Vista Certified
This week I attained my Vista Certification. I think the official title is Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Configuring Microsoft Windows Vista Client. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole “Technology Specialist” part. They have changed it from the old 2000/2003 Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). ‘Professional’ sounds much better than ‘Technology Specialist’ in my opinion. I think it has something to do with the fact that many people in my company have the word ‘Specialist’ in their title, and they are anything but. Overall, I’m pretty sure the last year I spent working with and deploying Vista at work has given me more experience than most with Microsoft’s latest and greatest. It is just too bad that Vista has such a bad rep in the press. I’m hoping Microsoft will be able to turn that perception around so I don’t have to bury my latest certification at the very bottom of my resume in small print.
iPhone
Alas… I think I am the only person in my immediate group of friends who does not have an iPhone. I’m sure there are a couple of them that don’t have one, but I feel like the only one who doesn’t. I must say congrats to Steve Jobs for inventing such a nice phone. It really has set the bar in regards to most other phones out there. That is kind of sad actually. It is not that Apple has set the bar so high, but more that the rest of the cell phone industry let the bar stay so low for so long (Microsoft included). Microsoft tried to shoehorn Windows into a mobile device for years when they should have trashed what they had and started over from scratch. Granted they were trying to compete with Palm initially and the whole stylus thing (which was never cool). But Windows Mobile 5 and 6 never did much to really up the bar. They work alright, but have been in need of a UI overhaul for awhile.
One of the Windows Mobile Phone makers from Taiwan (HTC) has done more to experiment and develop new UI’s than MS has. Pretty sad actually. My T-Mobile Shadow phone had a pretty neat interface that T-mo made, and perhaps that is part of the problem. Microsoft wanted to make the foundation OS and let the phone makers customize it. I recently updated my Shadow to WM 6.1 which includes a really neat sliding panels UI made by one of the MS devs. But it is clear this is just a stopgap until they can come up with something truly new (i.e. copy the iPhone). I won’t go into all the reasons why I refuse to go iPhone since plenty of people have covered all of its inadequacies (go here). What I am glad to see is that Apple has forced the rest of the industry to stop releasing such crappy hardware/software for mobile devices. It is apparent that Apple is not going to let up on The Shiny®, so the rest of the industry will be playing catchup for awhile. But this time, instead of a race to the bottom, it is a race to the top.
