Time for a Vista Do-Over?

DigitalDame2 writes "'There's nothing wrong with Vista,' PC Mag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff tells a Microsoft rep at this year's CES. 'But you guys have a big problem on your hands. Perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud.' He goes on to confess that the operating system is too complex and burdened by things people don't need. Plus, Vista sometimes seems so slow. Ulanoff gives four suggestions for a complete Vista makeover, like starting with new code and creating a universal interface table. But will Microsoft really listen?"

Comments

bah

[tritonman]

Every 2-bit nerd thinks he knows what's best for Microsoft, why should Microsoft listen to him? Because he has a blog and people read his blog? Like they don't already have qualified people working on their PR problems.

At any rate, Vista's bad image isn't due to perception, I have Vista Ultimate, running on a machine that can definitely handle it, it runs HORRIBLY, this great PC has become my secondary PC which I now rarely use. I'm not the only one like this, I know a couple other people with the exact same "perception" that they got by actually using the operating system.

Perception = Reality?

[TripMaster Monkey]

Lance sez:

Perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud.

You know, Lance, many of us have first-hand experience with the "reality" of Vista. To argue that "perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud", in the same sentence as "there's nothing wrong with Vista" gives the impression that our perceptions are not based on reality (to put it mildly). To put it not so mildly, you're calling us either deluded, or liars. Is that really what you want to say, Lance?

Re:Perception = Reality?

[darkwhite]

Vista isn't a horrible product, and I'd argue that it's far better than XP was when it was released WHAT???

How can you argue that a bloated piece of shit that takes up literally ten times the disk space and 3 to 4 times the RAM of its predecessor, while offering absolutely nothing new in the way of end-user features, is better than a significant improvement on a smashing success that Windows 2000 was, with lots of UI and performance/reliability improvements (even if a couple of them looked so awful they had to be disabled)?

Sorry, XP - with or without SP2 - was way better in terms of user value than Vista can ever hope to be. Vista may incorporate a lot of good work in the libraries and APIs that might be used in the future for significant improvements, but that is very well hidden behind the mountain of shit that the rest of Vista is.

I recall actually waiting for Windows 2000 and XP with interest and anticipation. Those products fit their install image into 300 MB of space and packed new features by the hundreds. What happened to that?

Re:New Code?

[baldass_newbie]

I see your name is apt. Do you even understand what you just wrote and how it conforms to what has actually happened in Windows releases?
Widely-used software is usually paradigm shifting and has feature sets that people not only want but feel they need. Word 6 made a splash because you could open/edit/save in either Word or WordPerfect format - something the folks in Orem scoffed at. Excel had the ability to use either Lotus or Excel keystroke commands while the 1-2-3 folks were wondering whether mouse support was that important.
I tell folks that if they get a Mac they don't have to buy DVD burning software, picture management software, music tools, backup software, etc. and they say, "Wow - that's hundreds of dollars of software I don't have to buy." Plus they hear how stable OS X is and that seals the deal.
It's perceptions and paradigm shifts.

And like it or not, Vista was started from scratch and went the wrong way. Monolithic kernels ain't the answer hence MinWin.

What's the problem, anyway?

[rbonine]

I've been running Vista 64-bit for over a year. No bluescreens, no incompatible hardware, no problems with media files of any type - divx, xvid, mp3, wma, etc. I don't have any intention of going back to XP.

I wonder how many of the "Vista sucks" crows are trying to run it on outdated hardware. Vista does like a lot of memory - I wouldn't touch it without at least 1.5 GB - but this isn't 2001 any more. There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago. (I have a Pentium D CPU, so I'm nowhere near state of the art, but I have 2 GB RAM).

Re:What's the problem, anyway?

[ledow]

Stick it in a domain-networked environment (such as, ooh, every office in the world). Now try to use it without your hundreds of users moaning like hell because they can't get simple things done... like, e.g. log in locally once a PC is connected to a domain without having to know the PC's EXACT name. Being able to switch off all that UAC etc. junk and have it just work as XP did on a Windows network. Not have to upgrade every PC to something approaching twice what you could get away with on XP (so, that's a 25% upgrade cost per-PC, multiplied by the number of PC's, adding the hours worked by the technicians in upgrading it OR all-new PC's and the associated rebuild-etc. costs for doing it out-of-cycle). Invest in more disk space because every PC image now takes 15Gb of useless crap before you start compared to about 4-5 on XP - servers with large pre-build images love this one, you just multiplied the size of some of their largest single files by 3.

