Editing Windows (section)

=== Missing Functionality ===

The following items are things that I would expect to be included in any modern 21st century operation system, especially one with a starting retail price of $199.00!

* No Secure Shell (SSH) client or server in base system. Although admittedly, SSH access to a Windows host would be rather useless at this time, see next point. 
* Although there is a CLI (cmd.exe) its complete lack of capabilities and sophistication renders it virtually useless
* Inability to <strike>mount</strike>, <strike>burn</strike>, create or otherwise manipulate ISO or other disk images (OK, you can burn ISO images as of Windows 7, you can mount as of Windows 8).
* Poor development tools. Full blown Visual Studio is expensive, only a stripped down ''Express'' version is available for free... Other platforms provide fully featured development environments that are far more versatile at no cost.
* No low-level troubleshooting utilities, ie) where is a ''tcpdump'' equivalent? Do Window admins never need to analyze network traffic to demystify otherwise unexplainable behavior? Even basics like ''dig'' for verifying DNS data is completely absent. While we're in this vein of thought, even the ''telnet''  client included in previous versions is not included in the default Vista install. Looks like they're moving backwards in this category.
* No system wide package management. Applications instead use one of a multitude of available ''installer'' systems. Each and every application, utility or driver needs to be kept up to date manually. (OS X suffers from similar limitations, so think of BSD and Linux's capabilities here).
* No PDF support. Reading PDFs requires free third party software. Creating PDFs requires purchasing Adobe Acrobat at a whopping $299.
* No ability to clone a volume from one physical disk to another. (Think of Norton Ghost and the like here). Such functionality belongs in the Operating System, not supplied by 3rd party vendors.
* No ability to identify hardware that does not have the drivers installed. I've had to resort to booting a Linux Live CD (Such as Knoppix) on countless occasions after installing Windows in order to identify the hardware in the system and find the appropriate drivers. This is beyond lame.