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Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problems
notdagreatbrain writes "Maximum PC just posted a lengthy feature looking back at the myriad problems that went into Microsoft's 6 billion dollar failure of the Vista launch. Aside from running benchmarks comparing Vista at launch how its performing now, they also found a Microsoft exec who was willing to speak frankly about Vista. The Microsoft source blamed bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista's early stability problems and described User Account Control as poorly implemented but defended it as necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform. He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end. Finally he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)."
There's no question Apple is improving its brand.
However, the reason for Apple's popularity is a massive generalisation:
The hardware is slick, but it seems to be getting worse (or being exposed to more scrutiny) as it becomes more and more mainstream. The hardware also has little to do with MS and its products success or failure, in the sense that it is perfectly possible to spend Apple-type dollars on a Windows PC and get a very solid, high performance machine.
The price is ok - I won't restart that debate but it remains the case that Apple is typically somewhat pricier for the equivalent hardware.
But the last part really annoys me - I have been an Apple customer from time to time and they annoy the absolute crap out of me. They deny problems, use proprietary software, aggressively attack anyone who attempts to open up their hardware platforms, and generally act in a self-righteous manner.
What Microsoft needs to realise is not that Apple is gaining on it because it "just works", it is gaining because it works at all, unlike many aspects of Vista.* There are plenty of ways to attack Apple, but unless you have a product that is at least competently made there is no way you can do it.
A case in point is the revised Zune - it looks like in many ways (other than MS's bullshit DRM/proprietary interface stuff) it is the equal of the equivalent ipod. If MS can do the same with its OS, then suddenly it has a product as good as Apple and 80%+ of the PC market already in its corner.
* and yes, I do know what I'm talking about, I have done several Vista uninstalls which have dramatically improved stability and performance of new laptops
Read Pynchon.
No, he admitted that UAC was poorly implemented.
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
They have no control over the shit quality of apps loaded by OEMs.
I can personally attest that everything he said is true. I own an Acer laptop, which ran like bloody hell with the OEM shartware installed. I also own an HP laptop, which ran like bloody hell with the OEM shartware installed. Upon formatting both drives, partitioning them more sanely and reinstalling Vista (Home Premium) on both, using the included Anytime Upgrade (or Reinstall) DVD, Vista ran wonderfully.
I still installed Kubuntu on both. Windows is nice to have around if you ever need it (BIOS updates on the HP, or calling for tech support on either machine, for example) but really not right for daily use for me.
The Acer has Intel graphics. All is good and will with Vista there.
I've had the HP (ok, it was originally a Compaq, which they warranty-replaced with a better HP model when it completely failed -- though both have the same video hardware) for a year and a half, now. For the first 9 months, the nVidia drivers were crashing the damn thing fairly regularly. It wasn't until 9 months ago that they released a driver that didn't crash this laptop.
I also run a desktop, which I use for music production, running Windows-only software (it runs in winE, but not as a fully functional application). I run Vista Ultimate (free from MS for participating in a "spyware" program, which I installed on a laptop which was used only for YouTube and other cutesy flash crap) on this machine. I've had both ATI and nVidia cards in this machine. The ATI still doesn't have a workable driver. The nVidia, same as with the HP laptop, no good driver until 9mo ago.
I purchased an HP printer for that desktop system. It literally took me a week to get the damned thing to install.
Other than that, I actually like Vista Ultimate. Now that I have stable video drivers and the printer actually works, neither of which were Microsoft's fault, it's wonderful. Being a retail install, it never had any OEM shartware installed on it.
Runs smooth and quick.
And yes, UAC is poorly implemented. That's Microsoft's fault, all the freaking way.
$0.02 from a full-time Linux user and fanboi. Vista has its place, even in my home. My HTPC runs Linux, though; the DRM in Vista still scares me.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
2GB isn't even enough. I bought a Lenovo laptop where 2GB was "suggested". Ran like crap until I updated to 4GB... which is the max the motherboard can handle.
