Vista & PS3... The same?

Example 1:

Microsoft are "soon" to release Vista. It looks (from my perspective, at any road) like it will have some kinda interesting things, and some OK things and some things that look pretty much just passable.

Of course I'm looking at this from a long-term Mac user point of view. And that has affected my thinking somewhat. I use OSX everyday. I use Windows XP only when I have to. I just dont like it, and that's it... But largely speaking I'm totally unfussed about the Vista release. I mean, I'll continue to use Mac OS all the time, I'll only use Windows when I have to, Vista probably won't set the world on fire, and Microsoft will still dominate the OS balance for a good long time.

Example 2:

Sony will soon release their PS3 console. It looks (from my perspective, at any road) like it will have some kinda interesting things, and some OK things and some things that look pretty much just passable.

Of course I'm looking at this from a long-term Sega gamer point of view. After The Mega Drive (Genesis) and Saturn consoles, I had to get a PS2, and then XBox. I'm pretty much unfussed about PS3 also. Even though I am not as involved with the console and gaming scene as I used to be, I think I can see that the Wii and 360 are better overall. The Wii of course has an interesting and innovative (potential) control system. And the 360 continues the good work started by Microsoft on their XBox console.

Thoughts

I must admit, I am nowhere near as versed on both releases as many people are, but I have read/listened about the two when I came across information... But, for a while I have had the feeling that there has been a fair amount of similarity between the releases of the PS3 and Vista. And seems to boil down to bloatedness and corporate arrogance…

First: Bloatedness.
In Vista, (it seems to me) that there is a lot of support for legacy systems. While this is suppose is a good thing, it must necessarily mean that Vista will be carrying a lot more baggage than it would if it was backwards compatible to say Windows 2000. There also appears to be many functions/features that just seem over the top, or copied from other companies, or unnecessary, or improperly thought out. (Antivirus companies unable to make stable apps by beta 2, because of an unstable core. Tricky....)

In the PS3, there apparently will be online play similar (?) to XBox Live, BlueRay (Why? Do we need 50GB games?), support for 1080p resolution (Why? Half a percent of users will use it), the Cell chip (which I hear is pretty good, but how it performs for gaming I dont know) other interesting things like wireless controllers.

Second: Corporate Arrogance
This is a bit more tricky. Microsoft has a massive handle on the business sector of the Operating System marketplace. In fact, their share is so large that they could still probably wait a couple more years to release and it would still be the biggest player in the game. So, that being the case, and especially if you take into account the lngth of time that Vista or Longhorn has been in the works, I think it should have been a "start from scratch" rather than a restore and update of XP, which it seems to be (to this outsider, at least). There seems to be a lack of innovation, but really Operating Systems don't seem to have much room for innovation. The best innovation MS could have done in my opinion, would have been start from the beginning. They know the whole world uses or has to use a flavour of the new Microsoft OS, so it's almost as if they can do what they please with the code. Another factor is the zillions of flavours the giant app comes in. Why not "Vista" and "Vista Server?" Forcing people to pay extra for services like networking or multi-user access is pretty despicable in my opinion.

In the case of Sony, a perfect example of their arrogance came up a while ago when there was some complaints about the buttons on the PSP. Specifically, one of the buttons would not always register a press. A second problem was that sometimes the PSP disks would pop out suddenly. Sony's response? "We knew about it, we traded the button functionality for extra screen space. The design is perfect." Perfect? I think not. I think that some of the "features" of the PS3 are one-upmanship (the screen resolutions it can handle), and some are selfish (the BlueRay drive). Sony are hoping that enough people will buy the PS3 so that the BlueRay format will be the next generation format adopted to replace DVD. A bold, savvy, shrewd, but selfish move. Selfish how? Because the PS3 is (because of the BlueRay drive) ludicrously expensive, in my opinion.

My conclusion?
Well, it's interesting that the two companies in question are both market-share leaders. It's also interesting that they are both very wealthy companies that carry lots of weight. It's also striking that both companies seemed to have copied the real market leaders or at least are only just now implementing features that should have been included a long time ago. The biggest thing for me though is the "not quite good enough" factor.... Either for the money (PS3) or for the hassle (Vista). Actually I think it's a little sad. I get the feeling that both releases will be damp squibs. Vista will be plagued by the problems that exist in XP, and the PS3 has the opportunity to raise the bar in the gaming world, but I fear will not, because of the greed and arrogance that appears to exist at decision making level.

In truth though, the fact remains that scores of people will buy Vista as it will be seen to be the only option. However, the jury is still out on the price of the PS3... I just don't know. At least the general public will probably get a chance to see both companies as they truly are... And that would be very interesting.