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Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product
Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"
The pre-iphone hysteria was touting the iphone as being the device that would liberate US consumers from the shackles of the telcos.
And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones
Vista wasn't the most dissapointing product - we already new how crap it was going to be. The iPhone was, because prior to release, it bought a ray of hope to US cell-phone consumers that was cruelly dashed.
(Yes, I know the iPhone is number 5 on the list, but it's there for the wrong reasons)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista... Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster. But it still has to burn a little to have the reason you came to work for the past 5 years be labeled "The Most Disappointing Product of the Year"
"...and when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe." Why does that have anything to do with Vista? Isn't that just an indication that Apple make great computers?
You're new round here, right? Microsoft pwns the PC vendors. They push Vista, or they get the hose.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I've seen some really low-end pc's (512 mb ram, integrated graphics chip) with vista pre-installed. I can't even imagine how slowly vista would run on those computers.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The big deal with Vista, yes it's not that bad, but even in its best possible light, its a minor improvement on XP. In its worst light, it is actually worse then the product that was released before it.
Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.
I have found a great use for it though. I have officially taken the stance that I will "never buy Vista" and will also "not support Vista", which frees me from the usual role of having to do tech support for anyone that knows I am in IT. I will happily support a Linux distro and most XP problems have solutions on the net by now, so my "personal favours" workload has reduced dramatically.
Seems every OS and gadget from 2007 is listed here, including the media darling, the iPhone.
Leopard is listed, which came as a bit of a surprise until I read this:
Adding insult to injury, some upgraders even reported a Windows-like Blue Screen of Death when upgrading from previous Mac OSs.
There's nothing Windows-like about it. There's a big difference between a kernel panic and simply stalling during the boot process on a screen which happens to be a shade of blue.
In mid-November, Apple released an update to Leopard that fixed some of the bugs, including the firewall glitch. Repairing Apple's reputation, however, may take slightly longer.
It speaks volumes that Apple fixed some problems 2 weeks after the OS was initially released. Their reputation is OK with me.
I don't think anything would please the author of this article unless it wiped his ass or gave him a spontaneous orgasm.
(sorry for the sort of off-topic-ish post)
The instant pcworld bashes Vista it somehow gains credibility on slashdot I guess :)
If you don't like the newer Start Menu, why not just switch back to Classic View?
part of it is that MS put out Vista when there was no need for it. A refresh of an operating system brings new drivers for new stuff, a bit of a different look, and built-in support or roughed in plumbing for what's coming down the pike. With the exception of gamers and videographers, for most people the PC, Mac, what have you, was fast and good enough three years ago. Most people browse the net, post here and there and do some mail/sms. They won't bother with computer or OS upgrades for quite some time, like only if their machine breaks. Companies, well, they dislike change, and the expense it brings, and for their limited computing needs, Vista brings nothing to the table.
The gamers, videographers and other hobbyists, they will have more than enough power to run Vista anyway so that won't really be an issue. That there is not enough superior to XP software for them available in Vista, is another matter.
Really, if Vista fails, it is because MS tried to make a market when there was none. The halcyon days of the 90's when people upgraded like buying shoes is over. Somebody just didn't get the memo.
Is there anyone outside of M$ that has said anything good about Vista? PCWorld said a few good things but their overall dissapointment carries weight because of their past enthusiasm. What this means is that Vista is so bad that anyone daring to defend it risks their credibility.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I agree with John Gruber. If Apple has a few more "disappointments" like the iPhone next year, it will make its shareholders very, very, happy.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
Every major tech development is on that list as most disappointing. Lets see, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, The entire security industry, the entire cell phone industry, the entire social networking space, the entire VoIP industry are all on the list. Google isn't on the list, probably only because they didn't really release a *New* product in 2007, if they had, they'd be right up there. Both Microsoft and Apple made the list twice, Microsoft for Office and Windows, Apple for OS X and the iPhone... I guess we'd all be happier if these companies had just sat on their thumbs this year?
This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?
Geez, which side are you arguing? Vista has 1% wider adoption than Windows 2000 and you think that's good for Vista?
And to those who claim Vista has been treated unfairly at /. by a bunch of snobby, anti-Microsoft uber-nerds, there is is in black and white. One of Microsoft's major sources of free publicity has just offered to speak at the funeral.
It takes one back. The sneaky-peaky buzz about something called, gasp, "Longhorn". The breathless, it's almost-just-about-nearly-any-day-now blurbs.
