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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
"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 :)
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?
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.
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.
Well put. That was refreshingly beautiful - every post about MS software (windows in particular) should have something about nihilism included.
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 +
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?