Longhorn vs .....
April 19, 2005 @ 03:05 PMIt’s funny to me that CNet and ZDNet and Slashdot and all the other little tech news sites out there are running endless reviews and comparisons of Mac OS X 10.4 to Microsoft’s Longhorn. The general feeling seems to be Longhorn and Tiger will be fairly equally matched as far as features go. The most prominent new feature of both operating systems is going to be their new search capabilities. Both sound nearly identical. Mac OS X is calling their technology “Spotlight”... Microsoft is calling there’s “MSN Desktop Search.” But they both do almost exactly the same thing. Apart from that, each are making improvements in other areas. So on first blush, it would seem natural to begin comparing these two operating systems as the next round of operating system wars begin.
Except for one minor technicality… Longhorn is expected late 2006 - maybe - while Mac OS X 10.4 should be on my doorstep in 9 days. Okay, so Apple delivered there OS first… so what? Well, here’s where it gets fun. Longhorn and Tiger will likely not even be contemporaries. Apple is on an 18-month development cycle, which means the Apple should be releasing another version of Mac OS X right around September 2006, around the same time as Longhorn.
Thus, comparing Mac OS X Tiger to Longhorn is completely fallacious. That would be like comparing Mac OS X 10.3 to Windows 98. Windows users wouldn’t let you get away with that. So us Mac users shouldn’t let you get away with comparing Mac OS X 10.4 to Longhorn.