So much for my theory that paying more will lead to a longer lifespan for my laptop. Vista smells like WinME - maybe it's getting to be like Star Trek movies, you should avoid every other (or in this case every third) release...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
An interesting read, but this telling comment was on the last page:
Yes, the June conversation was dazzlingly candid, and we were looking forward to an equally blunt follow-up meeting--a scheduled late-July on-the-record interview with Erik Lustig, a senior product manager responsible for Windows Fundamentals. But then the universe as we know it returned to normal, and Microsoft became Microsoft again. Our interview with Lustig was overseen by a PR representative and was filled with the type of carefully measured language that we've come to expect from Microsoft when discussing "challenges." A "challenge" is Microsoftese for anything that isn't going according to the company's carefully choreographed plans. In the text that follows, we've combined the information conveyed during the mid-June background conversation with decoded translations of the "on the record" conversation we had in July. The contrast between the two interviews is stunning.
The part where Microsoft was open to admit mistakes - even if done with back-handed compliments to Apple and slaps to other developers - began to sound like a breath of fresh air.
But the article itself is highly qualitative and lacks coherence, as if we're missing the director's cut. (Yes, I am comparing a bad movie as superior to this written word - knowingly.)
Nothing to see here, move along.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
major ones in some peoples' eyes. First the business version came on my laptop, but since I had plenty of money at the time, I got the Ultimate upgrade. Well thats been a disappointment as my Sony VAIO laptop has two graphics chips in it. A high end NVidia one which makes the graphics scream, but makes the computer hotter than hell, and a then a slow Intel i810. So I always keep it on i810, esp since I'm running FreeBSD which doesn't have very much control over the ACPI, ie it gets hot anyway.
The second problem was the price for something that wasn't much of a difference from XP as far as I can see, but perhaps I just don't care about the advanced features. The Ultimate updates have really never come, so that upgrade was worthless.
But as far as the OS itself, I think they did a good job on it. I only ever had a couple blue screens which were caused by the USB subsystem and were patched quickly. I also found that the only programs that don't work on it (that don't need special drivers) are DOS programs that require full screen display. And finally now I even have a driver for my 10 year old printer. So in the end it hasn't worked out so bad.
But perhaps thats more a reflection on Sony providing all of the needed drivers, updating them, etc, and making a really good laptop. I try to use FreeBSD when ever possible, but I have a couple Windows-only engineering programs so I need the dual boot.
Why would you want a new kernel in it? I do kernel development on a daily basis and the NT kernel is by far the best in popular use.
XNU is an ungodly slow mess of code with so many redundant APIs at every level that it's not even funny. Take a look at L4 to see microkernels done right -- hint, it was created to be a less retarded Mach.
Linux is poorly documented, has little to no code reuse, no real design (leading to modules being rewritten to fix bugs and design flaws while introducing even more), a ton of race conditions (causing stability and security issues), and scales very poorly in an SMP setting (the BKL is a joke).
Solaris is quite nice, but it's not used nearly enough. I've heard good things about the kernels in the BSDs, but I don't have enough experience to talk about them.
A lot of Windows is horrendous, but people talking about the kernel as this terrible thing need to learn what the NT kernel actually does and assign blame where blame it's deserved -- base services and shittacular drivers.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
But why not pick at least a few users that didn't like to talk about how much Vista sucked? The "after" part made sense: the previous haters were now lovers. Still, if you leave after the first part of the commercial ("Bathroom break!"), all you'd have heard was how bad Vista is.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Grant me the strength to fix the bugs I can,
the serenity to accept the bugs I can't,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Nazis were pretty sharp dressers, but the Italians gave them a good run
I entirely agree with you that Vista requires far more system resources than it ought to, and as usual, Microsoft has understated in the official requirements the amount of computing power you really need to run Vista smoothly. This isn't new for Microsoft either, they have a long history of grossly understating minimum requirements, presumably to maximise potential upgrades. I remember the Windows 95 requirements stating that 4MB (8MB? This is a long time ago) was enough to run a fully functional Windows 95 system. Well, yes, it was, until you actually tried to load an application inside the operating system, at which point everything would grind to a halt.
But a significant portion of the blame lies with the OEM's as well, the people who choose to sell 'x' system with Vista pre-installed aren't complete idiots, as much as we'd like to think they are. They in all likeliness know that performance will be anything from sub-optimal to atrocious, but they sell it anyway, because it will ultimately net them a profit, even if it comes at the cost of the customers enjoyment.
