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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?
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
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.
Yes blame printer drivers. Crappiest bloated pieces of shit ever to be coded. Print drivers on modern printers should be under 5MB MAXIMUM. Often print drivers on modern 5in1 w/es are in excess of 200MB! holy god, even taking the bullshit ap and ui they needlessly tacked on how could it have gotten that bloated. Even trying to make the program needlessly huge the compiler would probably compress it to less than anything i could code.
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.
Indeed. OS, hardware, software... they all have a significant impact in user experience.
They should do this study with computers coming straight off the shelves of Circuit City, Best Buy, and from online stores like Dell. Install "Mojave". Give these computers to the average user for a year.
Now, ask those people about their experiences. I doubt their answers would be anywhere close. The average response would probably be something like this: "I like how it looks better than XP, but I don't think it's any better really... I still can't find what I need, it's slow, and I think I need more memory or something. Fix that stuff, and some of the annoying boxes that pop up, and I'd probably like it better."
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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?
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.
hardly gave them any time
Manufacturers had more than full year before the release date.
But some manufacturers (Creative comes to mind) didn't ship proper Vista drivers for an additional eight months after Vista Business Final was released.
Perhaps not "top of the line", but they are certainly more powerful than the average $500 laptop sold at CompUSA - and let's face it, when faced with a $500 laptop and a $1000 laptop people will buy the $500 one. If it says it runs Vista, it should run it well - it may not be an excellent machine, but an operating system shouldn't be the most demanding thing people use. Said $500 laptop probably contains 1GB of ram if you're lucky.
I speak from experience, as someone who owns a DV9000. I ordered it with 1GB of ram to max out the CPU specs, knowing I would upgrade the ram later. Vista ran very very slowly. I upped it to 1.5GB and it runs just fine. Ram makes all the difference with Vista, even though it shouldn't. Say all you want about all the ram usage being pre-caching - if it were just pre-caching, it wouldn't have been slow with twice the ram it "needs", and it wouldn't have sped up dramatically just by adding half a gig more space used only for precaching. If that's their idea of speeding up applicaiton loading with pre-caching, I'd rather go back to the XP way of things.
The "Mojave Experiment" method is simple: get a person who says Vista is slow (because it is, on their machine), sit them in front of a computer with twice the ram theirs has, and get them to do a recorded double-take at how fast said machine is running Vista. Then they go home filled with excitement ready to prove themselves wrong on how slow Vista is and realize their copy of Vista isn't as fast as the Vista they used and wonder what the heck the testers did (remember, these are the kinds of people who read "Word for Dummies" - any person with a clue about technology would be filtered out in a screening process or have his response never aired).
I say all this as someone who uses Windows for daily development without much issue. I don't hate Windows. I do, however, hate dishonesty, whether express or implied, as the lawyers would say.
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
At least you can tell they're talking about Vista and not shoes.
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
It's not well known, but the officers uniforms were actually designed by Hugo Boss, that's why they look sharp.
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.
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...
Or Churros, don't forget the churros.
Delicious.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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?
UAC is NOT poorly implemented. UAC implementation is much better than Linux's sudo. The programs are poorly implemented assuming administrative privileges for everything!