As most of you already know already, Apple has officially announced Leopard’s shipping date, and Apple has re-lit it’s advertising campaign for the eagerly awaited 64bit Operating System. They were even kind enough to place most of those 300+ new features on a single page.

Besides all of the invisible work done to the OS, like making it 64bit, and increase it’s security. There is a list of over 300 new “palpable” features in it that you can actually see and use. So I asked a friend of mine who has been using Vista for a couple of months now what new things is he able to do with it.

After thinking a bit, he remembered a few of them: the search in the start menu, the improved start menu, the “widgets” bar, the transparent interface. After mentioning those he started stuttering so I helped him out a little and mentioned one or two that I remembered like the improved “bread crumb” icons that help you navigate to your parent folder’s content, and the improved parental controls.

But then I thought to myself “there must be more to Vista than this”, so I hoped over to Microsoft’s Vista website and managed to find a link which should have had the answers for all my questions, Microsoft’s 100 Reasons you’ll be speechless.

After reading most of those reasons, I have to say I was speechless. Not because I was wow’ed by the list, but because there just wasn’t much to say about them. Most of the features, or reasons as they call it, aren’t really reasons, but just clever marketing phrases such as:

You choose the fun—TV, games, music, movies, home videos, or photo slide shows—Windows Vista has all of your entertainment in one convenient place. Enjoy it on your PC, or gather friends and family around your home entertainment center, and let the good times roll!

Name one thing from the phrase above that you can’t already do with your 6 year old Windows XP.

I’m not saying that there wasn’t a lot of work put behind Vista, but nothing can explain or justify why it’s such an underachiever compared to Apple’s own OS, or even some of the more popular Linux distros which have features that we probably won’t see until the next iteration of Windows like: multiple virtual desktops.

Everyone knows how many resources Vista consumes while doing basically nothing, but apart from consuming more resources, there aren’t that many new things that you can do with Vista. Which leads me to the question:

Are Windows users simply satisfied with a nice-looking skin and a relatively stable OS?

And I don’t know about you readers, but since I usually take a whole day to format my computer and install all of the applications I want (some of them mimicking Mac OS X features) I have to say that having stability and a new skin aren’t reasons enough for me to consider purchasing their latest Operating System, specially when it costs a lot more than Leopard.