Now you have done all the "technical bits", wait and see how much legacy software that is mostly out of your control just stops working, or requires workarounds, or slows down (despite the computer upgrades). Watch your network graphs dip in correlation to the playing of music/video files on the PC's (although in a properly managed network, that shouldn't be a concern). Oh, and then you have the minor, obviously-we-should-be-there-by-now-anyway, of DVD-sized installation disks (and therefore network-shares, etc.), the fact that virtually everything you were running on XP runs with no difference or gets worse and that you have nothing really "new" to show for all that hard work and hassle. It's still an OS, it still just runs Word, it still just prints and saves on network shares. But for some reason you've had to change everything along the way to get to that point and the only thing you'll see difference is a dip in your client performance graphs. Oh, and to turn off all the whizzy new features to stop your users playing with them, you're really talking about waiting for Server 2008 with all the upgrade costs that involves.

It doesn't really matter what you use at home. You could use anything from MythTV to Windows Vista, Windows ME to MacOS. Nobody really cares so long as it gets their work done. What matters is what do you choose when you need to change. You try justifying Vista upgrades in a business environment, or to a little old granny who types up the minutes of the church council meetings. The problem is not "Why are people slating Vista?" but more "What does Vista actually DO that it didn't before for the average user?". 64-bit? Who cares. All that means is that drivers are harder to come by and some older stuff might not work. More than 4Gb RAM? So what? Doesn't crash any more than XP? Why did I have to move off XP then? UAC? Ha. The mental equivalent of "Yes to All" defeats that quite quickly.

Really, there's not much left. Home use, because it came with the computer? Fine. Use it. Home use upgrade? You can find a million reasons not to bother but we'd start with cost and what advantages it brings. Business use? Not until it's a de-facto standard. And there's not much chance of that happening while XP Pro disks and Vista->XP downgrade rights still exist.

Another common mistake.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Lance Ulanoff, like most other people, make the mistake of thinking the people who fork over money to buy Vista are the customers of Microsoft. Sorry, Lance, that is not true. They are not. They have been vendor locked into MSFT "environment" and it would be impossible for them to get out without paying a lot. So them getting ticked off is not a major concern for MSFT.

On the other hand, if MSFT can show that it plug the "digital hole" and tell the media giants that "Windows is the delivery platform for digital content that cant be pirated" then all of them will provide content only in MSFT approved format, and they will achieve a vendor-lock in the media sphere similar to the vendor-lock they got in the corporate world. So the thinking goes in Redmond. So they add layers and layers of stuff, signed drivers, protected video path, protected audio path etc etc. MSFT is trying to sell vista to media companies. Not to the poor dolts who own/buy the PCs.

Some of his suggestions look quaint. "Start all over, and forget 100% backward compatibility!" he urges. Vista has already given up on compatibility. So much of old software, libraries and drivers don't work in Vista. Active X is dead. OpenGL support is being eviscerated to supplant it with MSFT owned rendering schema. Office2005 SP3 just announced it is going to stop importing Office97 files due to "security concerns". (Just when OpenOffice started rendering and saving Office97 format files better than MSFT itself. coincidence?). No. It is a myth that the backward compatibility makes MSFT code slow.

MSFT never had long term focus. It flits about from this latest thing to the next latest thing in a desultory manner. As long as the vendor-lock in Office product keeps pumping money into its coffers it does not have any real incentive to find the managers who manage the projects well and those who build empires under them. Right now the bee in the bonnet of MSFT is to get a lock on entertainment somehow. It compromises everything else for that goal. And that is why Vista sucks as a computing platform.

Re:Nothing wrong

[belthize]

That was pretty much my reaction, read premise: "Nothing wrong with Vista", read
conclusion: "Completely rewrite Vista". Errm .... read middle. Ahh the premise
was wrong ... gotcha.

Belthize

Re:New Code?

[Dog-Cow]

Linux is only cheaper if your time is worthless.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...

[PopeRatzo]

"...Won't get fooled again."

These are the words of our Dear Leader and they apply just as well to Microsoft Windows Vista. It's not going to be my job to "give Vista another try" even if MS gives it a complete makeover. I'm gonna need a fair amount of greasing up before I lay out my money for a new Microsoft OS. Maybe dinner and a movie. Some flowers would be nice. Definitely, a deep price reduction.

"SP2"?? What, do I look like I just came in on the turnip truck? Like I just came down with the rain this morning?

Tell you what, Microsoft: You come up with an OS that outperforms XP Pro SP2, has some useful new features, is efficient, compatible, maybe even costs less, and then blow me, and I'll give your new OS a try. How's that sound?

I mean, I don't want to sound bitter or anything. I'm willing to let bygones be bygones.

Re:Nothing wrong

[chickens]

MS are still using a kernel written (or rather, cobbled together) in 1991. Oddly enough, so are Linux distros! I'm sure 17 years of development counts for absolutely nothing... Got to get me a kernel which was written last week instead.