Vista, in the categories, is actually the prototype build for MS next OS (as all features that made it a new OS were dropped like managed kernel, WinFS etc).
If apple wouldn't play the closed platform game, MS surely would have problems ... but if apple did, then apple would have the problems as they aren't really capable to write drivers and doing it for more than 8 different hardware configs (ie millions like MS) would definitely bring the company to a quite fast end.
I've actually a Mandriva One 2008 on a second partition as the idea behind that can be seen as an OS idiology (Ubuntu etc don't have it. Enforced opensource drivers just raises the level of problems, not the level of stability. Of 2 systems *core duo reference notebook from intel and a core 2 duo with high end components* none of both actually worked anymore on the network end since Ubuntu / kubuntu 6.10 ... the 7.XX distris are totally borked and that holds for most others as well. Mandriva including Compiz Fusion worked out of the box)
If apple wouldn't play the closed platform game, MS surely would have problems ... but if apple did, then apple would have the problems as they aren't really capable to write drivers and doing it for more than 8 different hardware configs (ie millions like MS) would definitely bring the company to a quite fast end.
I've actually a Mandriva One 2008 on a second partition as the idea behind that can be seen as an OS idiology (Ubuntu etc don't have it. Enforced opensource drivers just raises the level of problems, not the level of stability. Of 2 systems *core duo reference notebook from intel and a core 2 duo with high end components* none of both actually worked anymore on the network end since Ubuntu / kubuntu 6.10 ... the 7.XX distris are totally borked and that holds for most others as well. Mandriva including Compiz Fusion worked out of the box)