OSNews

"I'm an engineer, and I love to tinker, so I find that Windows just doesn't have what I need to make a living."

I can agree to this. I'm working in a computer sector in healthcare and I cannot tell my customers things like this: "If you want to use our Software with 'Windows', you can, but you'll need to buy all new PCs, new OSes, and pay a lot more money for the migration. And in some years, you'll have to do it again."

While this may be okay for home users and companies and authorities who don't have to look very deeply into their pockets, this repeating "renewal" is critical where systems are setup once and then have to run for 10+ years.

"Firstly, support runs out for Windows products in just a few years, and Windows is an immutable binary tied to x86 architecture and I am given absolutely no ability to port it if I must in the future move my product to a new platform. "

When you work with multiple platforms, you simply cannot use "Windows" because it's not compatible and not standardized. I've just supported a diagnostics setting consisting of two Linux PCs, an SGI Indy and two Sun SparcStation 20. Maybe "Windows" would be great if all of them were x86 PCs, but they aren't, so you simply have to work with what you've got instead of suggesting to buy a whole new setting instead.

"I cannot know for sure what is going on inside of Windows."

These things are essential to know where I work. I cannot tell my customers, "Uh, I don't know why the program stopped working. No error message, just an hourglass? And, no, I can't tell you why you can access the files while Dr. Schulz cannot. And I see no chance to find it out."

I visited a big hospital once, plugged in my laptop into one of the ethernet ports available in nearly every room, and what a surprise, I could access files with confidental data! I don't need to say that the server was a "Windows" box some very smart guy had set up. :-) When I reported this, the answer was just some more surprising: "Who cares?"

But finally, "Vista" has better tools for system diagnostics and error chasing, but it's still not comparable to the tools I have available in standard environments, such as Solaris.

At last, from engineer to engineer, one true wisdom: Use the right tool for every task. "Windows" definitely is not the one and only tool for every imaginable task. There may be tasks where a MICROS~1 product is the right tool, but there are other tasks, too.