Macs: 1 button, Windows: 2 buttons, Unix: 104 buttons 9003

You know, the whole Windows-Mac OS thing reminds me of (perhaps apocryphal) stories I'd heard in the past about the M16 buttault rifle. When it was first introduced at the beginning of the Vietnam War, it was supposedly the height of American engineering, a 'supergun' that would fire under any conditions and never need cleaning. As a result, soldiers weren't trained on how to perform maintenance on it, and cleaning kits weren't issued. Come to find out, mud, grime, and cordite affect pretty much all guns the same, and as the guns got filthy, they would jam and guys would get end. Eventually the Army wised up and got the necessary gear and knowledge out there, and the failure rate dropped considerably.

Any computer being sold today is an incredibly complicated machine, much more so than the PDP's and VAX's and IBM big iron and other machines that came out before I was even born. To try to trivialize the nuances of operating this incredibly complicated machine with an obselete 'desktop' metaphor and a 20- page "Getting Started" coloring book is just insane. Windows requires maintenance to be done just like any other system to run correctly, and most users don't have a f***ing clue how to do it. Vista looks like it's going to try to simpify even further, and personally I think that if it busts, it might be the straw that broke the camel's back.