And now, this. The honeymoon is truly over, and the groom is sporting a frying-pan-sized lump on his forehead.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
They may be spot on by ranking the debacle that is Vista as #1 on their list, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are just following everyone else's lead. FTA "and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets"... obviously they've never heard of Enlightenment, Compiz, Beryl or KDE4.
/.er, but they lost me right there on the second line of the second paragraph.
I enjoy a good MS bash as the next
Argh! This "consumed a gig of memory just sitting there" is such a complete misconception.
Your operating system SHOULD be using up memory when NOTHING ELSE IS USING IT!
If nothing else is using the memory then the OS SHOULD be using it for caching and whatever else it feels like. As long as it RELEASES said memory when SOMETHING else wants it, what the HELL is the problem with the OS using it?
It's just such a friggen cop out to slam an OS for doing that. I GUARANTEE that if OSX did that people would be quick to point out that it's using it wisely and gives it up when you want it etc.
Just give it a friggen rest.
Pick on Vista for reasons it should be picked on.
I run it at home and these are my gripes:
* DVD Maker, what could easily be a really nice, quick way of putting video compilations on very pretty DVDs, but RUINED by its complete lack of ability to generate anything like what it shows during ALL it's previews. Either it'll burn it in the wrong aspect ratio, or it'll just quit burning at 99% with no helpful error message.
* Deleting things is sometimes PAINFULLY slow. I mean, how can deleting one shortcut from the desktop take around a minute before the message goes away?
* Copying things can be horrendously slow. Unless you're copying from a local disk it seems to have some serious file management issues.
* It took me a LONG, LONG time to stop the darn thing bringing itself out of standby, no matter how many places I told it not to.
Here is what I actually LIKE about it:
* The games folder is very nice, nicely displayed, good info, very nice, look forward to increasing my games collection on it.
* The photo gallery is GREAT, really easy importing and tagging of photos and great organisation
* It does look pretty
* All my hardware has just worked straight away with it (gamepad, scanner, printer, camera)
* The start menu quick search feature is indeed cool, much quicker to find things that way.
* Live thumbnails of the programs you have open on your taskbar, actually quite handy to see what's going on with other apps.
And what I couldn't care less about:
* The sidebar... waste of resources, never have it on
* The funky task rotating 3D task switcher, pretty, but completely pointless
If they'd just fix the darn bugs I'd be very happy with Vista, it's just a case of having one of them come up and thinking 'How in the hell did this pass quality control?'. It's amazing to think that a company with that many employees doesn't come across the bugs that so many of us actual users do.
The only thing keeping most companies using MS Office is inertia. It would be too much work to retrain people on a new interface with OpenOffice or KOffice or any other alternative. And Microsoft blew that argument to hell when they destroyed the "proven" interface of MS Office. The learning curve to go from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 is *WORSE* than switching to OpenOffice, a point we have made very clear to our bosses where I work with regards to our recent switch to OpenOffice.
If you know anything about developing software, you know that a product that spends 5 years in development before release is going to suck. Has nobody at Microsoft read The Mythical Man-Month? Vista is OS/360 all over again. (Look over the chapter titles again. It's uncanny.) I thought Microsoft was supposed to have tough interviews; maybe they should just ask "have you read TMMM?".
Anybody at Microsoft who spent the last 5 years on Vista either already knew it would suck (before it was even released), or is at least finally learning a valuable lesson about software development. Nobody said life had to be easy; you don't win every time.
If you're working on the flagship product of the world's biggest/richest software company, releasing a "lackluster" product years late, and making every mistake enumerated by a 30-year-old book which is essentially required reading in the industry, that *is* horrible. I mean, that's practically the definition of how to be horrible. Short of going out of business over the fiasco, I can't imagine how to be horribler.
Alan Kay was right: "I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past". If they were a hardware engineering team and nobody happened to know how to apply Newton's results, would anybody be similarly apologetic?
Or a mathematician -- practically everything they do is standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. If you start from first principles in mathematics (like, say, Peano's Axioms), you're pretty much guaranteed to never produce anything innovative. If a group of mathematicians said "well, no, nothing new to report, but look, the old stuff again with this pretty 3d effect!", they'd be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.
So no, sorry, as a developer, I don't have a lot of pity for those guys. When you're 2 guys in a garage, it's fine to make rookie mistakes. When you're a $50B company, people expect more than "lackluster" results and a rehash of the industry's greatest blunders from the 1970's.
