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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)."
He blamed everyone but Microsoft?
Why does that not surprise me?
Where they invite users to 'try' the newest Microsoft OS, before revealing it's Vista.
Sure, have users play around a bit with a top of the line machine with a Slim Vista install, it's great.
Go to try to configure stuff, install 3rd party programs, run actual benchmarks, it's not so nice.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one. Good for them, I guess.
Continued? What? Continued?? Health? What? Health??
I'm not sure those words mean what you think you mean.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
They had to scramble to get drivers out the door because microsoft hardly gave them any time to work with the last revisions of Vista.
TFA misses a major misstep. Microsoft allowed Vista to be shipped on hardware that just wasn't up to the task. Vista is unusable with less than a gig of memory, but chain stores were flooded with laptops equipped with "only" 512MB. This gave new users a terrible experience. "First boot" of a new laptop took half an hour. No application, not even Solitaire, would run without freezing.
Two of my family members had Vista laptops ... for a few hours, anyway, until I installed Ubuntu. Performance problems all went away after that.
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.
The problem with VISTA is that it was launched it BETA. Missing drivers, big footprint hardware requirements, and horrible power management (which drained many a laptop battery) caused the early demise of VISTA. I gave up on VISTA, but I understand that MS is slowly working out the problems. Legacy drivers will always be a problem for VISTA and the TPM/DRM features will continue to make smarter users shun VISTA.
I am back to the DUAL BOOT Linux/XP on my older hardware and performance is decent. Same hardware with VISTA... forget about it.
The Nazis were pretty sharp dressers. I mean, if WWII had been decided on fashion sense alone, we'd all be speaking german right now.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The systems they used in the Mojave advertisements were HP Pavilion DV 2000 machines with 2GB of RAM.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/07/31/windows-mojave-advertisements-start-to-appear-in-the-wild
Not really top of the line...
You know, that would've been an extremely high-end workstation just a couple of years ago. Of course Vista should run like the wind on that hardware.
Never mind that I have a similar machine and Vista runs like frozen molasses, but can't upgrade to XP because NVidia hasn't released XP-compatible video drivers. I'd switch to Ubuntu in a heartbeat if it weren't for a few critical application I absolutely must have.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
So lets see, the drivers sucked.. maybe thats because, in order to get the WHQL/"Designed for Windows"/Windows Logo Program/whatever-the- marketing-team-decided-to-stick-into-the-name-today stamp of approval needed to be able to be able to supply a signed driver for 64 bit vista they had to run through a 6 month release gauntlet?
Any software release cycle that gets stuck delaying that long between finding a bug and issuing a fix is going to suck
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)
AT&T. Locked iPhones. Can't do anything not officially blessed with your iPhone unless you unlock it. Can't register your iPhone with anyone other than AT&T. iTunes is loaded with DRM, and QuickTime is pretty annoying... I do love Apple, but seriously, they constantly flirt with annoying their customers far more than most companies.
So why their certified those faulty drivers?
Most drivers carry the log "Made for Vista" with digital signature provided by MS. That is supposed to have some QA, isn't it?
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
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.
It's not well known, but the officers uniforms were actually designed by Hugo Boss, that's why they look sharp.
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?
He couldn't be German. His sentence at the end does not his verbs have.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
WTF? Operating systems are supposed to have two interfaces - an API and a DDI. MS fails at both.
Their technical problems are directly related to their legal problems. They can't be a neutral vendor of systems code while they're competing in the apps market.
Sure, Linux can be a pain in the ass to support, but usually it's a relatively simple build issue. And part of the pain is overly tight control of source code. With MS, there's simply no insurance that your technology will work with theirs.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention for the last two decades, MS IS ROTTEN TO THE CORE.
No, instead MS adopted their normal "fuck you all" attitude and forced a new, ill conceived driver model onto the IHVs.
Sure, XP driver support would probably not been a good long term solution, but it would have been a good idea for a year or two: enough time to make the transition slicker.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Every printer, network card, scanner and camera I've installed on Windows in the last ten years has tried to add useless dummyware on top of the driver.
You install the driver, then there's a "print manager" that has extra options, ink monitoring, visual queue monitors, and tons of crap that most people never need to do.
Of course, it also takes up residence in the system tray, in case you need dummyware at a click.
It's like our society in general. By attempting to pander to the stupid, it puts the smart in difficult positions and makes life worse for everyone.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
It's a very poor ripoff of MAC OS.
It's funny; one of the reasons I switched to the Mac was that I looked at Vista and thought, "well if I'm going to be running OSX, I might as well run the real thing."
Read the whole post, please.
I clearly state that I used the included Anytime Upgrade DVD to perform a full, clean install. No OEM disc, I can use that same disc to reinstall Vista Ultimate on my desktop, by simply entering the correct license key.
Yes, I've tried it. Yes, it worked.
Another case of HUAS.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Yep, I have seen the published kernel docs for Windows and can agree with what you said. Between the kernel and user is a lot of crap which is wrecking the experience. Putting the GUI into kernel space was a performance improvement in NT4 days but it immediately meant that the GUI and the graphics driver became tightly bound and easy for their interaction to bring down Windows.
See my journal, I write things there
Because I wanted to be certain, I looked on Wikipedia.
Specifically, it says the SS uniforms and the Hitler Youth uniforms.
That's what the Unix people like to say all the time, but it's not very helpful.
AFAIK for Desktop users there's very little difference between rebooting and restarting X.
They lose all their unsaved work - since most of it is still in apps in X. And the last I checked if you restart X, the apps die. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
Sure it's not a big problem for people who just use X as an interface to ssh and screen, and for some browsing. But I heard there's this push for "Desktop".
In the old days Windows 95 ran on MSDOS, if it hung, even if you could get it to exit to dos and then you type win to start it back up, it's still not very helpful to most people.
He couldn't be German. His sentence at the end does not his verbs have.
Does that mean Yoda was a Nazi?
Windows 7 won't have these problems! It'll fix everything!
But really. Blaming everyone but Microsoft? The drivers, when they deliberately changed the driver model at the last moment so XP drivers wouldn't work? What?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
a.k.a. Windows Vista.
UAC is NOT poorly implemented. UAC implementation is much better than Linux's sudo. The programs are poorly implemented assuming administrative privileges for everything!