Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 Deathmatch redux

These things are always fun to read and good for online sites because they drive up web page hits like crazy. Preston Gralla in Computerworld’s OS deathmatch: Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7:

• Operating System Name – The Winner: Snow Leopard. Wild animals are inherently more exciting than panes of glass.
• Price – The Winner: Snow Leopard. At $29, it’s practically an impulse buy.
• Installation – The Winner: Snow Leopard. It wins by a hair because of Windows 7’s slight glitch with my hardware…
• Launching Applications – The Winner: Windows 7. The taskbar has more features such as Jump Lists and has more fully featured thumbnails.
• System Configuration – The Winner: Windows 7. Many people might consider this a toss-up, but this choice reflects my predilection for tweaking and customizing.
• Software Compatibility – The Winner: Windows 7. That’s for now, though. In relatively short order, Snow Leopard may have its compatibility problems worked out.
• Hardware Compatibility – The Winner: Windows 7. Windows 7 will work with a wider variety of hardware for which Windows was designed than Snow Leopard will work with Macs.
• Ease of Use and Elegance – The Winner: Snow Leopard. No one beats Apple when it comes to design. As with previous versions of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard is flat-out beautiful.
• Enterprise Readiness – The Winner: Windows 7. Windows remains the enterprise standard.
• Extras – The Winner: Snow Leopard. There’s no real competition here; it wins hands down.

In other words, it’s a tie. You got a problem with that? Well, yes. First, Gralla gives the nod to Windows 7 for System Configuration. Windows more tweakable than a Unix system?

It’s still a more tweakable operating system (although its critics may say that tweaking is mandatory in order to get it running right).

So, Windows 7 wins the category because it needs to be tweaked just to run right, while Snow Leopard runs perfectly out of the box? Gimme a break, Gralla.

The Software Compatibility comparison is lame and arbitrary. Since Macs also run Windows and Linux it would appear that Snow Leopard can run far more applications, therefore has much greater compatibility. What runs on Windows will run on a Mac.

Since when are categories such as Price and Name of Operating Systems valid comparisons? Such wimpy considerations do little to add credibility to Gralla’s attempt to replace hit whoring with proper compare and contrast techniques.