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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?"
Indeed there's nothing wrong with Vista. Except of course the operating system.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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.
Vista can be POSIX compliant via a translation layer. But that isn't the problem. The problem is that it's unstable, unusable bloatware. Cripes, I couldn't get Windows Update to run with Microsoft Tech Support. If Microsoft can't get their software to update, how can an average user?
Sorry, the problems are much deeper (and higher) than simply being POSIX compliant. (I'm fighting the urge to say "look at Gnome".)
The opposite of progress is congress
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?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
The opposite of progress is congress
He wants them to throw away all the backward compatibility that all of the big corporate customers really care about.
And he wants them to sell a version that doesn't play music out of the box.
Is it me or are these both _really stupid_ ideas?
My Journal
All this does not matter.
Labels love it and they are happy with it and its top-to-bottom DRM. This is what MSFT wanted, this is what it got. Now they will happily shovel it down our throats do we like it or not.
It a repeat of the sad story of Media Center Edition of Microcrapware. If you deliberately remove all functionality that users are interested in you should not expect something to sell. Pick up a MCE Remote and look. It is missing "My Videos", "My Music" and any hint of fetching existing content from the hard disk. Yep. Right, We peones are not supposed to have content that has not been approved and blessed for distribution by a label ya know. Only recorded content for ya. Dumb, idiotic, no-seller from day one, but labels are happy.
Microsoft is not doing pesky Apple (or Hauppage) things and offering the users what they actually want. That is good ya know.
Vista is the same, just on a bigger scale. An OS made to order for the labels. No wonder it is crap.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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).
Oh wait...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
I started using Vista Home Premium when I bought my new Toshiba laptop, about 5 months ago. At first I was going to just install XP on the system, as I was quite apprehensive about Vista's compatibility issues with much of the software I need to use day to day. But, as an IT contractor, I knew I would have to start supporting Vista sooner or later, so I took the plunge.
I also expected that the first thing I would do is turn off all of Vista's "pretty" including Aero, and make it look as much as 9x/2k as possible. That's what I'd done with XP (Blue...ugh!) and I figured Microsoft's latest UI-gloss would be the same. Based on what the media had told me, I thought the DRM would be horribly intrusive, the security ever-present and annoying, but useless.
Ehm... whoops! I was a bit surprised. Vista runs quite well on this new but definitely not top-end laptop. It's a bit slow to fall into sleep mode or wake up, but not bad considering the 2GB of ram it has to deal with every time I close the lid. Bootup isn't too slow, and although shutdown is a bit laggy, I shut the system down rarely so that's not much of an issue.
As for DRM... what DRM? I have MP3 files, DivX, MPEG-video, watch DVDs and listen to (and rip) CDs quite often, and have not had it bother me yet. I don't use the frankly horrific Windows Media Player or it's associated store, nor do I use iTunes. Using either of those will of course result in DRM and associated DRM-related issues, but that's YOUR problem, not mine. My CD-quality ripped MP3 files have no DRM, thank you very much.
The security screen that darkens the window when you are installing, uninstalling, updating, changing, or even just copying files into the Program Files directory is a bit overused, but the implementation is great- as far as I can tell, it does a system "stop" and holds everything until you make a decision, possibly stopping malware from auto-installing as easily as in the past. I wish I could select when I want it to happen more specifically then "on" or "off" but maybe in a future patch that'll happen. "Run as Administrator" is a bit vexing in that you can't log in as "Administrator" (AKA root) but you can make shortcuts automatically run specific programs as administrator (Netstumbler requires this as it needs low-level access to the wireless NIC).
The wireless and network connection screens take a little getting used to, as they are new since XP, but the ease-of-use and controllability are still present, and I do prefer it a great deal over Apple's over-simplified system.
Oh, and Aero? Shiney! I actually rather enjoy the transparencies, and most of the transitions are quite unobtrusive. The new start menu is nice in some ways, although I wish it responded faster to opening folders, which is perhaps more an issue with the laptops slow drive speed. Making the task bar 2 level tall works very well, and the start icon expands slightly to fill it's area better.
My major annoyances have mostly to do with the aformentioned wireless connectivity, and with IE7. For some reason, when I load media-rich websites sometimes that window will crash. This doesn't happen on any of the other Vista or XP systems I run IE7 on, so it may be a driver issue. The wireless has problems connecting to open APs sometimes, and for some vague reason doesn't like the occaisonal brand of AP (SonicWall seems to be the worst). I think both of these issues will be fixed shortly, and neither are hugely problematic for me.
Overall, I rather like Vista, for all of it's shortcomings. I wish I had it installed on a powerful-enough system to play games on, though. DirectX 10, anyone? I AM looking forward to Windows 7 though, if Microsoft pulls off most of what it wants to do for that OS, it should be quite the system.
Of course MS isn't going to listen to anyone asking them to rewrite an OS from scratch, when they just spent nearly a decade doing so. That's absurd. Now some suckers have participated and provided feedback for their public beta... cough, I mean *release*, they're going to tweak things here and there, maybe rewrite some major problem areas, strip out some of the bloat, and release their next OS.
Anyone else notice where their programming languages are going? Extensibility, re-usability, modularity, and *really* good library support... we're finally seeing an effective implementation of what object oriented programming claimed to be all along. I would not be surprised then, to see that they've taken the same approach with their operating system design.
