Windows 7 (Yup, I went there.)

It's not that it's a bad system, hell, far from it. It's the most stable, effective, and secure windows system yet. It's to be expected, honestly. After the fumbles with Vista's instability, incompatibility, and overall failures as a system, they were bound to catch all the major issues.

(Skip down for TL;DR)

My problem's actually with OS systems as a whole, Mac, OS9, OSX, Vista, and now Windows 7. Apparently, the idea of a company enacting ease of use, or safe and secure systems, is a series of idiot proof locks, which is far from bad, if you can keep the system running just fine. With the recent trend though, the OS's company, be it Mac or Windows, begins to consider their customers more and more incapable of free choice, or even the simplest of decisions. They begin to decide what software belongs where, and they make choices for the user that invariably impact overall performance. With the recent trend, it becomes increasingly more difficult to navigate through all the clutter, in order to remove that same clutter, or even make the system run the way YOU want. Individual preference is replaced by company enforced branding, and if I want to remove components, it's not my choice anymore. sure, I can turn some of them off, but ultimately, they're still there, taking up space. I also have a problem with the themes. Large icons, and fancy task bars don't fix a system's basic issues, they only cover them up with big seals that say "Easy of access" "'sleek, simple design that anyone can use". In reality, those are excuses for saying: "We refuse to accept responsibility, the user is the problem, not the system. The user needs to be locked out, and should not decide how the system should work."

Ultimately, if a user actually WANTS to make their own decisions, then they'll have to resort to a malicious level of system hacks and modifications, and it bothers me that any company that creates an OS, would force users to do that.

TL;DR: Any market OS focuses on the "Sparkle" rather than allowing users to decide for themselves, ultimately creating a security barrier, that lets the OS creators decide everything for the user, Ergo: Security begets idiot proof, begets removal of free choice.


/rant


That said, what do you people think?

To be honest, I see this clash between ease of use and streamlined software happening with just about every new OS that comes out. You have the group of individuals who could navigate a command line in their sleep versus the soccer mom who just wants to use her damn Facebook and couldn't tell you what a batch file is to save her life: they aren't mutuall exclusive, but which group do you think is bigger? Business goes where the money is, and for them they listen to the fed-up fourty-somethings who can't figure out what this newfangled "run" icon does on their start menu.

Let me put it in perspective: my mother bought three laptops this year. Yet at the same time, she types in "GOOGLE.COM", then types in "www.COMCAST.net" into google's search engine, then searches for "EMAIL" on Comcast's website- when should have just typed in "comcast.net email" into the url and been taken to the page in a fraction of the time it initially took to get there. But she's got money to spend.

I personally don't care either way, since (on a scaled of 0-10, with ten being the computer geniuses) I'm a four or five, and have Ubuntu installed in parallel with 7 on my laptop.

I suppose if the market's going to do that, I just wish they'd at least attempt to acknowledge the more experienced users, even though I know that they won't.

This could probably be solved fairly easily by simply offering an "Easy Mode" and an "Advanced" or "Power User" mode that you pick during setup and can switch between using a control panel icon.

Of course, you'll have an assortment of users who think to themselves "hell yeah I'm hot shit, gimme the good stu--OH NOES WAT IS COMPUTARWEBMACHEENE DOING AARRRGHGPPFFZzzzle". And maybe Johnny comes over to grandma's and turns it on power user mode then forgets to turn it off.

Yeah, I wouldn't suggest an option like that.. too much security issues and easy exploits.