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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.'"
Don't ditch it. There's no need to ditch it altogether. Release a "second edition" a la Win98, give some options to reduce bloat, work with major hardware manufacturers to make useful drivers, and work on general compatibility (back and forward). Then re-release the OS to praise and thanks.
Make it a logical step from XP so that companies needn't retrain their employees.
Why do so many people ignore the often-cited reason for not switching to Vista? DRM is invasive, restrictive, and ridiculous. Hard-core gamers went vista ASAP, much like file-sharers who got it for free. The universal response was either that they hated it, or that they didn't see an improvement.
I've had to trouble shoot computers with it on there. I repeatedly found myself wondering why they had changed things that were so simply on XP to be so complicated on Vista.
Microsoft won't "drop" Vista, any more than they "dropped" their most horrible other operating system - Windows ME *cringe*. They'll just move on. They've already wrote the system. They'll keep updating it. The real question - the critical one - is how long they will support XP. They'll need to continue to support XP until they get a system out that is an actual improvement, and not just a corporate-ass kissing piece of crap.
The problem is not the operating system itself. The problem is with Microsoft's development processes. Its ineffiency bloats the operating system and bogs down the speed and quality of the development. Moving on to a new operating system will result in the 'same' product. Think about it... telling the development team of Duke Nukem Forever to move onto Duke Nukem Whenever will not result in an expedited, improved, or actualized product.
From my limited perspective, it appears to me that Microsoft tries too hard to be everything to everyone. Other operating systems do not follow this plan. What you end up with is audio drivers slowing down network performance and a whole lot of feature bloat. Whereas I'm a FreeBSD/Mac OS X fan through-and-through, I have to admit Microsoft wouldn't be where they are if they didn't have decent product. It's just unfortunate to see them getting 'a little big for their britches.'
I'm sure we're just heading into something of a reform in the world of operating systems. I think that Vista is going to be just one of many casualties of competition. In the end, I feel the users will win.
I really don't get the point of these commentaries. Yes, Vista is a bit of a dog's breakfast. Yes, companies aren't rushing out to buy it en masse.
But it's being bundled with home computers, and your average Joe is NOT going to know about the problems. If he's lucky, he may have a friend who recommends staying with XP for now. But for many, many people, they'll just buy 'the whole thing' from PC World and be running Vista.
Like a lot of things Microsoftish, it may not be a running success out-the-door (Zune, Xbox), but it'll slowly get a foothold until more and more people start using it. Vista is here to stay folks, and in five-or-so years, it'll be the dominant OS. Microsoft won't support XP forever.
(Posted on a Mac mini!)
This article doesn't make any sense.
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista. Those people are still paying for a Microsoft OS. Congratulations, you've decided to give Microsoft money instead of giving Microsoft money.
A lot of things could someday sink Microsoft. People choosing to buy one of their products won't be it.
(Unless one of those products somehow combusted and burned down a pack of orphanages, resulting in worse publicity and lawsuits.)
Guy goes to an astrologer and he looks at the horoscope, does lots of calculations and says, "Jupiter is in the same House as Saturn. And Saturn will stay in that House for 7.5 years. All through that 7.5 years, you will have misery and misfortune. Your wife will leave you. Your son will usurp your house and throw you out. You will lose all your wealth and fall sick. You will be miserable for 7.5 years."
The guy, visibly disturbed asks, "What happens after 7.5 years when Saturn moves out of the House of Jupiter?"
The astrologer shrugged and said, "You will be used to the misery."
Same way, in three years the miserable performance of Vista will be defined to be industry standard fast tracked and approved by ISO and users will use 4GB of RAM to browse the internet.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I doubt Microsoft will take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion, if for no reason other than sheer arrogance.
Companies kill me, it's a corporate lifecycle that we see again and again, and very few seem to learn from it. Once a company gets so big, it gets it in its head that it's invulnerable. It thinks that it can do anything it wants, and people will flock to it because it's the latest and greatest offering from the King of the (Whatever).
We see it now with Microsoft and Vista. We're also seeing it from Sony on its Playstation 3. Sony thought, "Of course people will buy the Playstation 3. It's a Playstation, for crying out loud!" Anyone remember when Hayes thought that they had the modem market locked up tight? Or when IBM didn't treat clones as serious competitors?
Usually, companies like this end up either going out of business, or at least eventually become relegated back down into the fray because they stop asking themselves, "What do our customers want?" and become totally focused on "What do we want?
I see the same thing happening before too long with Apple and its iPods and even Google, which as recently announced that it's going to start running image and video ads and plastering ads on its YouTube videos. Once a company starts thinking about its own interests over that of its customers, it's the beginning of the end of that company's dominance.
Of course, who knows? They might eventually pull a Nintendo. Go into a slump for a few years, learn from their mistakes, and come back out swinging. Historically, though, that is rare, and we are talking about Microsoft here.
The real fact of the matter from those of us that use Vista everyday is that fact that it works just fine. My games play the same or better than they did in XP, my development tools run just fine, and the UI for once is actually nice to work with. Now call me crazy, but I don't find Vista bad at all.
