Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product

Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"

I didn't find it disappointing

But my expectations were 0 to begin with. Can't disappoint from there.

Re:I didn't find it disappointing

Wow, Microsoft actually met someone's expectations!

Great job, guys!

Interesting Thing No One Mentioned ---

The interesting thing in the article that no one mentioned (and none of the Microsoft bashers at Slashdot ever want to mention) was this blurb: "When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant--in part because hardware and software makers didn't feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated." Vista was in Beta for over 3 years. Microsoft gave 3rd parties FOREVER to modernize and get used to the new UAC --- but they dropped the ball. Poor, cheap, no-nothing 3rd party developers that can't figure out how to write a program that doesn't run as admin / root are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft did everything in its power to force these idiots to change --- but they failed --- and now many of those some idiots (including a lot of you that post on slashdot) blame Microsoft for poor compatibility. You bitch for years about poor security. They give it to you, and you now bitch about incompatibility. What do you want?

Re:I didn't find it disappointing

No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft

We look back at our complaints over XP and are forced to reflect on our simple naïveté.

Nihilism means nothing to the dancing peasants.

Re:I didn't find it disappointing

Well put. That was refreshingly beautiful - every post about MS software (windows in particular) should have something about nihilism included.

Re:I didn't find it disappointing

I expected Vista to be the cause of countless stories on Slashdot. Apparently I'm in the wrong line of work, seeing as how I can see the future...

Re:Great Expectations

No, I actually have been posting that from what I've seen at school, it wasn't being adopted. My university recently joined the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Allience (MSDNAA) and all CS students could download free copies of Vista Business edition. Many installed, but as I reported, I didn't know of even a single version that lasted. Every single one went back to either WinXP and/or Linux. I didn't go so far as to suggest MS would end up a laughing stock, but I did say it seemed to fail.

disappointing, it is relative!

Sure it can, you score can go into the negative area since Vista is slower than XP. By my count, it is -5 because of the worse benchmark score and compatibility issues.

http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/20071128181/windows-xp-faster-than-vista.html [mobilecomputermag.co.uk]

Re:disappointing, it is relative!

Well, in my basement, I run a 1982-vintage VAX-11/785.

You stud, you.

And I only have a detailed, working reproduction of a 15th century torture chamber, complete with drain in the middle of the floor.

Re:I didn't find it disappointing

But my expectations were 0 to begin with. Can't disappoint from there.

I was hoping for an install CD completely full of ones myself. I got ripped off- half of them are missing.

I did

I had an expectation of 0, but the reality was closer to the square root of -1.

Re:I did

Sorry, the iExpectation is from Apple.

Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007?

This was under discussion (again) just the other day... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1944206 [slashdot.org]

Here is the full PC World Magazine's list http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html# [pcworld.com]

*The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007*
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
#2. What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War
#3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
#4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
#5. The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone
#6. Un-Neutral: The Broadband Industry
#7. Cannot be Completed as Dialed: Voice Over IP
#8. Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
#9. Sorry, We Already Gave: Office 2007
#10. Is Anyone Listening?: Wireless Carriers
#11. Singing an Old Familiar Zune: Microsoft Zune
#12. Just Another Oxymoron: Internet Security
#13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks
#14. Screwed up to the Max: Municipal WiMax
#15. Box Unpopuli: Amazon Unbox

Re:Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007?

The instant pcworld bashes Vista it somehow gains credibility on slashdot I guess :)

Re:Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007?

You must be new here. The instant anyone bashes Vista it gains credibility on slashdot.

Re:Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007?

I want -- need -- a daily dose of MS bashing.

Just install Vista; it practically bashes itself.

It's called a consensus opinion.

Is there anyone outside of M$ that has said anything good about Vista? PCWorld said a few good things but their overall dissapointment carries weight because of their past enthusiasm. What this means is that Vista is so bad that anyone daring to defend it risks their credibility.

Re:It's called a consensus opinion.

I like Vista.

Re:It's called a consensus opinion.