I think you're simplifying the objective of "The Mojave Experiment", while speed is definitely one of the largest complaints against Vista (and one of the most valid), it's certainly not the only one. Other prominent ones, for example, include the perceived application compatibility and the UAC stigma (Opening Notepad will result in a UAC confirmation dialogue). I'm not entirely familiar with Mojave mind-you, I'm not really the target audience ;) But I'd be very surprised if performance was the only criticism they are trying to address through it.
As for the Vista pre-cache, honestly, I'm not personally a big fan of it. I understand why it exists and I think much of the reasoning behind it is sound, but it's not ideal for many computer usage scenarios. I frequently dabble in virtualisation and have found that the SuperFetch functionality has an effect on VM performance, ranging from minor to severe, depending of course on what exactly the VM is doing. Thus, I tend to disable the SuperFetch service.
It's more than just RAM problems. I'm typing this from a 4G XPS 1530. It's a great machine. Runs Ubunutu 8.04 and XP wonderfully, but the pre-installed Vista is a piece of crap. At this moment I'm connecting via the Gigabit wired connection because wireless is unstable. Wired is SO 2005!!!!!
Seriously though, the wireless connection drops every couple minutes. Googling informs that it could be a bunch of things and I've tried each one. These include switching to high performance mode (so the wireless card doesn't get turned off to conserve battery) to upgrading the access point so it understands some new power save feature, to disabling IPv6 settings. None work.
Even with 4G I get those freezes. Googling indicates it could be SuperFetch. It might be the virus scan. It might be my graphics card crashing and silently restarting. Doesn't matter what the culprit is, it's just freaking annoying to be typing something and have the machine pause for 10 to 20 seconds at a time.
I agree with you that Microsoft shouldn't have OKed 512M configurations, but I think that was probably the least of their problems. At least with a minimum RAM configuration you could upgrade.
*Shrug!* I'm not the OP, but I know what I'd do: set them up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu (your choice) and let them go after setting up their connection and email. Odds are that after a week or two they won't have any more questions for you unless something goes wrong, and that will be rare. I know; my sister's a Windows refugee on Ubuntu, I'm her tech support, and she needs less help now than she did on Win2k because with Linux, It Just Works.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Printer drivers are bloated in part because of the OCR code and reference images that they're forced to include. Seriously; try scanning and printing an American dollar bill, and see what happens.
If you are talking about the Mojave Project commercial, they didn't let you touch the computer. I know, I was one of them. All they did was show some of the basics built in the OS, like how quickly you could navigate through folders full of jpegs. But no 3rd party apps. It looked like bare bones, tweaked install on a top end HP laptop.
Anyway, I told them my wife has Vista on her HP and she hates it compared to her older Toshiba with XP. So they show me what they originally billed as their new OS in beta, code named Mojave, and asked if it seemed faster than my experience with Vista. I said yes, and I'm sure many others did too, and that's probably what they ran with in their ads.
What they didn't care to hear from me was that at the end of the demo, after I gave pretty good comments about the demo, they revealed that they demo'd vanilla Vista, not some new OS. So I ripped into them saying that then their installation sucks because my wife's stock computer is much slower and their GUI sucks because she has to relearn everything after getting comfortable with XP. They asked if I would be willing to put Vista on my other PCs and I said possibly, if they gave me free copies, otherwise they'll remain dual boot Ubuntu/XP machines. I don't think they used those comments...
The hell Microsoft doesn't have control over this. This is Microsoft's fault and it is rewriting history and denying the obvious to say otherwise.
Let's start with the fact that Microsoft execs overrode *internal* objections to shipping Vista, and they consciously certified marginal Intel systems as "vista-ready" when they knew they weren't. There's no reason they couldn't have made more of a push to have drivers ready, and they could have publicly identified the hardware that was incompatible. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they made a deliberate decision to push the new OS onto platforms for which it wasn't appropriate, and before the appropriate drivers existed.
