News Media Begins to Compare Windows ME to 2000
We note the coincidental publication of two fairly thoughtful comparisons of Windows Millenium Edition (ME) and Windows 2000. For anyone who has been out of the room for the past year, these are the next generation consumer and corporate operating systems from Microsoft.
Walter Mossberg in today's Personal Technology Column in the Wall Street Journal calls Windows ME "...the final, sputtering
iteration of the aging consumer Windows product line that last saw a really
significant release five years ago, when Windows 95 came out." This is surprising, in that Mossberg is not a dependable Microsoft basher.
Molly Wood and Jim Aspinwall take a different approach in their comparison on CNET. They divide the analysis into two broad categories: Windows at Home and Windows at Work. Then, they attempt to compare the two operating systems and tell why one is better. On its face, this analysis strikes us as pretty pointless. It would really be news if Windows ME wasn't a better home operating system than 2000, right?
So, we believe that Walter Mossberg's analysis is more trustworthy, even if his piece is much briefer (due to the constraints of his main distribution format). He is always willing to tell his readers how he really feels, and never hesitates to remind us of statements vendors have made in the past that they wish customers would forget. Here is an excellent example from his current column:
At one time, Microsoft had far more ambitious plans for this Millennium
release. It was supposed to have a dramatically simpler interface and to have
such major stability improvements that the tentative marketing slogan for the
product was: "It Just Works." That bold claim was dropped and the plans
scaled way back to leave a minor Windows upgrade I can't recommend for
existing PCs.
That paragraph says a lot, and we admire a journalist who is willing to tell it to us straight.
Here's a question that CTDATA would like to see answered with respect to the ME - 2000 comparison: Which operating system runs better under VMware?