Have you used Windows 8? Have you used Mountain Lion. I’ve seen both. I can tell you that there is very little innovative about Mountain Lion. Its pretty, it adds in some iOS stuff, but its not that different from Lion, which wasn’t that different from Snow Leopard. Very incremental improvements.
Windows 8 is a whole new ball game. Totally different than Windows 7. It leapfrogs the competition. I’m not trying to start a holy war with Apple fanboys, but that is my informed opinion. If you disagree, thats fine. Thats why the free market and consumer choice is a good thing.
Lose Metro and it isn’t that different from Win 7. It does seem lighter weight though. Ran ok on a VBox on a HP laptop. That says a bunch right there.
I don’t think anyone doubts that Win8 is going to be a significant change over Win7. That’s not the question. The real issue is whether or not that change will be a good thing for the end user.
For the hobbyist who wants the latest and greatest.. probably a good thing without question. For the corporate environment who sees “major change” and reads it as “costly training”, maybe not so much. For the average home user, somewhere inbetween.
Of course, having observed tech punditry for the last couple of decades, the safest prediction I can make is that most of the pundits are probably wrong, and that we won’t have any good idea what will happen (in terms of success/failure as measure by actual end users) until it actually happens.
Sheesh, I just got Windoze 7 at work. I don’t want to learn yet another ‘totally new system’