Even if that statistic represented the whole market, almost all new PC's come with Vista preloaded (due to customer demand? HARDY, HAR, HAR!), and the PC market is still growing. Vista's share WILL grow, because the market is stuffed to the gills with Vista PCs. It'd better be growing pretty damned fast before you start trumpeting Vista's success.
This is my favorite part though. The very page you linked to sums it up best: Statistics Are Often Misleading
You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.
Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers. Can't get much clearer than that.
I think you have about nailed the description of linux on the desktop, with 1325134 programs that start with the letter K or G followed by names that do not have anything to do with what the program is about (konqueror/internet explorer, krita/photoshop, amarok/windows media player, need I go on? Aren't the names on windows just a tad more descriptive/obvious?).
I swear last week I had to resort to using yum search to figure out just which k* program was a no-frills command line picture viewer because doing an ls
-- the cake is a lie
Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.
Neither was XP. And when Windows 2000 came out I didn't see people leaping from NT4 like ants to a sugarbowl either.
Other than Windows 95/NT4 which was an amazing upgrade from Win3/NT3, no Windows release has been terribly exciting. Win98 from Win95? No big deal. Windows XP Pro from 2000 Pro? No big deal. Windows ME from 98...nothing could be less compelling. Windows XP Home from Win98? A boost in stability to be sure, but 'worth the cost of upgrading' for the new features? Hah!
The only real issue with Vista is that its just an evolutionary step. All the Vista hype was monsterously out of proportion to the actual product. Some of that is Microsofts fault... and some is just the internet doing what the internet does.
Hell, even in the Mac world... really, other than MacOS6 to MacOS7 in the early ninties and MacOS9 to OSX 10.0 each release hasn't been a wondrous new dawn upon the world. (Although in Apple's defense the OS 10.x revisions have come out more rapidly than the revisions to Windows. But then again...even Vista Ultimate at full retail is a fraction of what it would have cost to upgrade to each 10.x revision. (Although to Apples credit the family pack pricing is an excellent idea I'd like to see from Microsoft.)
Well put. That was refreshingly beautiful - every post about MS software (windows in particular) should have something about nihilism included.
Every GOD DAMNED vendor in the world has their own fuckin' menu! Instead of programs grouped by function or task, you get "Adobe Acrobat" and "Adobe GoLive!" and "Microsoft Office" and "McAfee Virus Scanner" and SO WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF A MENUING SYSTEM?
The problem is one of cultural norms. They do it because everyone else does. Also, no company was interested in letting the shortcut to their product be sat next to that of the competition. I guess this is why some have up to three layers of subfolder in their start menu entry. Microsoft do it too though.
I get annoyed by overuse of modal message boxes (they have their place, but that place should be a rarely visited one) and programs that insist on stealing and in some cases holding focus, even though it has no bearing on the true needs of the program. It's just about 'look at me, I are an important!!!!'.
Not when XP came out and everyone was all "I love my 2k and I will never upgrade ever. Fucking XP is rubbish. I will never ever ever use it ever."
I did a lot of computer repair work back when XP first came out AND handed out a lot of advice. I am also as uncomfortable with Microsoft as the next guy. When someone would buy XP back then. I had to admit, it was a step up from 98. Now I did not want to change from 98, it was plenty stable for me and used less resources.
But I could understand why people upgraded. It was more stable for the average user who did not know how to tweak his machine. Some people even liked the fisher price interface. A good laptop or desktop ran XP decently.
Of course spyware and drive by downloads made XP a disaster for the average lo-tech user. Since 2004, it takes less than 3 months to reduce XP to such a mess, that it has to be reloaded.
Flash forward to today and I could not say the same thing. Anyone who is in the market for a computer I warn to not try vista, especially if they are comfortable with XP. It runs slower on hardware that would make XP fly. If you are an average lo-tech user, you will be confused by how everything you are used to has been moved around. Many new features are downright invasive.
Being objective about things. I have gone from "upgrading from 98 to XP, well to each his own" to "upgrade from XP to Vista, you will regret it".
We have one Vista laptop user left at work and he is begging to get back to XP. Lets face it. Vista is a dog no one wants to take for a walk.
vi +
People who play at a rigged game eventually get sloppy. That much was entirely predictable.
