I will quote a portion from the 5th part in the series:
The Difference of the Challenges Faced
Apple's existing Mac OS X Tiger has been in ongoing use by millions of grandmas, creative professionals, school kids, and molecular biologists for nearly two years.
Leopard doesn't face a huge list of security flaws, legacy baggage, and core architectural problems that desperately need to be fixed; its just icing on a cake that already tastes pretty good.
Vista, on the other hand, faces significant challenges. Microsoft's existing Windows XP is the root of the most expensive destruction caused by any operating system ever.
Severely FUBAR
Windows deficiencies have spawned a third party market for antivirus and security tools that drains away many billions of dollars of direct repair costs, and untold billions of lost productivity every year.
Vista is challenged with solving poor engineering decisions made in past decades: some were the product of earlier technology limitations, but others were the result of sloppy and irresponsible development, a fact that even Microsoft publicly recognizes.
In addition to the problems Microsoft has created, the company also struggles with problems caused by bad third party development for which the company has no control. Developers who skirted Microsoft's public APIs and refuse to let go of deprecated legacy have forced the company to support a mess of old technology that impedes progress and folds excessive complexity into Microsoft's code base.
Out of Control
If Microsoft were entirely in control of its own destiny, it could quickly banish support for legacy hardware and decisively move developers into the future by laying out clean new APIs and simply killing off the outdated, arcane ways of doing things that drag down Windows development like millions of tiny anchors tearing up the ocean floor as the ship from Redmond struggles to push forward.
As a smaller, nimbler company that isn’t hamstrung by foot dragging hardware partners, Apple can plot its own future, and has solved its legacy issues by enforcing the meaning of deprecated.
Apple isn't escaping a plague of viruses and spyware because of its smaller installed base, but rather because of the simpler, cleaner design of its software, a luxury afforded by the company's power to move decisively and cast off the unnecessary baggage and boat anchors of past legacy.
This gives Apple another advantage with Leopard over Vista: Leopard can quickly adopt and exploit new features though its tight integration with a known, limited set of hardware precisely because it only runs on Apple's Macs.
Microsoft's Vista not only has to support an incredible variety of existing hardware, but is also obligated to support a lot of poorly written software as well.
This has worked in Microsoft's favor in the past, as its legacy support served to complicate rivals’ efforts to compete against Windows in the PC operating system market. Against Apple however, it puts Microsoft at a significant disadvantage, particularly in the consumer markets Apple is targeting.
Legacy development issues also play into the technology that shapes the elegance Leopard and Vista can offer.
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