In all the swirling rumors about Windows Vista, the next generation OS from everyone's favorite monopolistic software conglomerate, one thing is abundantly clear: Macintosh is the stylistic standard that we all hope to someday attain. Or at least Microsoft seems to think so. Why else would they be imitating even the most inane of Macintosh UI features:

-"Traffic Light" window controls. The minimize, maximize, and close buttons on Mac windows are nonintuitive and hard-to-click colored circles that look like a traffic light. Why abandon icons which users have been familiar with since Windows 3.1 in favor of a clearly inferior presentation of the same functionality?

-Animated window mini- and maxi-mize. The most ridiculous waste of UI/graphics capabilities is how when you minimize a Macintosh window (by clicking the yellow circle? red circle?), it squeezes together and sucks downward into the taskbar. It's distracting and it serves no purpose, especially when switching quickly between, say, Visual Studio and MLB.com Gameday.

For all the improvements that this version promises (a search that actually works and is easy to locate, tabbed browsing, god-willing a standards-compliant IE), doesn't Microsoft realize that if I wanted all the crappy graphical knickknacks that I've come to expect from Apple I would just buy a Powerbook and set aside the money to inevitably send it back to Apple to get the faulty hard drive replaced?