Apple's new Mac and iDevice OS: how quickly can MS catch up?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 08 June 2011 14:39

Your IT - Home IT

Apple's magical and revolutionary ways have seen in introduce (but not yet release to the public) its OS X Lion and iOS 5 operating systems, along with a new cloud service that wirelessly synchronises various iMacs and iDevices, but couldn't Microsoft quickly catch up?

Microsoft was smart to show off a demo of its Windows 8 platform a few days before Apple's WWDC event, showing that Microsoft is indeed able to not only deliver a proper touch-based interface all its very own, but blend in the power of a full desktop OS at the same time.

Apple has gone down this path as well with the merging of iOS features into Mac OS X 10.7 'Lion', although Apple has made no mention as yet of full touch-screen controls on iMacs, relying instead, at least for now, on its trackpad to deliver a range of multi-touch gestures.

This means no need (or as yet, ability) to reach out and up to your screen to do things, and while Microsoft's OEM PC partners have offered touch-screen 'all-in-one' PCs for a while, the reality is that they haven't proved all that popular a feature with end-users, not least of which because of Windows 7's not so finger-friendly interface.

Microsoft changed all this with its Windows 8 demo, showing a very fluid, fingertip friendly UI, while showing off a Windows 7 mode that was also fully touch compatible (as it is today).

Interestingly, there seemed to be no attempt to make any of the icons or control mechanisms finger-friendly in the Windows 7 portion of the Windows 8 demo, but with at least 12 months to go before Microsoft is able to get a Windows 8 tablet out the door, they've got plenty of time to figure it out.

Next up is all of the features demo'd in OS X Lion, iOS and iCloud.

While Apple's features are all to be commended, and are now awaited with great anticipation, there doesn't appear to be anything that Microsoft's photocopiers in Redmond will be unable to copy.

Microsoft also has massive data centres and mature cloud services of its own, hundreds of millions more customers than Apple (which claims 200 million iDevice users against over a billion Windows users) and has shown it has an updated OS that makes no compromise between a multi-touch environment, or one that uses the keyboard and mouse, able to operate both at the same time.

Continued on page two, please read on!