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

Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[yagu]

Well, in summary, the new Vista:

• Introduces the new user security model similar to Un*x, only 30 years later. But it is (so far) incredibly inane in its interaction model with the user (from the article):

  The bad news, then, is that UAP is a sad, sad joke. It's the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.

• they've taken the "windows" metaphor to its (in their opinion) next logical step, i.e., "glass", offering translucent and transparent windows. But (FTA):

  Anyway, the reality of glass windows is that they stink. The windows themselves are translucent, meaning you can see through them partially. But the visual difference between the topmost window (that is, the window with which you are currently interacting, or what we might describe as the window with focus) and any other windows (i.e. those windows that are visually located "under" the topmost window) is subtle at best. More to the point, you can't tell topmost windows from other windows at all. And don't pretend you can.

• they've added a "Media Center", but (summarizing the article), it stinks.

Thurrott says he still doesn't hate Microsoft for not delivering on all of these promises:

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.

The world needs friends like Mr. Thurrott. He's a pretty forgiving guy. But, it would have been nice had Microsoft really been able to deliver this as promised. I was looking forward to buying a new upgraded computer!

Sounds like an apologist

[thewiz]

'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.'

Hmmm... Sounds like something I've heard before from a sister-in-law:

'I don't hate taking care of the kids, and I certainly don't hate my husband for disappointing me and the kids with his actions that don't even come close to meeting his original promises. I'm sure I learned something from this debacle, and hopefully he will be more open and honest about what he can and cannot do in the future ... In some ways, my husband actually will exceed other men, but not to the depth we were promised. Instead, he will do what so many other husbands have done, and simply promise us a few major changes and many subtle or minor ones. It's not so horrible that he misleads me and the kids. It's just not what I was promised at the alter.'

Both sound like someone trying to apologize and explain away someone elses bad behaviour.

A credibility problem

[clevershark]

It's hard to trust the reviewer when he writes about how disappointed he is, but still gives the product 5/5.

Don't care. Don't want to care.

[plover]

Frankly, I don't want to get excited about Vista.

Since they're building DRM right into the core of the OS (including crap such as the Protected Media Path and all its ilk) I have absolutely no reason to think they won't allow corporate partners (RIAA, MPAA, BSA) to abuse this to kill pieces of "unapproved" media or "rogue" apps. What happens when the .*AA tells them Azureus is being used to pirate software or media? Shut 'er down! Even if you've only ever used it to share the latest fad video or big open source distribution, it won't matter. And that's wrong.

Whether I agree with them on issues of piracy or not (I don't approve of pirating software myself) I refuse to allow my computer to participate in extending or enforcing their policies, and I refuse to install DRM based media players. I'm going to keep XP on that machine for as long as it runs, or until I replace it with an open OS.

This just in...

[Kohath]

This just in:

A product's performance doesn't live up to the hype.

I know we're all shocked that he unthinkable finally happened.

My Vista sucks

[VAXGeek]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Windows Vista PC (Pentium 4/3000 w/64 bits of power) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than Windows Vista, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Windows Media Player 11 is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista machine that has run faster than its XP counterpart, despite the translucent interface. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3000 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.

Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Windows Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

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?

Easy

[MarkByers]

Can anyone here name any Microsoft product that lived up to its hype? Anyone?

Word 2007 will easily live up to the hype. I've heard it's going to be absolutely amazing.

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...

I understand, but don't agree.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

It would be very fun to program in avalon, but utlimately the best applications are the ones with the simplest interfaces. Too many comapnies try to be innovative and cool with their UI design and its crap. Its all nonstandard and does not behave the way all of the other controls in windows do. MAYBE avalon will entice those compaines to write all their crap in avalon, which will bring standardisation and a higher level of stability to these programs, but nto for a good 2-3 years after vista. Probley just in time for the update. I can't wait that long, as a user or a developer. I'd just rather use things ina simple elegent way without animated 3-d buttons. I'm not going to buy another computer, for a nother year at least. Even if vista is out then, I might have to take a real look at getting an intel mac Mac.

Re:So just for perspective...

[tehshen]

Halo?

Hi!

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.

Re:Posix and security

[IntlHarvester]

This is "role-based" security, not "user-based"

So, no, Linux/Unix has not been doing this since inception. There's been military versions of Unix that have done it for a long time, but it's hasn't been a generally available feature (and still isn't on the desktop even for SELinux distros).

Re:Filesystem

[ickoonite]

Nice troll.

I've karma to burn, so just a couple of points:

Vista doesn't look vastly different...

This is such bollocks it's hard to know where to start. As Thurrott laments, one of the most fundamental features of a windowing system - the idea of depth in a 2D space and so marking out the active window - has been thoroughly fucked up by a team whose sole goal seems to have been to chase the teh pretty crowd. Those screenshots were damning. Usability has gone to shreds.

...even though most of the OS has been rewritten...

Do you actually have any evidence of this? Judging by the icons in some of the dialogue boxes (try here), some of the stuff hasn't seen an update since Windows 95. There's a reason it "'appears' to not be different to push away current Windows Users".

...and has tons of new protections and features that just work..

Evidently not. Evidently they are so poorly implemented that even fanboy Thurrott is banging his head on the table.

Vista is a new OS with the first radical change in Windows since Windows 3.0.

You're a fucking idiot. A first class fucking nutcase.

Then I read the rest of your post, where you start talking about this fire bollocks, or something, and I realise that you actually are a fucking nutcase...

...you need to prepare, learn and even USE some of the ideas Microsoft has recreated in development, and bring these to other OSes.

OK, I'll give you that. Apple brought decent search to Mac OS X in 2005 after Microsoft announced it would implement it in Vista, then Longhorn. Alas, Windows users will get their hands on it in...2007. Hmmmm...

iqu :|

(And, just one thing, moderators, before modding me down, take a moment to read and consider the parent's post. I am normally a rational and controlled type, but sometimes things just have to be said...)

Not the first time they haven't met expectations

[Locke2005]

Imagine how poor Melinda Gates felt on her honeymoon, when she discovered what Bill had been promising her for years was going to be "the greatest thing ever" could be summed up in two words -- "micro" and "soft".