I got a new laptop from work a few days ago. Of course, it’s loaded with Windows Vista. I have to say that it is much faster than Windows XP, and much prettier. They even figured out how to make fonts look nice and smooth, a breakthrough for Windows. Since everyone knows it’s no fun talking about good stuff, I’m going to get right to the weird stuff.

First of all, they’ve “improved” the security model. Administrators are no longer really Administrators. This is the Microsoft solution to their security problems. Rather than making a stable OS that doesn’t have security flaws, they don’t let the person using the computer use the computer. Brilliant. I think in a future security patch, they’re going to disable the power button so you can’t turn your computer on. After all, a computer that isn’t running is a secure computer. Maybe that patch will rename the OS to Windows Placemat.

Installing software and starting programs is, truly, just like the Apple Security commercial. I used to laughed at this commercial, chuckling at how cleverly Apple was exaggerating the behavior of Microsoft’s new OS, blissfully unaware that this is actually precisely what using Windows Vista is like.

Apart from “borrowing” Apple’s notion that operating systems don’t have to be ugly and their revolutionary concept that using a computer doesn’t need to be a miserable experience, Microsoft has also mimicked Apple’s Exposé feature. Exposé is one of my favorite things about OS X. When you push a specific key on OS X, Exposé spreads out your windows on your screen so you can see what you have running. You can then click a window to choose it and Exposé puts all the windows back with the window you chose on top. Vista has a similar feature, which I’m guessing is called “It’s Hosed, eh?” In typical copy-cat fashion, their version is almost completely useless. Rather than spread the windows out in a way that lets you see all their contents, it displays them at an angle, obscuring most of the windows. In a fit of design brilliance, it also shows your desktop at the back, just in case you forgot that there is a desktop. The windows, since they’re at an angle, are impossible to read with the ones in front covering the ones behind them.

This is a typical Microsoft “enhancement”: The widows all slide into place beautifully, things fade in and out, and – most importantly – it doesn’t actually do anything. The way the windows are displayed and unreadable, it doesn’t provide any information not already available through the task tray, which Windows has had since Windows ’95. But I’m certain an entire team was built around it, gobs of money was pumped into it, and a whole lot of people in Redmond feel awfully satisfied with themselves for building it.

When I was working at Microsoft, I shared an office with a guy who had a great sense of humor about Microsoft. He always joked that whoever designed the restart “feature” was a genius: one feature that solves all Windows’ problems. He wanted to work on the “Restart Feature Team”, he would joke. One day he Googled it, and it turned out that Microsoft actually had a team working on a feature called the “Restart Manager” for Vista which could restart parts of the operating system without having to restart the whole shebang. So, rather than build an OS that doesn’t need restarting – like OS X and Linux – they’re making a restart manager.

Well, there should be some points for consistency.