As a software developer myself I realize the fact that OS's are large and complicated and they all have some issues. I use Linux, I use OS X, and I use Vista. Each has their own merits and their own problems. The problem is that now, just like it was popular in the 80s and 90s to hate IBM, its popular to hate Microsoft. News writers see this as a bandwagon they can use to get articles read and website hits. The real fact is that Vista has no more problems than any other OS at this point in its life cycle.
I truly wish that for the good of all of the tech industry, people would see that every piece of software, and every OS has its place. Vista does a lot of things well... It just happens to have a few flaws and a few "features" that just seem to go against the grain of the most vocal people in the geek world (i.e. DRM) and thus we see articles like this that are ridiculous and inflammatory simple for being as such.
Didn't we go through this same issue when Windows XP first came out in 2001? I remember back then you needed 512 MB to make it run decently fast, and the "sweet spot" was 1 GB of RAM (both of which were not that common back in 2001).
The problem with Windows Vista is that the hardware has not yet completely caught up with the potential of the OS. Just wait till 2008, when machines with 4 GB or more of RAM become more commonly available and graphics cards that support DirectX 10 are more widely available.
Except the same joke was already used today in another MS article. By the same AC? Who knows . . .
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
That's not to say that Microsoft couldn't suffer losses in this generation, but it would be more about the presence of strong alternatives than their failure to adopt a 'move on' strategy.
What's really interesting about this /particular/ FUDy article is how quibbly it is. He appears to have three major complaints: the pricing scheme, specifically of the Ultimate edition, the UAC(and specifically, that it doesn't like a specific unnamed third party app which we're assured is from a 'well-known software company'), and DRM. We're not talking about blue screens and security holes here.
There is no compelling reason to move to Vista, and it seems obvious that waiting for SP1 is probably the right move for anyone who wants to upgrade. That doesn't mean that this OS won't succeed, however, and it's shown marked improvement on many counts since launch. Can we just call this FUD and "move on"?
Maybe if Microsoft spent more time on stuff (that people actually _use_ you know), instead of fluff, maybe Vista would actually be half decent.
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
- Expose. Enough said.
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!)
- The ability to re-locate, (or hide) the dam 'close' button
- Title bars that stop sucking up valuable screen space, instead of being small movable tabs like in BeOS
- Virtual Desktops
- An OS that gets FASTER from version to version (again BeOS)
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process.
- Unified widgets/gadgets: NO, I don't want seperate run-times for Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, insert flavor of the month company because they decided to do their own implementation.
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
- A file system that doesn't suck. YES, I want to be able to start my filenames with spaces for sorting purposes (Thx Explorer. NOT.) have my filenames contain colons, end with a period or question mark. And treat the underscore as a virtual space, so we don't have to quote filenames in our command scripts. A way to "tag" files, so I can visually see BOTH a heirarchy, AND flat filesystem.
- Config files that can be moved from system to system instead of hiding everything in the bloated registry
- Free dev tools would be nice.
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing.
All I want is an OS that doesn't suck... is that _really_ too much for a programmer to ask?
The real problem is that CPU speeds have nearly flatlined. Making a new more bloated OS on the assumption that CPU speeds will offset the slowdown is yesterday(7 years ago?)'s development model. Moore's law still holds for a while but it will result in more cores and memory rather than a significant per-cpu speed increase.
It sounds to me like the creators of the software you need to use have no clue how to write software for a multi-user environment.
... right? This "admin to install, guest to use" is nothing new to the world. It's been doable on Microsoft products since NT.
Drivers and kernel aside, Vista changed one huge thing: through UAC, people can no longer write files to Program Files.
It's shocking how many programs did this in the first place. Almost every game in existence writes saves to their folder in program files. For work, I'm forced to maintain 10-15 different programs which allow the users to view "documents" (that's an entirely different story) - and half of them copy the file from the temp folder, to another temp folder... in Program Files.
Vista is trying to be secure. And, if you run Vista and Vista only, it is secure. Other big Microsoft products (MSSQL, Office, Visual Studio) all run happily - as a guest user. Admin to install, guest to use.
Sound familiar? It should. This is slashdot. We all use Linux, right?
So Microsoft comes around and says, "you know, enough of this, we're going to make the OS stable by preventing unauthorized programs from writing files where it shouldn't" - and everything dies. Dies horribly.
Microsoft has many sins upon their heads, in the software realm. However, countless program incompatibilities because software designers have no clue what "multi user" really is - is not Microsoft's (direct) fault. Vista was in beta for an extended period of time. Then they pushed an open beta. It's not like they made these changes behind closed doors and shipped it.
The day that the complaints will stop is the same day that the third party developers get a clue how to design a program around the fact that they can't always write files everywhere they please.
It could be a while.
How the hell did that get so many views? I think you just answered your own question. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't quantify things in terms of "watched 100% of the video".
