Warning! Do NOT apply XP SP 3!

[AgentZero]

A hefty list of things they get right better than Linux or Mac?
Other than marketing, and as a consequence, software market share, can you actually name three of significance?

Things they've done better than Linux:
1. Ease of use. Linux is not easy to use for people not already well familiar with how computers in general work, and slapping a GUI on top of it doesn't change this. When I wanted to do something as simple as install the video drivers for my new graphics card, I wound up having to recompile the kernel. A PITA, but no big deal for me. Linux still has far too many operations that require mucking around with the command line that are simple point & click operations in Windows. And trust me, when you're trying to convince an elder sibling to switch over to *nix, and she winds up finding instructions to get her printer working that include a sneaky "rm -rf /" while running as root, well you might as well tattoo Windows4Life across her forehead at this point.

2. Consistent Support. With 99% of the problems I've had with Windows that were Windows problems, and not some other software/hardware not behaving itself, I've found the answer to in Microsoft's Knowledge Bank. The remaining 1% I have found no answer to, anywhere, ever. Try Googling any number of common *nix problems, and you'll find a huge variety of answers, most of which (from personal experience), don't actually work for one reason or another. There's no consistency of language either, even within a single distro, which can make finding the solution to your exact problem nightmarish. Windows problems, on the other hand, generally take me no more than a 30-60 seconds to find the relevant webpage, because Microsoft uses a consistent language to describe problems, which makes it far easier to find solutions.

3. The "Just Works" Factor. I plug my MP3 player into my XP box, it pops up and tells me it's found new hardware and installed drivers for it. Ditto my digital camera. And my external hard drive. I do the same in Ubuntu... Nothing happens. It's not until I start fiddling around in the CLI that I actually get some useful error messages, and eventually get things up and running. And in the dozen or so Linux distros I've tried, I've run into similar problems, and programs that fail to load without giving an error, and programs that crash with no error, and it's not until I haul open the terminal and start fiddling that I actually find out what's wrong. So I could even say that even when things don't work, they don't work, better, in Windows.

As for Macs:
1. Right click, lol. Well, in seriousness, with all of Apple's vaunted "intuitive interfaces", I've found people with little to no experience with computers tend to figure out how to do things in Windows quicker. I've worked in a few places where people had the option of using either Macs or PCs, and inevitably, those least familiar with computers wind up on the Windows boxes. Note that I'm not referring to people who have only used Windows, I'm talking about those who have never owned a computer, and have only limited prior experience working with them. I don't really understand it myself, I'm actually quite fond of the OS X UI, but I've been told plenty of times that it's, "Nice, but only makes sense after someone explains it."

2. Developer Support. I've run into employees of EA, Ironclad, Relic & Rockstar (They all have offices quite near where I live), at a variety of social gatherings. Inevitably, I wind up asking them about the dearth of games on Macs & Linux. Everyone I've talked to has given my some variation of "Apple won't play nice" when it comes to Macs, and nothing but a thousand-yard stare when I prod them about Linux. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but from talking to these people it seems as though there's more than just market share behind the reason so few developers put out Mac versions of their software.

3. Letting you do whatever you want. Yes, a lot of people fubar their systems because of this, but that's more down to personal ignorance than any particular flaw with the OS. Have you ever tried to make a Mac do something that Apple didn't think you'd need to do? Holy crap. It will just fight you every step of the way, bringing to bear it's full arsenal of lockups, power downs and refusal to boots in an attempt to stop you from doing something as simple as enable support for writing to NTFS partitions, as I discovered on Friday.

Now of course, there are plenty of things that Macs and Linux do much better than Windows, otherwise I wouldn't be running Linux on my laptop, or have a dual-boot set up on the desktop. But the fact remains that there are a lot of things that Microsoft does very well, and it irks me a bit when I see people condemning MS for things that aren't it's fault, when there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to condemn them for that are their fault.