Their next OS will be better, and though we might complain, most of us will end up with it running on our machines. And you know, after a few years we might actually start to like it. That's my prediction.
look at Gnome
give fishing rod to gnome
sleep
take fish from gnome
eat fish
Don't mind me, I'm also fighting the urge to use Multi User Dungeons. I was a fool to think that rehab was the end of it.
which is totally what she said
Quantifying perception -- that's where things get squirrely. True, gratuitous changes can give bad first impressions, but Vista's more serious problems do nothing to dispel those impressions.
Take a statement like "Vista is slow." There is no single thing that is "speed" when it comes to operating systems. Vista isn't
"slow" in the sense of failing to do many units of computational work per unit time on average. It's "slow" in the sense that you can't rely upon it to respond to input in a consistent amount of time. Serious work has a rhythm to it; you can adapt yourself to a tool that is slow, but effective, but you can't to a tool that doesn't behave in exactly the same way every single time you use it. Using Vista is like dancing with a partner who has a lot of fancy moves, but can't hear the music.
Most of Vista's faults you can adapt to, like it's unnecessarily complicated and cluttered file dialog box. But you can't adjust to the fact that it really needs far more memory than its claimed minimum if you don't want to deal with a user interface that freezes every so often because of swapping. I know swapping is the case because I'm writing this on a laptop with 2GB of RAM that is almost unbearable to use without 2GB of ReadyBoost flash. I'm running pretty much the same workload as was acceptable under 1GB on XP or Linux but as I type this, I can see the access light on the flash drive almost continually blinking as the OS goes for cached pages.
Microsoft probably could make Vista a viable platform if they simply made 4GB the minimum required RAM. Or if they could make it possible to use Vista with the rated minimum RAM requirements. I had an open mind, because people always complain when Microsoft changes things, excepting maybe Windows 2000 where they were ready to try anything after the stability nightmare that was NT 4. And maybe Windows 7 will be that kind of improvement over Vista. But for now I can say I started with an expectation that Vista would be at least OK once I got to use it, but after almost a year I have to say it's the first operating system I've ever used whose performance is a serious problem for my productivity. These are greatly alleviated by ReadyBoost, but even so it's a relief to boot into Linux and not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system. In fact, I've begun to boot into Linux and do my work in an XP virtual machine, which feels faster than running the same user tasks directly on Vista.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think Vista really did get a bad rap. I've been using it for a year now. I believe one of the major sources of complaints was early driver support. Even some big name companies, like NVidia, had really shitty drivers at first. This is not really an issue any more.
The other major complaint, UAC, really ceases to be a problem once the system is configured. Sure, when you first set it up, you get a lot of pop-ups when trying to change settings, but once things are pretty much the way you want them, you rarely see a UAC pop-up anymore. About the only time I see them is when installing a new program.
Indeed - he did misuse that term, but phrased like: "Vista's kernel is monolithic" it seems quite accurate...
:P
...I think it's quite reasonable to describe the Vista kernel (when loaded in memory) as a "giant black box that drives primates into a murderous rage."
(With apologies to Kubrick and Clarke)
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Linux is only cheaper if your time is worthless.
Okay, I'll bite.
Linux is only FREE if your time is worthless. With some distros like Ubuntu, you can install faster and easier than you can with XP, and still use the computer while it's working. So, not only is the software free, but it uses less of your precious time to install it.
"...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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Re: 2) Both Windows 2000 and XP had problems with driver availability at the start. Also with their resource hunger compared to the predecessor. But I cannot remember as much complaints about user interface (UAC?) and backwards compatibility as with Vista.
Re: 3) There are many reports (admittedly without statistics) of users disliking Vista enough to remove it and install XP instead. This is something I heard last in connection with WinME, which people dumped in favor of Win98.
Re: 4) True, and it will be interesting to see how the numbers change when SP1 is out. At that point, any parallels to Win ME will break down:
Windows 2000 was the best way to upgrade from Win ME. Microsoft gave up the Win9x line soon after, introducing XP Home instead. This time, there is no such architecture switch in sight (I assume Windows 7 will take a few more years and won't be released in 2009).
So I think Vista SP1 will make or break Vista in the business world. If Microsoft gets it right, they will get to enjoy their dominant position for a few more years. If it doesn't make much of a difference, I expect more news like this: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/30/2341206&from=rss (French police moving to Linux)
C - the footgun of programming languages
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Vista is in fact the move by MS to go to ONE base, no longer the 9X/NT seperation
Wasn't that XP? The last OS to use the 9x kernel was windows ME, 8 years ago.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I was looking to buy a Media Center recently. Microsoft's view of the way "TV" should be sucks. Every Media Center PC I looked at had a large case, loud fan, and hugely complicated remote control or worse, a wireless keyboard.
Great for geeks, horrible for the rest of the people living in my house.
I bought an Apple TV, and I couldn't be happier. Sure, it doesn't record live TV, but for $9.00/month I get an HD DVR from my cable company.
I put all my DVDs, music, and photos on the Apple TV, and it is easily navigated with a simple remote.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. They need to fire their product designers and hire some guys that think like normal humans do.
-ted
I think that vista is good...
*Ducks*
But I think they need to remove most of the features in the initial install but include the option to install those features later. Or at the very least an option to select what features to install when first installing the OS from the disk. With these improvements in the installer than maybe the vista would seem faster because there are less features.