I don't hate it. I just never used it yet. I have still Win2K at home and WinXP on my company's laptop. Even though it is labelled 'Windows Vista capable', and my company is actually the maker of the laptop, it never rolled out Windows Vista to its employees.

Re:this list stinks and I don't like it.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I've been reasonably happy with Vista as an HTPC/mediacenter OS. Seems much more stable than any previous pre-sp windows release; I often see 30+ days of uptime which was previously something I only experienced on solaris/linux/bsd machines and I'm not talking 30 idle days, my htpc can record 2 HD streams and 2 analog streams while playing back another hd stream and/or playing civilizations 4. Some of the interface felt a little wonky at first but after giving it a few weeks it felt much more tightly put together than XP and certainly more so than gnome or kde. Truly the only problems I really have with vista are easily enumerated as such:

No way to auto install security updates w/o also auto installing all other updates.

No built in support for hd-dvd or bluray playback, even with Microsoft's own hd-dvd hardware.

The price.

No support for unencrypted digital cable tuners in media center.

No good visual configuration options for REALLY BIG displays (I'm on a 47" at 1080p and it is always difficult getting the fonts balanced for readability and usability) Now, most of the issues exist in xp and linux as well. I'll reserve my final judgment for vista until it gets a bit past sp1.

P.S. I'm not an MS fanboy nor an MS apologist, I just call them like I see them. I am a professional Solaris/Linux system administrator with over a decade of nearly exclusive use of linux. I think that there just really isn't much serious innovation left to be had on the desktop, but vista makes a pretty decent living room OS...

Timewarp 2001

I have never seen this before. Nope. Not ever.

Not when XP came out and everyone was all "I love my 2k and I will never upgrade ever. Fucking XP is rubbish. I will never ever ever use it ever."

I did a lot of computer repair work back when XP first came out AND handed out a lot of advice. I am also as uncomfortable with Microsoft as the next guy. When someone would buy XP back then. I had to admit, it was a step up from 98. Now I did not want to change from 98, it was plenty stable for me and used less resources.

But I could understand why people upgraded. It was more stable for the average user who did not know how to tweak his machine. Some people even liked the fisher price interface. A good laptop or desktop ran XP decently.

Of course spyware and drive by downloads made XP a disaster for the average lo-tech user. Since 2004, it takes less than 3 months to reduce XP to such a mess, that it has to be reloaded.

Flash forward to today and I could not say the same thing. Anyone who is in the market for a computer I warn to not try vista, especially if they are comfortable with XP. It runs slower on hardware that would make XP fly. If you are an average lo-tech user, you will be confused by how everything you are used to has been moved around. Many new features are downright invasive.

Being objective about things. I have gone from "upgrading from 98 to XP, well to each his own" to "upgrade from XP to Vista, you will regret it".

We have one Vista laptop user left at work and he is begging to get back to XP. Lets face it. Vista is a dog no one wants to take for a walk.

Re:Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007?

I agree with John Gruber [daringfireball.net]. If Apple has a few more "disappointments" like the iPhone next year, it will make its shareholders very, very, happy.

That is fantastic news

to the 5 people who own a tablet pc

Re:Tablet PC

In the sense of the word as it is actually used, agnostic means that God is unknowable, or more precisely, that one *believes* that God is unknowable.

No, the word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context. They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.

WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.
STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit up.

There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category of theological noncognitivists,

WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?
STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.

which is different again from weak theism.

WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.
STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.

An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily represented above is

DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.

And of course, theological Slashdotism,

SOVIET RUSSIA: This shit fucks YOU up!

What about the iPhone?

The pre-iphone hysteria was touting the iphone as being the device that would liberate US consumers from the shackles of the telcos.

And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones

Vista wasn't the most dissapointing product - we already new how crap it was going to be. The iPhone was, because prior to release, it bought a ray of hope to US cell-phone consumers that was cruelly dashed.

(Yes, I know the iPhone is number 5 on the list, but it's there for the wrong reasons)

Re:What about the iPhone?