What about the systems loaded with crapola? Microsoft has been bullying systems manufacturers for years. Microsoft could have required that in order to get the cheap wholesale price, the systems makers had to distribute their malware some other way (e.g., a rebate coupon if you run a CD and install all the crap). This issue simply wasn't on Microsoft's radar screen. It wasn't on their radar screen because the home user is not their target market. They care about 2000+ seat enterprise installations, and those folks buy machines that are built to order and precertified, and don't have the garbage software and buggy drivers.
Microsoft missed several things this time around, including the netbook boom (oops, guess we can't kill XP), the google/apple boom (turns out that home users now value reliability, simplicity, design, and enterprise capabilities, such as synchronized calendars, outside of the enterprise), and the internet's capability to severely punish arrogance and incompetence. They didn't realize that a lousy home experience was going to spill back into the enterprise.
This is a company that has $18 billion in annual profit on $60 billion in annual sales. They have the resources to get stuff done properly. What they do not have these days is competent management. They are on the way down. They are firmly ensconced in the corporate world, it will take a long time, but the direction is finally clear. I wish they were on the way up and making our computing lives better, but they aren't.
How many processes are running before you start any of your desktop applications? In desktop applications, I am not counting anything that automatically starts.
The reason I ask is that on my work laptop, company issued, 63 processes are running at boot before I start anything. This is on XP SP2, 1 GB RAM, 512MB ATI, 2 GHz Dual Core Lenovo. 1 GB is not enough with this load for XP now, not because of XP but because of the other apps. Clean boot to ready desktop, ready being no pauses due to the SATA HDD being thrashed, is about 10 minutes. +600 MB RAM is used before I launch a single app.
I'm just saying that you might have some junkware running on there, or like my work laptop, have a lot of "security" overhead. My home-assembled PC is far weaker by specs., but beats the Lenovo easily for desktop usability.
At home for comparison, quad boot, Solaris 10 (Java), XP SP3, Vista Home Premium SP1, Suse 11 (KDE 3 & 4). All the pretty effects are on for each desktop, all run just fine, and all are up in about 2-4 minutes. 2.4 GHz P4 with 1GB RAM, NVIDIA 6200 128MB. Vista and Solaris live on a PATA HDD. Suse gets the most use due to ease of administration and KDE's tweakability, but that is just my mileage.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
My problem with Linux is actually the exact opposite. Usually things crash all the time in Windows, but it almost never takes Windows all the way down. In Ubuntu I frequently get crashes that either lock the system up so badly that I can only control the mouse and everything else is frozen, or everything including the mouse locks up (and trying to switch to another screen never seems to work). I might just be an Ubuntu/Debian/Gnome issue though..
The part that got me was the horrendous file copy times. Seriously, how did they screw that up? They scrapped the new file system, so what exactly was their excuse? All they had to do was keep doing what XP was already doing!
But what about Genocide in the face of Hairstyles throughout the 20th Century?
Who run Barter Town?
Similarly, the reason your linux drivers work so well is that linux hasn't had the ginormous revamp that the win32 kernel just underwent. Hardware vendors needed to make significant changes to their drivers and thought they'd get by with shoddy (probably outsourced) effort.
Actually it sort of has, its just that due to the nature of the OSS development stuff like changing the wireless stack and changing writing DRI2 is done gradually and as a result tested more. This is really a feature of the short release cycle of linux, OTOH it also means that some stuff keeps getting left behind because its too big.
Hardware vendors needed to make significant changes to their drivers and thought they'd get by with shoddy (probably outsourced) effort.
Goes for both tbh, my friend got a new ati laptop with vista, her laptop strugles with graphics toned down. while another friend has a much older intel laptop that seams to run it just fine with everything still running (all other spec favour her laptop over his). my experience on linux is fairly similar, before i broke my intel laptop it was fairly stable and could at a push run compiz, since getting an new ATI laptop it was just too unstable with ATI and is now too slow with OSS drivers.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I've worked on several products branded as Microsoft but outsourced to whatever 3rd party to actually write. There is a serious flaw in the management there that permeates every single project they have. This article kind of touches on it but does not go into details.
I really think this is intentional in the MS culture as EVERY manager I've encountered there is indoctrinated with this way of thinking. I can think of several times I would be having conversations with my own PM, complaining about the MS decision makers and how it's pretty apparent that if they "fixed" whatever implementation design we were working on the product would look like an Apple product instead of one from Microsoft.
