows PC, they could — and typically should — get an Apple Macintosh computer running OS X.
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Apple is about to release an OS X upgrade, nicknamed “Leopard,” that will make Vista look archaic in some ways.

Appearance. Vista looks amazing. …
But OS X has had eye candy like this for years.
Users can adjust the border translucency … But Vista is still only an OS X clone — and a slightly inferior-looking one, at that.

Finding stuff … Thank goodness Vista is vastly superior to its XP predecessor in this way.
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Hmm, does this sound familiar, OS X users? That’s right, the Spotlight search engine does the same thing.
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The Exposé feature in OS X does pretty much the same thing.

You also can create intelligent Search Folders … just like the Smart Folders in OS X.

More secure.
You can’t install anything on a Vista PC without clicking through confirmation windows … OS X has boasted this feature for years.

Wid(gad)gets.
Microsoft’s gadgets could be called rip-offs of Apple’s widgets.
…

Bonusware. Microsoft has bundled an assortment of useful programs with Vista, which means you won’t have as urgent a need to invest in additional software.
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But these programs are no match for what is available on any new Mac. Every Apple machine has iLife, a suite of interlocking programs for editing video, burning DVDs, organizing photos, composing music and even creating slick Web sites.
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Vista also bundles in Windows Calendar, Mail and Contacts, which are rough equivalents of iCal, Apple Mail and Address Book on Macs.

What’s next? Apple this spring will release OS X version 10.5 with advanced features that will leapfrog the just-released Vista.

While the new Windows has rudimentary data-backup capabilities, for instance, Leopard will include something called Time Machine
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It’s also important to note that Apple has offered OS X upgrades at roughly yearly intervals during the half-decade that Microsoft has labored on Vista. Apple is an innovation engine; Microsoft, not so much.

Bottom line. Get a Mac with OS X unless your home-computer needs are Windows-specific, or if the fine Media Center is a must for you. You likely won’t regret a Vista-PC purchase, but I’m betting you’ll enjoy a Mac much more.

Nicely put.

Vista Today

Mr. Gates was on the Today Show hyping Vista. He claimed that Vista’s innovation far outpace anything Apple has done. Unfortunately for him, that claim is contradicted by the ongoing Iowa v Microsoft case:

Excerpted from an email of Robert Scoble’s former boss sent to higher ups:

He showed Spotlight” functionality embedded in 4 different apps, then highlighted that developers can build (and should build) the same functionality in their apps,

They even showed a bit of extensibility in their design.
I don’t have details, but at first blush, I think they will be there 80% on developer platform too.
- Their Avalon competitor (core video, core image) was hot – lots of transparency, ripple effects, etc
° I have the cool widgets (dashboard) running on my Mac right now with all the effects he showed on stage. I’ve had no crashes in 5 hours,
° Their video conferencing was amazing (you have to see a demo),
° They have no indigo/web services story
° They are betling on RSS in a high profile way – so they will get credit for this too
° They have “agent” like software – I have it working on my Mac as of last night. It’s very cool scripting soltware for the
entire system. You should see a demo of this – Jobs does it in his keynote
° I’ve enclosed a screen shot from Lenn of using Spotlight against locally cached exchange data. (You can point the built in mail client against an exchange server. The mail is copied down locally, and then “spotlight” works against it wickedly fast)

The bold was in the original email, I guess, emphasizing OS X’s stability and robustness.

That email elicited this response from Jim Allchin:

Sigh…
jim

Indeed.