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Forbes Says Vista Not People Ready

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-is-it-ready-for dept.

Diomedes01 writes "Daniel Lyons has an opinion piece up on Forbes.com about a recent press conference held by Microsoft, and the results are anything but flattering."

3 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. My Clinically Inept Siblings by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Surprise surprise, people are predicting that Microsoft's Vista may not be 'people ready.'

    Let's take my three sisters. Each has a degree in biology. Each considers me their personal tech support when anything "breaks." It sucks.

    I've gotten phone calls from them about the behavior of Windows XP on multiple occasions. Once they thought all their windows kept closing if they opened too many. As it turns out, they had the "grouping" feature enabled for windows of the same type on the toolbar.

    *sigh*

    Now Vista will have a new 3D effect to window grouping. Sweet Jesus, I am turning my cell phone off. I can imagine it now, "All my windows are turning sideways! Make it stop!"

    Aside from "Ease of Use," I don't think any of the advertised features are going to meld well with any of my sisters. The new 'Aero' technology is no match for my sisters' Airhead logic.

    I plan to make up some story for them about how Vista is the devil and if you install it, it will slowly begin to ruin your computer. Oh, and if you try to save your biology notes, it especially hates the medical sciences so it will delete them instantly. Not to mention that its new 'AI' abilities allow it to call you names if it perceives you to be an unqualified user. That should stop them from buying it.
    The worst part is that Microsoft can smell this potential market in young people who don't know what they need:
    Microsoft execs also talked about "Impacting People," then they dragged out fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, who seemed very "impacted" as he sang praise for Microsoft programs. Actually, he was reading meaningless statements from a TelePrompTer. Here is one of his quotes, verbatim: "When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination."
    That's exactly the kind of publicity stunt that would cause all three of my sisters to run out and buy Vista. *shudders* He's an fucking fashion designer! What the fuck would he know about computer software?!?!

    And what is with this part of the article:
    Why not at least switch to an Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL) Mac? Apple's new operating system is stable, reliable and easy to use. The applications are simple, gorgeous and work well together. And they're here. Today. Steve Jobs must be waking up a happy man this morning.
    This article brought to you by Forbes Magazine's Daniel Lyons, owner of stock in AAPL.

    Thanks, Dan, I was with you there until that last paragraph where your Apple sales pitch kicked in.
    --
    My work here is dung.
  2. Software Assurance and Date Slippage by E-Sabbath · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As I understand things, many Software Assurance Plans, which were essentially forced on customers with the claim that Longhorn would be available, expire as of 12/31/06.

    I wonder if there may be issues with claims salesmen made and this date slippage.

  3. Re:trying not to troll by aralin · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Up until a year ago it took some three months to actually produce a working build of Windows Vista. Now they managed to pull a miracle and get it down to about a week or so. I work on a similar scale software and we produce working builds every day or two on multiple codelines. If we ever get to third day without a working build on main codeline, the developers scream like mad. If we would get to a week, the development would halt for the sheer number of conflicts from thousands of developers pounding it day and night. If we hit three months, the product would become totally unbuildable and the company would implode in a big puff of smoke, or maybe godzilla would eat us all, I just cannot even imagine that possibility.

    The fact that Microsoft operates under conditions like that is indeed a herculean effort, but such a huge amount of resources is wasted in the process and such amount of overhead generated, that there is no wonder for Vista to be delayed 3 years and its feature list slashed in half and its stability and security (whatever amount there ever been) is going down the drain. I can only imagine that Office is in the same boat.

    This is not merely flawed development environment, this is a sign of total disaster in making.

    --
    If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.