I hesitate to criticize Microsoft. As an ex-Microsoft user, it’s easy to be accused of simply bagging the ‘opposition’. But when it comes to simplicity, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Microsoft continue to be a wonderful example of what not to do if you want to make life easy for your customers.

Microsoft’s long-awaited new operating system, Vista, is not even available to the general public yet and they’ve already managed to make it unnecessarily complex.  Where Vista’s predecessor, Windows XP, offered two versions to choose from (‘Home’ and ‘Professional’), Vista comes in no less than four flavors: ‘Home Basic’, ‘Home Premium’, ‘Business’ and ‘Ultimate’.

I’m not even going to bother trying to interpret the differences for you (you can do that yourself here). What I don’t understand is what they are trying to do. More particularly, why they are needlessly making life more difficult for their millions of customers. Every one of those customers will now need to go through the angst of understanding the options, trying to work out which will suit them now and trying to work out whether that will still suit them in one or two years time.

Apple include the lot in just one version of their OS-X operating system. That’s simple. Why can’t Microsoft?