As many of you may know, I’m an intrepid creative that has used Windows as my sole production platform for years. That has often left me “on the outs” with the myriad Mac acolytes that seem dominate this little corner of the computing world.

There are several reasons for my aversion to most things Apple, but principal among them are the burn marks I have from the NeXT computer fiasco back in the late 80s. As a former NeXT user, I’ve simply never forgiven Steve Jobs for the way that company was handled. You can add the total sham tactics that Apple historically has used to falsely compare the Mac to the PC – and then there’s the premium pricing that seems to accompany Apple products – along with the inexplicable premium added to the exclusive third-party peripherals that finds their way into that constellation. Add it all up and you get one big “talk to the hand” from me.

OK – many of the things that amount to my historical objections to Apple are beginning to fade. I get it. Between the MacIntel switch and Apple’s improving price/performance ratio, things are much more competitive. And quite frankly when I saddle up for a session on the Mac I find my way around fairly easily. It’s a very good OS with an nice user interface. I sometimes feel like the OSX design actually impedes getting to the features and settings that I want, but I chalk that up to their penchant for making things feel like a Fisher Price toy for non-savvy users.

The thing that has really kept me committed to the Windows platform – beyond pure price/performance ratio – is one of philosophy. Microsoft has the right balance of professional development and community/transparency. Variety is the spice of life, and I simply prefer the open landscape and range of options in the world of Windows that you don’t get with a closed eco-system that Apple controls. Add to that the penchant for Apple to find new and inventive ways to compete directly with their third party developers and the equation just doesn’t make sense to me on any level.

By contrast I find Microsoft’s approach to platform development to have a good balance. They’re not perfect, and quite frankly they’ve made some major strategic mistakes – such as the long stretch where they ignored the open-source community. But I’m a firm believer in their approach to professional development and third-party support, and their shift to embrace more open-source patterns and practices (including direct OS community engagement) is beginning to bear fruit. Of course, Microsoft’s biggest bout of hubris surrounds Vista. I, like many others, honestly believe that the project started with the best of intentions, and of course anyone can read endless articles about what went wrong with that product track. And quite frankly, I believe that much of Vista’s lack of “street cred” is a bad rap. For what it’s worth, Windows XP set the bar pretty high. The latest revision of XP is light weight, extremely robust and supports a variety of uses, from general desktop computing to enterprise deployment – and even had a few boutique versions that serve well for embedded applications (the SmartAV Tango is a prime example of an embedded device running XP at its core).

But it looks like Microsoft is beginning to get a lot of things right with Windows 7 – which to me amounts to a major refactoring of Windows Vista. I’ve been using Vista on both of my audio workstations for a while now, and have been fairly happy with the results. The two exceptions echo what many others have identified as the major shortcomings of Vista – too much memory load and too many unnecessary services running in the background (which are related to each other). Most reports I’ve gotten from music application beta testers are that Windows 7 is as memory efficient as XP with the updated interface (and functionality) of Vista. Now that they’re about to release the first “release candidate” I’m getting reports that things are as good or better than Windows XP when it comes to supporting resource-heavy applications for audio and video.

So I’m excited about the prospects of setting up to try out the first release candidate of Windows 7 here in “the red cave”. Even though it could mean some short-term downtime for some my current projects, I expect that the potential increase in productivity and efficiency will pay dividends in the long run. Since I’ve been running Vista for so long, I consider the risk to be minimal. And the upside of having more computing resources translates to having more creative options. May is going to be an interesting month for the “geek” side of the equation here at Titan Line Audio.