I'll happily concede that in openness and freeness, OO.org is the clear winner, but the GP's stated reason for switching seemed to be that the interface of office2k7 was more different to the previous version than oo.org, and that being different was a bad thing.
personally I really hope that OO.org do adopt something similar to office2k7's ribbons. finding features I havent previously used has never been a simple task for me in oo.org, or any previous version of office, but in office2k7 things seem to be grouped with a little more sanity than previous efforts. office was never the pinnacle of interface design, and OO.org was more or less a crappy copy of that design. sometimes you just have to know when to throw a design out and start over
TIAEAE!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The interesting thing in the article that no one mentioned (and none of the Microsoft bashers at Slashdot ever want to mention) was this blurb: "When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant--in part because hardware and software makers didn't feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated." Vista was in Beta for over 3 years. Microsoft gave 3rd parties FOREVER to modernize and get used to the new UAC --- but they dropped the ball. Poor, cheap, no-nothing 3rd party developers that can't figure out how to write a program that doesn't run as admin / root are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft did everything in its power to force these idiots to change --- but they failed --- and now many of those some idiots (including a lot of you that post on slashdot) blame Microsoft for poor compatibility. You bitch for years about poor security. They give it to you, and you now bitch about incompatibility. What do you want?
Isn't OSX slower on the same hardware as compared to MacOS 9 and isn't there some compatibility issues between the two.
One thing I would say about Vista, is that if compatibility issues are what it takes for Windows programmers to at last write programs that can function with reduced privileges, this is a good thing.
The thing about Vista is that while it has almost no major improvements compared to Windows XP, if you add up all those tiny little "nice" additions, it does improve the overall user experience if you have a computer that doesn't suck. Honestly, if you turn off the idiotic UAC botherware and just use the OS for everything from productivity to games, you will probably find that things tend to run decently.
As for benchmarks, I really wonder when the last set of benchmarks have been run to compare Windows XP to Windows Vista. Driver support from NVIDIA and ATI/AMD has improved quite a bit, and I am curious at this point if the differences in performance have become minimal between the two operating systems or not.
Keep in mind that if you test with computers that only have one gig of memory, you are unfairly penalizing Vista in the same way that running Windows XP with only 256 megs of memory will be unfair if you compare it to a Windows 98 machine. If you starve the OS during testing, then you can't expect to get fair results. Vista has a number of additional services running for various things, and they do take a bit more memory and CPU power. How much of the reduced performance is caused by all of these services(many that may not be needed)?
So, Vista may not be fantastic, but if you compare Windows XP to Windows Vista with four gigs of system memory, Vista may not seem quite as bad as many would have you believe. If you tested the OS a year ago, the improved drivers may very well change how well it works for you. Just don't give me that garbage that it doesn't run well on your three year old computer, because Windows XP ran like crap on older computers too if they didn't have enough RAM.
The potato it is uninformed.
This was the year that finally made me give up on PC gaming. I'm so very sick of buggy releases (no, you shouldn't have a patch available before the game is released, EVER), buggy drivers (ATI's been going down-hill since AMD took over, unfortunately), putting up with Windows Update, etc. I'm going to finish the games I've already got there, but I'm not buying any more, period.
My DS, Wii, and PS2 will provide plenty of entertainment, thanks.
I'm going to stay away from the 360 (crap hardware quality and game patches... it really does bring the PC gaming experience to consoles) and PS3 (game patches and high price tag).
- chrish
Microsoft Halo doesn't need Windows Vista; it's also available for Xbox or Xbox 360. Nor will any Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, or Super Smash Bros. game be likely to require Windows Vista. The closest thing to a Windows version requirement for games on consoles that I've seen is the requirement of Windows XP (and not Windows 2000) to use Nintendo's USB Wi-Fi adapter ($40), but a cheap wireless B/G router (also $40) works around that problem handily.
So this narrows it down to PC-exclusive games that need DirectX 10. I am not convinced that those will come out in the next three years because nowadays, many PC-exclusive games are either MMORPGs or games from smaller studios, which need all the customers they can get.
Wy the negative definitions? See, I would say I am an atheist, but I would define my atheism thusly: "Why bother making up arbitrary reasons for things? Have fun, have plenty of sex, sleep lots, eat lots, discover things, create things, share things, help people and most of all live, since tomorrow will be even better. Plus, at the end of it all, you get to die and then won't give a crap anymore about anything, since you'll be dead." Although I must admit that I try not to be arrogant in my atheism, since if I don't think I matter in the grand scheme of things (because there is no grand scheme of things) therefore I am free to do whatever I want. However, since other people seem to think that they must do certain things in their lives because of XYZ (get into Heaven, Nirvana, get a nice reincarnation, whatever) then I may as well help them, since to me doing so is no different than not doing so, but it does make a difference to them, thus I'll help out. What I'm saying is, I don't think of life as shit. PS: I do think Vista is shit though :)