So, in a good way, MS has managed to keep their company culture homogeneous. Too bad it's a terrible culture. It really sucks because you see some great people working there and you wonder how it happened to them.
One recent project was pretty hefty on the SL2 and you don't even wanna know what their "solution" was to make sure that our apps would work well with the RTM...
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
Control no, influence yes. XP succeeded as well as it did largely because good drivers weren't as hard to develop as with 95/98/NT, given the wealth of talent available in the workforce.
Vista created too much work for driver developers that had seen drivers need only minor updates as service packs came out. Suddenly they need full rebuilds for existing hardware and new hardware needs programmers that are fluent in Vista's needs. Meanwhile, the best programmers have been less interested in Vista than advancing their careers in any of dozens of fields available to them. Coding Vista drivers is to most a downward career path compared to plush network admin and/or consulting jobs or starting their own businesses.
So the talent pool available to code Vista drivers was lackluster, and because IT demand has exceeded supply for many years, the new talent's ambitions are split between many more fields than when XP emerged. Meanwhile, hardware developers for the mostpart didn't see much cause to devote more money towards driver development for Vista than they did for XP.
This is why a fully integrated hardware/software approach like Apple's won't step on landmines like this. They have not only control and influence, but their survival also demands foresight. They know what their new ventures will entail from 3rd parties, and they provide the necessary incentives before the 3rd parties even dream of it.
OS X was initially as brutal a change as Vista is, and it cost Apple millions of users, myself included. However, it was a necessary fundamental shift to remain competitive and they invested millions in supporting the developers to make the huge change as painless as possible for their end users. Microsoft is spending that money on Jerry Seinfeld to talk about shoes.
I'm already preparing for my next audio workstation to have a Mac as its hub. I only wish the audio industry could handle bumps as well as Apple can.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Not quite true. The hardware vendors are only allowed to sell modified "OEM" Windows disks because that is all MS chooses to allow.
At least that's the case with the HP lappy I bought here in OZ. When I complained that the OS they gave me didn't have the same features as Windows Vista Home Premium as described on the MS site and demanded remedy, they weren't allowed to ship a full install because their contract with MS precludes it. I had to get MS to ship a disk and get HP to send me a cheque.
So I don't blame the OEMs for putting crapware on systems, they need that extra money to deal with arseholes like me who hold them to their pre-sales claims. If they claim to offer a Windows Vista Home Premium machine but MS won't actually let them supply it, they are screwed. MS has created this issue.
I don't therefore I'm not.
One more time. "New" Coke was a clever scheme which allowed Coca Cola to completely reformulate the standard Coke formula to cheaper ingredients without anyone noticing. They simply announced, for no conceivable reason, that they'd changed the recipe for a product which had dominated their market for decades and showed no sign of losing that dominance. The new product was clearly inferior and was not accepted by Coke drinkers but stayed on the market long enough to flush all of the original recipe products out of the distribution channel. With that accomplished, Coca Cola announced a change of heart and brought back the "original" formula, except that instead of real sugar and real vanilla and other real ingredients, it contained high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavorings. While it didn't actually taste all that much like the original formula, it was much closer than "new" coke. Net result: Coke now saves a ton of money on ingredients and an entire generation of Coke drinkers have no idea what real Coke tasted like. Hint: it was much, much tastier than what is sold these days.
And this is where the small premium for a business class laptop pays off bigtime. Buy an HP business laptop or a Dell Vostro machine and you get pretty much a clean OS install with working drivers and a minimal (of often helpful) third party apps.
This is true. Nevermind the fact that you get higher quality hardware, and a completely different tier of support.
Unfortunately they're starting a slide a bit too, the latest generation of HP Business Notebooks have Yahoo Toolbar, the fattest Norton/McAfee home product, Office 07 (trial), and SQL Server running.
The revised zune has taken the mp3 market by storm has it? Taken a chunk out of iPod sales? Oh wait, it hasn't.
MS worsed enemy isn't Apple or Linux, it is MS. MS wasn't loosing Vista sales to Apple or anyother OS company/provider, it was loosing Vista sales to XP, its own product.
