Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities

jcatcw writes "After hundreds of hours of testing Vista, Scot Finnie is supremely tired of it. And of Microsoft. Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. But the real problem isn't with Vista. It's with Microsoft itself. His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"

Comments

Re:Join the bandwagon

[suckmysav]

You know, I agree with most of what you write, apart from the "everyday home user" stuff.

If they are not interested in the everyday home user then why on earth would they be currently in the middle of ploughing through half a billion dollars woth of mass market TV adverts trying to convince people to go "Wow" when they first see Vista?

Couldn't have put it better myself

[mandelbr0t]

When all is said and done, it's not that I don't like Vista. It's that I've lost faith in Microsoft to deal in an evenhanded way with end users and corporate buyers of its software. We just need more intelligent, rational people to start thinking like this. I have no doubt that Vista will appeal to lots of users. Unfortunately, those users have been hosed repeatedly by Microsoft and still appear no closer to the quoted revelation.

Re:Join the bandwagon

[timeOday]

"If they are not interested in the everyday home user then why on earth would they be currently in the middle of ploughing through half a billion dollars woth of mass market TV adverts trying to convince people to go "Wow" when they first see Vista?"

This reminds me of some ads I've seen "BASF... We don't make the things you buy, we make the things you buy better." Remember those? It was like they were purposely saying, "99% of you within the sound of our voice, we don't care about you... you can't even choose to buy our products or not, because they're everywhere in everything. To the other 1%... look how much we can waste on this - that's how big we are."

Or remember Enron saturating the airwaves with ads for their new bandwidth commodities market? How many of the viewers were really commodities traders? I think it's just a "show of force."

Is Microsoft really trying to accomplish anything or spread any message, or simply maintaining their larger-than-life image?

Re:It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run

[JordanL]

Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform.

Don't delude yourself into thinking that tech savvy people don't put the heat on Apple for their similarly moderate improvements version over version because their Apple. Apple releases them every 1.5-2 years.

This took Microsoft over SIX years to send out. People aren't saying it's not a gradual improvement, people are asking why the hell it took Microsoft SIX years to make such gradual improvement, how long its going to be before they make their next incompatable "gradual improvement", and whether or not Microsoft even has an R&D department. Most of the things they did were very clearly innovated by someone else.

-Security's a problem? Let's create something that will let us blame the user. (UAC)
-Games going to other OSs are a problem? Let's rewrite an incompatable DX10.
-Third party drivers for video crads are crashing our driver model? Let's just gimp the third parties so that they can't and do it ourselves. (Bonus for gimping OpenGL.)
-GUI/useability is a problem? Let's just slice and dice some Linux and OS X elements.

The problem is not that Vista is incremental in change, it's that its incremental, it took six years, and Microsoft is forcing the incompatability anyways.