Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?

mr_mischief writes "An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet's News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on. 'Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'"

Comments

Huh? worst start?

[nanowired]

Windows ME anyone?

Re:leave it alone!!

[commonchaos]

For those of you that don't get the joke, check out the video that this is based on.

Re:Verdict is in?

[PCM2]

Is the Verdict in that Vista did, indeed, tank?

Finally getting MythTV working with my remote, configuring my video drivers properly, and getting my SPDIF audio working were the final nails for me. Now Linux can do pretty much everything that Windows Media Center was doing for me before. I haven't rebooted from my Ubuntu partition in weeks. I find I'm far more efficient in this OS (even with the GL Desktop disabled!)

This reminds me.....

[JDHawg]

.... of DOS 4.0

Now for you youngsters who don't know what I'm talking about, DOS 4.0 was a train wreck of an operating system that gave user's who 'upgraded' from 3.X nothing but bugs and heartache.

What's that old saying? Oh Yeah, it's "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." I guess 15-18 years is enough time to forget about past mistakes.

Re:Verdict is in?

[Samalie]

I bought a new laptop about 4 months ago, pre-loaded with Vista.

Yep, I've had signifigant problems. The removal of MS-CHAPv1 forced me to upgrade my office's vpn/router. Now works perfectly supporting both MS-CHAP 1 & 2. I have a couple of pieces of software that like to give me grief, but nothing I haven't worked around..

Memory useage sucks, I admit it freely. My laptop is a beefy box, but every now and then it slows to a crawl. There are bugs...oh yes there are bugs. Media Centre has issues at times with DivX files. Driver support is spotty at best. The Ultimate edition has got me diddly-squat over other editions really. UAC is retarded "Yes, I'm sure I want to move this file....yes, I want to connect to....aw fuckit" /disable UAC.

I've grown to HATE Vista.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I really don't hate Vista. It works - for the most part. Things are signifigantly more stable even now than back in the pre-release days (I've been testing since Beta 1), and I have hope that SP1 will fix some of the more annoying crap. Drivers are coming...although in the same vein you can't blame Microsoft when vendors choose to discontinue driver support for (x) product - thats the manufacturer's business choice.

I in no way think Microsoft released the next thing to perfection in Vista....but I really don't think it is complete ass either. Look at the release of Win95, or XP, and you'll see a similar pattern of spotty driver support, some applications failing to work, etc. The only real problem this time is everyone seems so hell-bent to beat on Microsoft that they're causing alot of the issues, being writing dodgy drivers, or software bugs in their products, etc.

I'm no Microsoft lover, be assured....but if the vendor community as a whole actually worked with Microsoft (and Microsoft with them) to get their shit done right, then quite frankly Vista wont suck...at least not as much :)

Vista right now is very WinME-like, but the OS does have potential. At least I can still surf for porn :P

Re:I use Vista daily.

[thsths]

> My brother is using the 64 bit version of Vista for his video production work (since 32 bit Vista is capped at 3 GB of RAM), so I know that there's a lot more headaches with 64 bit Vista.

Indeed. I wonder whether 64bit will ever be ready for the mainstream. At some time it will have to be, I guess, but when is that? Certainly not before 32bit become rather painful.

The main problem with Windows and 64bit is that you need all new drivers, because pretty much every driver is in kernel space. And then there is the horridness of the 32bit subsystem: 32bit libraries go into WoW64, 64bit libraries go into System32. Sounds like Alice in Wonderland, doesn't it? Dropping the 16bit subsystem didn't help either, because it seems a lot of installers still need it.

Of course Linux has it own problems with 64bit. RedHat tries to be as compatible as possible, but only to RedHat. And Debian goes "pure64", with no compatibility whatsoever, and certainly not to RedHat. Until this problem is resolved, 64bit Linux will go nowhere either.

Re:woa wooooaaaa woah

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I just started a new job for a non-IT company and the standard issue monitor is a 15" Dell LCD locked at a max of 1024x768 resolution.

To make matters worse, they were recently upgraded to Office 2007.

At such a *low* resolution, with all the fancy eye-candy they have added, there is a little tiny window in the center of the monitor where I can actually see what I'm working on. There is so much wasted space (i.e., a 1/4" bar that says "Click here to enable Instant Search") that there is hardly any room to get any work done. It almost feels like I'm trying to view a document on a PocketPC or something... To make matters worse, I'm a touch typist and seldom use the mouse for something like Print Preview (Alt-F-V in the past) and now when I try to do that, it pops up a dialog telling me that I'm about to Convert my document instead of Preview it. Thanks, Microsoft, thanks a lot!

Get decalf. And an enter key.

[dtolman]

Ever wonder why no one seems to appreciate your insightful long form commentary? Maybe its because 3 lines into a 50 line text block their eyes glaze over and they hit the back key. Paragraphs are your friend - not something to be avoided.

Reading a text block like that is the visual equivelant of listening to those sped up caveats they spit out at the end of car commercials - their must be something in there...but who the hell knows, I stopped paying attention 8 words in.

Re:All the Puppy does is Wine.

[SatanicPuppy]

But then you're right back to using Windows! I've gone that route, where I have a couple of big ass terminal services machines serving every MS app that people say they have to have, and at the end of the day someone is going to look at the balance sheet and say, "If we need this much microsoft stuff, why don't we just use windows?" and you're left trying to justify the cost savings to a bunch of PHBs whose staff is still pissy that they don't get to use Windows, and is making a stink about every single little flaw.

And Outlook, Jesus. Outlook/Exchange is a fricking deal breaker, you will run up against that wall over and over again, and trying to sell people on OWA or Lotus does not work. Outlook is one of those apps that does not have an OSS equivalent, and if you say "Evolution" you're telling me that you have no idea why people use Outlook.

Re:Whatever

[Qrlx]

What? Muslims, Christians, and Jews are all children of Abraham. They all worship the same deity.

Re:Real problem

[fractoid]

The real problem is that CPU speeds have nearly flatlined. I think the REAL problem is that with Windows XP, they created an OS that is 'good enough' that people don't need to upgrade from it. Windows 3.1 was OK for its time but on a scale of 1 to Awesome, it was shit. Windows 95 was better. Windows 98 SE was pretty damn good, people used that for ages, but it still required semi-regular reinstalls. *sweeps Windows ME under the rug where it belongs*

Windows XP will run for years+ without needing a reinstall, it has excellent hardware support and will run practically any software. It works fine on 5-year-old or ultra-cheap hardware. It has a familiar interface, good-enough network support for file sharing etc. Basically it does everything people need from it. So they have no motivation to go to Vista, which by all accounts provides an overall worse user experience than XP, while costing a lot more and requiring a fuckton more hardware power.