Revolutionary file & print sharing… wtf?

Okay, so, this is just too bad to let by. ComputerWorld are all excited by the newly redesigned file & print sharing in Vista. The details are here. Now, I was genuinely curious how things were being changed. About half way through the article, however, I became suspicious.

For example, the Documents and Settings folder has been renamed to Users.

Wow. That’s incredible. Where do they come up with these brilliant ideas. Oh, right, MacOS X DP4, circa May 2000. Awww, don’t feel bad Microsoft, six years late is looking pretty good compared to the Vista shipping date.

So, the real crunch of the article is this:

The Public folder is designed specifically for file sharing. If a user needs to share a document with others in the organization, he can place that document into the Public folder on his machine. That way users can collaborate on documents without having to actually create shares on their workstations.

Isn’t that just mind-blowing? Who would have thought about creating a shared folder in order to share stuff? The mind boggles. But wait… what a coincidence, MacOS X also has this crazy folder called “Public”… and hey, it’s shared… who’da thunk it?

I’m sorry, I just can’t help this one. Every article I read on Vista is ultimately just explaining how they’ve made it a bit more like MacOS X. And of course the wider world thinks this is all revolutionary. From the point of view of the Mac world, Vista is going to be the biggest anti-climax in history. That only makes it even sadder that it’ll probably still be inexplicably popular.

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