Tiger Roars as an OS

Michael Gartenberg | April 12, 2005, 11:02 AM

Well, as announced this morning, Apple's OS X Tiger will ship on the 29th and that's the reason I'm in SF this week. I spent some time with Phil Schiller yesterday and got an in depth look at Tiger. I purposely held off writing anything until the vendor glow wore off a bit but this morning I'm still convinced that Tiger is a big deal and it just might be the the best OS on a PC I have ever seen for productivity use (I'm still waiting for Apple get produce a 10 foot UI for media centric functions) . The reason? Spotlight. Integrated search just works so much better at the OS level and when it's integrated into everything. For the first time users aren't constrained to or forced to learn the intricacies of a hierarchal file system. It doesn't matter where on my disk the information is or even if its sitting in my email. Spotlight finds it and then lets me manipulate it.

What does this mean? In an age of hundreds of gigs of info, users don't need to spend hours and hours organizing their data to be able to find it again. Add in the concept of Smart folders that work just like the smart playlists do in iTunes except they do it on all my data. Finally toss in an automation tool that's like a visual applescript and its a snap to tag and manipulate the data you've found. How's this for even more fun? you can use safari to monitor your RSS feeds (with a great and simple way to see if sites support RSS and then add them) and then create smart searches within them. My own personal pubsub...

There's a lot more in Tiger, iChat2 runs rings around msn messenger for video chat and dashboard is just plain cool. The real hit for me though is spotlight and the integrated os and application functions. Tiger is a real leap in os functionality and msft is going to have hard time to upstage tiger with longhorn. The real challenge that Apple has is to make sure people understand what they've done here. They need to turn up the volume on this several notches so that they don't get lost in the checklist wars, i.e., we have search, they have search... There's a real experiential difference here in what Apple's offering and if you spend far too much time organizing your stuff or just can't find it again, you need to take a close look at Tiger. What's missing? not much for me. I'd like to see RSS persistent so I can read and search offline and I wouldn't mind seeing MSFT add Spotlight for Entourage. Otherwise, for the moment, this OS is nirvana for productivity.