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Revisiting the Original Reviews of Windows Vista
harrymcc writes 'We now know that a remarkable percentage of consumers and businesses decided to spurn Windows Vista and stay with XP. But did the reviews of Vista serve as an early warning that it had major problems? I looked back at the evaluations in nine major publications and found that they expressed some caution--but on the whole, they were far from scathing. Some were downright enthusiastic.'
i agree. aside from needing a lot more memory than what was considered "standard" at the time of its release, vista wasn't bad at all. i think everyone was just riding on the stay-away-from-vista band wagon. it's just sad that the general public believe the opinions of 12-yr-old geek wannabes or 40-yr-old bloggers who don't even know the difference between java and javascript.
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Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The legacy of Vista is the importance of first impressions.
for the majority of users, their first Vista experience was impeded by a slew of "you just clicked an icon! this is a security risk! are you sure??" messages, and "in order to run this program, you must have administrator privileges. do you want to run this as administrator now?" popup messages. it was very annoying, and blunted what could have been a fine experience with a shiny new OS.
This was by no means the most serious problem with Vista, but it had tremendous impact on its reception.
Vista ain't bad, and really Win7 isn't as different as Vista was to XP. I tried very hard for 10 years to use Linux. Not any more; it's too much work. When I'm using my computer, I don't want to spend time fiddling with the OS and desktop environment. So I'm happy using Windows at work, and Mac OS X at home. Each to their own though.
For me it didn't even take getting new hardware to get better performance under Vista. MS released some patches soon after launch that addressed the main performance issues people were having, and it's been great ever since. I'm still using it, after 2 years of no re-installs or cleaning up of my computer, and it's flying. The major problems people had, which were not addressed by Microsoft, were due to the new driver model, which made drivers less able to crash windows and generally mess up your computer (a Good Thing). Pre-Vista drivers weren't compatible, but now nearly everything has a Vista driver, so it's not a problem. The same thing happened when people moved from 98SE to XP - everyone decried XP's 'Fisher Price' interface and screwy drivers, but it was the exact same thing. Now folks are pining for XP, when in a few years Windows 7 will be the new XP. Vista was, in my opinion, rather unfairly tarnished by people spewing utter bullshit about it (which still goes on today on /.), and it'll never get over that. For those who have used it, the majority are still using it, and didn't go back to XP.
Hey, Harry, you were writing and editing stories about Vista back when it came out, right? What did you say? Um, thanks for reminding me. I wrote quite a bit about Vista in my Techlog blog for PC World, and was smart enough to express caution about its significance and raise questions about compatibility issues, but not savvy enough to guess it would become a legendary flop. (Here's a post from March 2006 in which I'm fairly skeptical, but say "It...seems unlikely that it'll be a Windows Me-style fiasco." Wrong!)
I recall that I had plenty to say about the last quarter, last month, last day, last hour, last minute removal of features that made Vista interesting. What was left was a Windows OS with a lot of hinderances and no benefits over the previous version of Windows. It was one huge empty promise. And I did, in fact say this was the new WindowsME. And quite predictably, I was marked "troll" and "overrated" and heard no end of how wrong I was. What I heard was that Vista was elegant and refined and that if the PC was too slow to handle it, it wasn't Vista's fault.
No one succeeded in changing my mind on the topic and it seems the masses, for once, agreed with me. (How rare!)
I dont think Vista was that bad OS after a little bit more powerful hardware came out and after you got used to it. It feels a bit more sluggish than XP but that's what Win7 improves with their move responsive UI (which is really important thing that always seems to be forgotten - just compare Opera to Firefox)
So Vista isn't so bad one you get a more powerful computer, get used to the slowness and upgrade to Windows 7? Was this supposed to be tongue-in-cheek?
I am not a crackpot.
I never had any problems moving from 98 to XP.
In fact since XP is actually Windows NT 5.1, it was a hell of a lot more stable than the old 95/98/me MS-DOS overlaid-with-a-desktop model which kept crashing or freezing. I'm glad Microsoft discontinued that line.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
But my feeling is: Windows 7 will suffer the same fate that Vista did. It will be still XP in all major Corporates; where they will erase the pre-installed Windows7 and install XP using the Corporate licenses. Software developers will continue to support XP atleast for the next 4 years.
By which time, the OS on the desktop will be irrelevant siince Netbooks will completely change the dynamics of the OS market. It will not be a stretch to predict that Linux will establish itself within the next 4 years in all Corporates where people exect their devices to boot instantly and work reliably consuming less resources like mobile phones.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Another note to add is that Vista was the first OS Microsoft created that wasn't designed to have Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer linked, which was likely a cause for several backwards-compatibility issues.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
Vista sucking has a lot more to do with sociology than technology. The problem was that marketdroids severely understated Vista's hardware requirements, tried to segment the market too finely with too many editions, and outright lied about the user experience at some levels of hardware capability. What's what marketdroids do: they lie for profit.
But marketdroid lies notwithstanding, the underlying technology behind Vista wasn't bad: far from it, actually. For the first time, there's a half-decent security model for the average user. (I don't buy that UAC sucks.) There are a ton of kernel and API improvements behind the scenes. We have symlinks, even!
Sure, there were a couple release-day bugs, but every OS has those. XP had a similar number of pre-SP1 issues. And hell, it had fewer than the first version of RHEL5 (that OS paused for a full five minutes on every boot, polling SATA drives that never came, until a patch fixed the issue.)
