It’s a close race, but at this point, the seventh day of April, 2008, it’s been narrowed down to two candidates.  I-Tunes vs. Windows Vista.

I-Tunes sucks, first off, because they make a great product, the IPod, but they force you to use this crappy software, that is not only unstable, but lacks the features of many similar products before it.

Secondly, I-Tunes wants to put the Apple Safari Browser on my system.  I have no need for this.  FireFox kicks ass, and I don’t need another browser in my life right now.

So Apple, while you’ve cornered the market on great music-listening hardware…you’ve FAILED pretty much everywhere else.  And yes, that includes whatever ventures you have in desktops and laptops.  Anyone who can honestly say they can do more with an I-Mac, or whatever the hell you call your PC these days is an idiot.

Now on to Windows Vista.  This was a dog from the start.  I’ve had my hands on this from the start, and it’s pretty much always sucked.  The out-of-the box experience is terrible, since you have to pretty much OK everything to run…before it runs.  Of course, this is a result of a lot of you idiots executing programs that you’ve received via e-mail, even if they’re from unknown sources.  Microsoft took the safe road, and decided that you weren’t safe from yourselves.

Once you get past that, and you can if you look up how to tweak it, then you have to make sure your hardware can work.  In the past, Microsoft, and the hardware vendors out there, have made sure that backwards-compatibility is possible.  NOT THIS TIME.  Stuff that has only been out for maybe a year or so before Vista came out isn’t working right.  Maybe you’ve gotten lucky, but there’s a lot of people out there who didn’t have that same luck.

Vendors aren’t creating drivers for products that should be supported because they’re too busy working on drivers for the NEXT version of Windows.

Things are getting very messy.  My advice right now, is to build yourself a solid Windows XP Pro based system, and run with it.  If you have an I-Pod…well, you’re at the mercy of Apple.  There are other solutions out there, but they aren’t that great yet.

It’s a shame these companies suck.