That is REALLY REALLY scary for a company, after all, yes they COULD copy more of Apple or whatever other product but you can't make a copy of your own product without people wondering, if it is the same, why should I buy a new one?
Vista, as many predicted, turned into Windows ME and people just didn't upgrade and then slowly just stayed with what they had and decided to wait for the next version. MS can't have that, forget the home user, it means billions in lost sales if industry decides not to upgrade. Sure sure, they get Vista with each new PC, but MS has been counting on upgrade sales that now just ain't coming. Worse, MS had this offer where you could suscribe to upgrades. One of the reasons Vista launched earlier for business is that they needed to have a new product out to allow all those companies that had subscribed to actually update just ONCE.
Do you think that in future companies would be less willing to believe MS on a similar upgrade program? That is a lot of lost sales.
And now MS has to fund the development of a new windows, that is promised for 2010 but lets face it, when has MS ever launched on time? Worse, what if it again is a dud? Sure sure they promise lot of new stuff, but they always do that and never once have been able to deliver.
MS still is very rich, but the cracks are showing, it is no longer the darling of the stock market, it has had to pay dividend because its increase in price was no longer enough to keep shareholders happy. MS got a lot of money and a lot of money coming in but it is also bleeding money like mad. The 360 finally managed to beat Sony only for Nintendo to popup again out of nowhere. So MS will have to fight yet another round that might NOT turn a profit straightaway on that market. The Zune still ain't doing well. There is no Microsoft music store that anybody uses. Its office suite is under near constant attack. Netbooks can't run Vista but can do Linux. Apples market share is constantly increasing. Vista can be as easily pirated now as all previous MS software.
The real problem that MS has? That they got far to many problems to list. But the biggest is simply that they are to big to really feel the effect of their failures. Billy boy and dragged out into the streets for Vista or Zune or MSNBC or live search etc etc. MS bleeds some money but the company survives easily and that means they never adapt, never learn from their mistakes. What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. But what is also true, that which doesn't hurt us, doesn't force us to change.
Apple on the other hand has felt the bite of failure and has changed because of it. That is what created the iPod and OS-X, because they screwed up before and felt it, so they learned from their mistakes and improved on it. Yes Apple is heavy-handed with its customers and denies problems, that is because so far that attitude hasn't hurt it. Its customers tend to forgiving in that department.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I like the bit where he complains about the crapware and payments:
I've worked in one of the vendor companies. Why do you think that places like Fujitsu Siemens, Dell and the like have the tag lines that say "[Insert company] recommends Windows Vista® [pick a version]"? It's because Microsoft give them kickbacks and payments for it!
Where's the difference between saying "Yes, use Windows Vista [version] because we get paid" and saying "Yes, have this 'useful' bit of junk on your machine because we get paid (a proportionally smaller amount, because it's a smaller app)"?
I haven't actually had any driver problems with vista and my old printer works fine. The computer came with 2gb of ram and it runs ok. BUT I can't copy a large file without it taking forever to estimate the copy time. I can't unzip a file without it taking forever. When I click the drop down address menu I don't get a tree of were I am in the directories I get some auto complete list of guesses which is really annoying.
I mean what sort of operating system is released that has trouble copying files? Its the stupidest thing since windows 95 "make your system disks" wizard which was the first thing you saw and broken so it never went away.
Would you like to comment on the Linux model in which driver compatibility is not even guaranteed between point releases of the Kernel. That kind of "fuck you" attitude dwarfs Microsoft's, especially as it is a deliberate decision made for ideological reasons rather than on good technical grounds.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Linux is poorly documented, has little to no code reuse, no real design (leading to modules being rewritten to fix bugs and design flaws while introducing even more), a ton of race conditions (causing stability and security issues), and scales very poorly in an SMP setting (the BKL is a joke).
Your statement above indicates only one thing to me - you know nothing about Linux.
There is as much documentation for Linux as there is for Windows, it's more of a case that most users of operating systems just cannot be bothered to read books, program documentation or search web sites when they encounter a problem.
No code reuse??? You're kidding me, right? That's the *whole point* of the GPL, that code *is* reused!