The "Vista sucks" meme, however, spread virally because 1) we all love to hate Microsoft, and 2) most users really can't tell the difference between good technology and bad, but they can certainly parrot what their friends say. It doesn't help that Vista really did suck for some users who were running on underpowered hardware. (If you want to argue that Vista's hardware requirements are too high, we can do that, but Vista doesn't suck on the hardware for which it was designed.)
Really, Microsoft could just rebrand Vista as Windows 7 and release it today to great acclaim: in fact, that's precisely what they did. Since Vista's release, even low-end hardware has caught up to Vista's original requirements, so despite the inevitable lies from marketing, Vista^H^H^H^H^HWindows 7 will now run fine for a lot more people. The new name kills the old meme, and forces people to reconsider whether Vista sucks.
tl;dr: Vista doesn't suck on the hardware for which it was designed. In fact, it's a vast improvement. Marketing sucks for lying about what hardware you need for Vista, however, which put a bad taste in people's mouths.
And needing more graphics power than was considered normal in order to display a modern UI.
And UAC being maybe the most annoying thing ever added to any piece of software ever.
And inexpicably long file transfer times.
And backward compatibility.
I used the Vista RCs extensively and couldn't stand them, even on excellent hardware. This past weekend I spent an hour or so helping a friend set up his new Vista laptop and network and was reminded of why I can't stand Vista even on hot off the presses high end laptop hardware. The UI lags no matter how much computing power you throw its way. UAC still requires multiple approvals before executing one task. Even with an SSD traversing directories is still too slow.
I've been running the Win 7 RC and have to say that it appears to fix most all of Vista's problems apart from UAC. It is probably good enough to get me to take advantage of bootcamp, which Vista certainly was not.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The main reason most businesses stayed away from Vista was because there was no business justification for it. If the only thing Vista can do that XP can't is to run slower and look prettier, why would you want to install it? Remember, a business software upgrade is never free even if there is no additional licensing cost. The IT staff time required to upgrade the PCs and networks along with any user downtime or learning curve is not worthwhile just to install a slower and buggier OS that offers no real improvement over XP.
You complain about both backward compatibility and UAC. Most problems with UAC came from exactly that - the old software wasn't made to support it. New software is. Nevertheless, UAC is the correct direction for securing Windows as OS. People have been complaining that Windows is insecure, and now that MS takes the correct way people complain that it's a nuisance? You can't have it both ways (and you can disable UAC if you're not happy with it).
UAC nuisance goes away when you replace older software with newer one that supports it. But to support it MS had to just throw it in.
So Microsoft should, what, remove the feature because geeky people (defined as: people who already know how to disable UAC) want to do all kinds of geeky, potentially insecure, stuff?
"Throw the average user to the wolves! Cater only to the uber-geeks!" That's the philosophy they should use?
And yeah, the UI is dog slow on a machine on which linux absolutely flies. Still. Core2Duo, Nvidia 8400GS, slow as crap.
There's no reason Vista should be "slow as crap" on that machine. Maybe you've just broken something by installing low-level crap.
Comment of the year
...(XP didn't have the same kind of just-show-ui-quickly-while-its-loading thing either)
The hell it didn't! If one logs into the computer as soon as the login screen is displayed, (if the "welcome screen" is enabled) you'll see the "Welcome" line rise in a jerky fashion. That will disappear, and the taskbar is displayed right away. Because XP uses Terminal Services to show you your desktop, you'll see that the Start button, QuickLaunch area, and system tray will be blank (for only a few seconds, or longer) while your hard drive grinds away trying to furiously load everything at the same time. Win NT4 took a while to give the login screen (on slow computers), but at least when it did, one knew the OS was loaded completely.
I do like the idea of 'delayed automatic startup' in Vista (and 7 I hope)...
I remember the good old days of 'the operating system loaded', then 'you can use your computer'...now, it's a mash. So many people I know start clicking stuff and don't understand that their computer is still loading (there's no clear indication that services/apps are still loading damnit!), and they ask me why it's taking so long...then they click it again. Sure, there's a HD light that few (as in 10-15% of all computer users) people understand, and the hour glass sometimes...but nothing definitive...why is that so hard?
UAC still doesn't stop a user from clicking "okay" "okay" "okay" as they install a trojan.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What the guy got stuck with was a Vista Basic machine, and that is entirely MSFT's fault. They put out frankly ridiculous system requirements for Vista Basic and for quite awhile after Vista was released Worst Buy was pushing Vista Basic machines with really underpowered Celeron or Sempron chips and a measly 512Mb of RAM. considering folks were used to the "XP Home/Pro" way of doing things Vista Basic smelled like a way for MSFT to push their new OS onto PCs that were WAY too underpowered to ever run it.
So don't blame the guy, blame MSFT. After all how many average Joes are gonna know the REAL system requirements of a new MSFT OS, or the difference between the SIX versions of Vista? And lets be honest here, Vista Basic should have NEVER been released. It was obvious from day one that Vista Basic was a screwjob intended to let OEMs get rid of old stock by putting a version of the new OS on a machine that simply couldn't handle it and get it out the door. if you ask me a LOT of the Vista hate can be laid directly at MSFT's door for allowing machines that never should have had anything but XP walk out the door with Vista Basic and a "Vista Capable" sticker.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.