How Vista Disappoints

MCSEBear writes "Writer Paul Thurrott has given Microsoft a verbal dressing down for what has become of Windows Vista. He details Microsoft's broken promises over the years since Longhorn/Vista was first previewed back in 2003. He demonstrates where current Vista builds fail to live up to Microsoft's current hype of the much reduced feature set. From the article: 'I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future ... It some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux, but not to the depth we were promised. Instead, Windows Vista will do what so many other Windows releases have done, and simply offer consumers and business users a few major changes and many subtle or minor updates. That's not horrible. It's just not what was promised.'"

Comments

You Have to Have to Have to

[bogie]

Watch this video

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-413444611 2378047444&q=Motorrider&pl=true

I've always been of fan of each OS borrowing from one another, but this is just sad. MS ripped everything out of Vista that was truly innovative and we are left with XP rethemed and few nice subsystem tweaks. Frankly Vista is a decent update if it had be released in 2003. WTF have they been doing for 6 years?

Re:Vista will dominate

[clevershark]

A place I used to work for (very large bank) was using NT 4 as recently as 2004.

Then they relented and let *some people* install Windows 2000 on their machines, if it was determined that they really needed it. That's not an uncommon practice with very large companies. All the PCs we had had license stickers for more recent versions of Windows, but we still had an OS which had been released back in 1996.

I've nothing against using Windows, as long as someone pays me for it...

He overlooks the biggest crime of all.

[Captain Rotundo]

I am not very familiar with this guy, as I dont ussually read microsoft press, but how can he link to a dialog like this: http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_5 342_rev5_00.jpg (it says 'You dont currently have permission to delete this file." and then offers the choices "Continue", "Skip", and "Cancel") - and not point out what a total usibility disaster it is? How can a company like microsoft in today's world put up something that abnoxious and unusable?

In case you don't get it its making a decarative statement and then presenting options that have no correlation to the statement, I'm a professional in computers, and have been using them for well over 15 years and couldn't possibly even guess what each of those options should do. Continue what? if I dont have permission to do it how can I continue. Cancel what exactly?, as far as I can tell it just said it wasn't going to do anything anyway. Skip? skip the delete I was just told I can't do? I am baffled... based on the article I guess that it should have said something like "You currently don't have permission to delete this file, what would you like to do?" and given choices like "Grant Permission", "Don't Delete" etc...

I haven't really used windows extensively in a very long time so maybe if I did I would be used to figuring out these obscure dialogues, but I don't think I would ever stop cringing when I saw them. It reminds me of the dialog windows used to put up when you went to access help for the first time in an app, it would ask how big the search database should be (or something) and give you three choices similar to "small (recommended)" "medium" "large" and no other info, not even a clue as to how this would effect your help at all. do they still do that nonsense?

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[TheRaven64]

This windows NT 4.0 will kill Linux

I was using NT 4 back in 1996. Back then, it has SMP (scaled up to 32 processors, although the cheap version was limited to two). Linux was just starting to get SMP capability.

It had native threading, which Linux only got last year.

It had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems? I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux.

It had a GUI with a single, consistent, user interface toolkit. Linux got one of those in 2030?

It had support for hardware accelerated OpenGL and later DirectX. I can't remember the first time I got 3D acceleration of anything other than GLide working with Linux, but I don't think it was before 2000.

It had a stable ABI and component system that allowed some basic introspection and management of reference counted objects. These objects still work on current versions of Windows[1].

Did NT4 kill Linux? No. It was, however, a long way ahead of the competition. Now, let's look at MacOS of that era; it had the consistent UI toolkit (and a set of HIGs people actually used), but no security model, no memory protection and no pre-emptive multitasking. NT4 was pretty far ahead of that too. Apparently OS/2 was in a similar place, but I didn't use it so I can't comment.

Now, let's look at Vista. It's got the same VMS-lite kernel. A nice architecture - much nicer than UNIX, in my opinion - but they haven't really done anything interesting with it for a decade. It's got a 3D accelerated desktop, which may be slightly better than OS X 10.4 (although 10.5 will probably be out before Vista), and fairly similar to Cairo on something like XGl. It will have a horrible mish-mash of visual styles and behaviours that will make a GNOME/KDE hybrid look like the paragon of usability. It will have...uh...

Vista may be ahead of the competition when it launches, but if it is then it will be by such a small margin that it will be the last release that is. When Microsoft originally announced Longhorn, people thought they might actually deliver. Their competitors were worried. They started developing the same sorts of features Vista promised and eventually came very close. Meanwhile, Microsoft started dropping the same features from their version until Vista became so anticlimactic that even Windows fanboys stopped caring.

[1] I think. I haven't actually used Windows for two years, but I haven't read anything to the contrary.