No real design and race/stability conditions? Again, you clearly show your ignorance. Yes, I agree that hardware vendors do not support Linux as well as they do Windows when it comes to drivers but all that means is that because of a need to backwards engineer drivers, some Linux drivers do not have the equivalent functionality to Windows ones. But that's not a fault of Linux, it's a fault of the hardware vendors not handing out specifications.
As a power user of Linux for 10+ years now, and Windows for longer, I can honestly say that I have rarely seen Linux crash as a result of a driver problem - and even then it's happened because of a kernel that I have myself compiled, at which point I just boot into the old kernel again and just do some investigation. Yes, I've had lots of standing around waiting for a new kernel to come out so that an included driver will have the functionality I need, but that's nothing to do with stability.
Yes, Linux does have its problems, just like any other OS. But it's you that is treating it as a "threat" to your beloved Windows, not anyone else. And if you're going to make statements like you have done, then please be prepared to qualify them properly - otherwise you yourself will appear to be a zealot.
I work for a telecoms company that produces major PBX and call-centre reporting systems and just about all of our products now run on Linux. Much of that has to do with the world moving away from commercial UNIXes to Linux, but the fact is that any attempts (in the early days of our migrations to commercial OSes) to migrate to Windows for anything but the smallest systems failed. Windows *does* have a place when it comes to integrating client applications into a customer Windows network - but the fact is Windows is too big and bloaty for this kind of application whereas Linux can be optimised and streamlined much more.
In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
UAC is NOT poorly implemented. UAC implementation is much better than Linux's sudo. The programs are poorly implemented assuming administrative privileges for everything!
I also do kernel development for a living and I couldn't disagree more on your description of the Linux kernel.
Poorly documented? Get yourself a copy of "Linux Kernel Development" by Robert Love and "Linux Device Drivers, 3rd ed" by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini and Greg Kroah-Hartman. You will have no problem writing kernel extension and device drivers after reading those books.
On top of that, you have the whole source available if you really need to know how something works. As a kernel developer, you should have no problem understanding the Linux kernel code.
Little code reuse? Look at USB, look at WiFi look at file systems. Generic functionality/modules is used by lot of the drivers.
No real design? What about everything is a file abstraction, partition memory into zones to efficiently support NUMA systems and hardware that can only use part of the address space? Virtual File System that allows Linux to support more file systems that any other OS out there?
A ton of race condition? We have 2, 4 and 8 core Linux systems with uptimes >6 months. That does not prove that you are wrong, but it is a good indication.
Scales very poorly in SMP settings? That must be why Linux is used on 423 (out of 500) of the worlds most powerful supercomputers or are you telling me that the supercomputers that run Linux are uni-processor systems?
BLK (Big Kernel Lock)? It is time for you to upgrade from Linux 2.0. The BKL is used in very few places in 2.6. It is mostly used for drivers for really old and/or slow hardware.
"background task consuming enormous amounts of RAM and network bandwidth and otherwise misbehaves, it's going to make the experience shitty"
No, it does not have to be that way. Microsoft could have designed a kernel levl scheduler that always makes sure that the foreground task, the one the user is interacting with is responsive. These kinds of issues were worked out in the 1960's and are covered in university level computer science clases such as "operating system design 101".
Mac OS X is very good at this. I can write a resource hog app and un it in the background but at the same time iTunes will play music without skipping. Even on an old G4 machine.
You also can't argue that MS has to suport all kinds of different hardware. Linux and BSD Unix support a much wider range of hardware.
...if you don't. With regards to third parties, Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. They are the dominant operating system vendor. They can't exactly lock out third party developers or pull the kind of crap that Apple is doing with iPhone devs.
No really, VISTA was released in BETA.
Brian Valentine, Senior Vice President at Microsoft shoved VISTA out the door so he could get his singing bonus when he quit Microsoft and hired on at Amazon prior to the VISTA release.
Really, I am not pushing FUD on the VISTA release. It was a pretty front end, built on unfinished software. The manager who usually got these projects over the finish line bailed out leaving an unfinished code-base and leadership vacuum. To me this was evident in VISTA. Additionally, all of Microsoft's side deals to cripple.control functionality on media playback and the annoying security pop-ups made VISTA annoying and slow performing.