Win2k, which you left out, was easily the best MS product ever. Could (still can) play games as well as XP, more secure, no activation, near zero DRM, fewer bugs, less memory usage, etc.
For most of the life of MS Windows, the product has been a hack. It was intended to provide added functionality to MS DOS. As MS evolved Windows, MS bolted on more bloat to compete, for instance MS Windows for Networking. Therefore MS Windows worked not unlike those old jalopies with an air intake clamped on the hood, bad bondo job, and, in modern terms, a rear wing made from an old hockey stick.
All this was true until NT. This is the first time I was impressed with MS, and considered it more than a toy or cheap workhorse. The improvements continued through 2000, and I gave XP a lot of slack. MS did a good job producing a real OS, and the fact that it ran on cheap commodity kit made it a valuable product.
The product with MS Vista is that, as far as I can tell, it returns to the bad old day of hacking together a toy OS. I give it no slack. After the experience with XP, there is no reason why MS Vista should be of pre XP quality. To quote the parent, there is no excuse to produce an OS of the poor quality not seen in 10 years. The problem is not that MS broke every promise that would have made MS Vista a superior product. The problem is that MS has not even been able reach the level of respectable inferior product that made MS Windows 3.11 to 95 at least tolerable.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Speaking as a Perl developer, a JScript developer, an IT professional, and a kiosk developer, I now adore the Microsoft corporate assistance, as well as Vista.
The article is question -- and boy is it questionable -- says things like "vista is too expensive" and "it sales are lower than xp's were". Welcome to economics. Just because you lack the funds, doesn't make it a bad thing.
As a business, I've had wonderful times with Microsoft licensing over the last six months. Where I thought I'd have to pay $300 per kiosk, I wound up having to pay $200 one-time licence. Umm, that's basically free.
I'm using both XP and Vista for the kiosks. XP is missing a number of features that Vista has perfectly --
all on the IT side.
I've been reading slashdot for well over a decade now. You guys have it all wrong. Windows is much more flexible than you give it credit for -- and all without having to re-compile a kernel. Absolutely every OS tweak and alteration is possible just as simply as changing a registry key. And each and every one is well named and documented. Just start reading.
Deploying a few hundred configurations is a breeze -- as easy as plugging in a UFD.
There are more tools, support, documentation, and details available for Microsoft's corporate professional solutions than Linux users have all but hoped for. And when they aren't free of charge, they are impressively within budget.
Sorry that your budget is absolute zero. Some of us actually operate successful businesses, and simply love the idea of spending one dollar to make ten. Spending zero to make ten is actually worse, not better. And spending half a dollar to make ten isn't significantly better than spending one.
Do something legitimate, with actual business intentions, and Microsoft is a dream to work with. Want to do something all on your own? That's a different story.
I have no problems with Vista. And any problems that you have with any features, are easily solved by disabling those features. I can't believe that linux users are upset with a default configuration -- freakin' change it. The only difference is that you aren't starting from scratch. You're capable, just do it. And if you do it for someone else, they'll pay you for it.
And no, you don't have to want to get paid. And no, they won't be paying you for your time, or your skill, or your abilities. They'll be paying you for the sole reason of not having to do it themselves. Welcome to the wonderful world of profitable business -- you don't do anything by yourself.
There's a good reason why driver support and bugfixes for Vista are taking forever. In the past, programmers and L337 users lived on the razor's bleeding edge, had the latest version of Windows installed MONTHS before it hit the stores, and were STILL there at midnight to buy it the moment it was officially available.
With Vista, that hasn't happened. To a large extent, it's been shunned even worse by the computer elite than by any other single group. There's peer pressure to NOT run Vista, widespread sentiment that it's rotten to the core thanks to Microsoft's deal with the DRM Devil, and general disinterest. That's a big problem for Microsoft, because the bugs people who bought a new laptop with Vista from Dell experience aren't part of the daily lives of the programming priesthood. Vista has become the "other" OS, shunned, scorned, and psychologically written off as irrelevant to their daily lives. The bugs don't annoy the very people in a position to fix them, so they remain and fester. Ditto, for drivers. If programmers aren't personally affected by whether or not some device works under Vista, they're not going to feel the same sense of urgency. Of course, there's always the business motivation... but when you get down to that special something that really drives programmers to spend their weekend fixing something, even though they aren't getting paid overtime... it's just not there.
If Microsoft REALLY wants to save Vista, they need to introduce one more editon: Vista LE ("Liberty Edition") -- $199, bootable from CD, freely installable on any 2 computers owned by the individual, installable and runnable on an unlimited number of virtual machines, as long as the host machine is running Vista as well, and an unlimited number of "floating" installations that can be activated for up to 30 hours at a time, with the catch that if you activate machine #3 for 30 hours and don't de-activate it, you can't activate machine 3b until the original 30 hours have elapsed. Oh, and every last bit of kernel-level DRM including protected audio and video paths COMPILED OUT. Of course, this means you won't be able to run WinDVD or view premium protected content... but nobody who buys VistaLE will really care, because we'd never buy DRM'ed content anyway.