Looks or brains -- Windows 7 and Apple's Snow Leopard

I don't need to tell you that Microsoft's long-awaited/long-delayed latest and greatest operating system -- Windows Vista -- hasn't been the success Microsoft envisioned. Sales have remained slow since Vista emerged in January 2007. Many would-be Vista users buying new computers turn into won't-be users by downgrading to XP. Corporations and IT staffers are pretty clear in their efforts to avoid it. Microsoft is even reassuring customers that they can skip Vista and move from XP directly to Windows 7. So pundits are scrambling to ask -- and then answer -- the question of why Vista failed.

They're asking the wrong question. Forget why it failed. Ask why it would have succeeded in the first place and how it would have proved its value. And then ask what this means for Windows 7, and more important, for chief rival Apple.

That's not so big a rhetorical leap, really. As Microsoft is busy prepping Windows 7 -- and making a splash, as it did in January by releasing a public beta -- Apple is quietly developing Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard. (Apple doesn't generally do public betas, leaving tea-leaf readers to tell us what's coming.)

Like Windows 7, Snow Leopard will be more about refinement -- and less about revolution -- than recent OS X updates. It builds on the previous OS, Leopard, and isn't supposed to introduce new whiz-bang features.

Microsoft, for its part, is promulgating a big, long list of new features and changing the branding entirely in an attempt to blot Vista from the collective memory. But there still won't be a new kernel, file system, speech technology or holographic interface, and no antigravity tweaks, either. So we'll stick with the "refinement" argument.

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