Blackfriars' Marketing

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Computerworld judges Leopard more productive than Vista

Despite Leopard's teething pains (which I'll talk about in a minute), Computerworld's in-depth analysis says that Leopard spanks Vista when it comes to getting things done. The money quote:

There's really no contest. Tiger is a better OS than Vista, and there are no long-term downsides to Leopard. Vista doesn't measure up.

....

It can be described in a lot of different ways, but it boils down to this: Even in a Windows-centric IT setting, I'm far more productive on the Mac than I was with Windows. During this year, my only tech support call to our IT department came when a routine change was made to my network log-in password, and for some reason neither the old nor the new password would work on the Mac or Windows. It took about five minutes to fix.

Despite any teething pains that accompany almost any OS upgrade, I expect those advantages to continue with Leopard -- and the gap between it and Vista to widen.

As someone who introduced a Mac into a Windows-based business in my last job (and got away with it) and now runs a business on Macs, I couldn't agree more. It's nice to see the productivity difference noted in the mainstream press.

All that said, I do want to note that Leopard appears to have introduced a rather serious wireless networking problem into the Mac world, and its getting in the way for a lot of Leopard users, myself included. Judging from the comments on the above thread, this appears to be a very tough bug to track down. My symptom is that I've lost several bars of wireless strength, and wireless networking has become unreliable. Also, I'm now unable to manage my Airport base station using Leopard, either through the wired or wireless network interfaces.

Since I have both a wired connection available and a Tiger image to boot from when I want to modify the base station, this isn't a show-stopper for me, but many other users don't have those luxuries. I'll bet there are some engineers seriously burning the midnight oil in Cupertino these days until this bug gets fixed. And rightfully so; until this gets fixed, it's a black spot on an otherwise great release.



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