The pre-iphone hysteria was touting the iphone as being the device that would liberate US consumers from the shackles of the telcos

Show me a single claim from Apple that says that. Just one will do. Or are you talking about some know-nothing blogger trying to generate click-ads ? In any event, to make the claim, you have to cite your source, otherwise (given that this is slashdot, and you're a known anti-Apple troll) I call bullshit.

Simon

Re:What about the iPhone?

Vista wasn't the most dissapointing product - we already new how crap it was going to be

I think since 2001 every major Apple or Linux annoucement was met by something along the lines of "Longhorn can already do that in a better way". I was hoping there would be something behind the hype and atleast one improvement over MS Server 2003 and a few more improvements over XP. People really do expect more than a hobby operating system now and a suprising number of people are already being hit by the rather stupid limit of around 3GB of memory in 32 bit Vista. They are upgrading to Vista in the first place to get suppport for new hardware to better run their software and in the same year as release there is a very narrow window between inadequate memory and the top limit with a very poor way of handling what is in resident memory unless it is a machine dedicated to a very small number off application. A kludge like superfetch actually makes sense when so little memory can be adressed and most of it would normally be filled after boot with a lot of applications that may not be used in that session.

Once there are more drivers the 64 bit Vista may be a good option but the 32 bit version is a step backwards for Microsoft in my opinion. My opinion is coloured by having to deal with Vista installed on hardware that is completely inadequate - laptops with slow drives, low memory and sharing memory with graphics hardware that is not capable of handling the effects that got turned on by whoever does the installs.

Re:What about the iPhone?

god help me, i'm typing this on my wii...

Stop that. You'll go blind!

Re:What about the iPhone?

Once there are more drivers the 64 bit Vista may be a good option but the 32 bit version is a step backwards for Microsoft in my opinion.

If I understand the whole 32/64 bit situation with Microsoft correctly, the 64bit model that MS chose (LLP64) may cause some issues beyond simple driver replacement. LLP64 creates a new integer type called long long which is 64bit and keeps long as 32bit. LP64 (Unix version) redefines long as 64bit. The advantage of LLP64 is that overflow will not occur since there are two distinct types but casting a pointer to a long will not work. The opposite would be true for LP64.

The end result is that software for LP64 software needs to be ported by being recompiled to either 32bit or 64bit systems but for LLP64, the software needs to be specifically written for either 32 or 64bit. I'm not an expert here. Can someone else comment?

Re:What about the iPhone?

And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones

Personally, I couldn't care less about being locked to a single provider, mostly because AT&T/Cingular is the best provider in my area and thus have no reason to switch (I was on Cingular for years before getting an iPhone). I assume by "pay-twice-for-songs" you're referring to ring tones, which couldn't be further from the truth. If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like. More than that, you can "easily" make your own ring tones out of any audio you like without having to hack your phone at all:

1. Use an audio editor like Audacity to pull a 30 second or less chunk of music from your audio file. Save this as an mp3
2. Import the mp3 into iTunes
3. Use iTunes to convert the mp3 to AAC
4. Rename the new .m4a file to .m4r
5. Re-import the .m4r file into iTunes and it will go into the Ringtones folder, which can then be synced to your iPhone

"Proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps" is three ways of phrasing a single complaint, and that's changing early next year. In the meantime, you can write useful webapps or jailbreak your phone. While not ideal, Apple has committed to providing an SDK for third-party development, which is a change from their initial plans (from the start they always planned the iPhone to be locked down, rather than being a more open platform like Windows Mobile).

I'm far from an Apple fanboy, but I like my iPhone. I bought it knowing exactly what it was and was not. Then again, I also actually like Vista and don't feel that it's the biggest disappointment of 2007. From the list, I also like Office 2007 and my Zune, so perhaps I really don't have any credibility in this discussion :).

Re:What about the iPhone?

Wow. How does it sound after all that?

SKSKRSKRSKRKSKRSKRSKRSKCH "Joe, what the hell did you put in the blender now?!"

Re:What about the iPhone?

Whereas with my Blackberry, I copy any mp3 I want over, no matter how long, and say "Use this ringtone", and it's done. Apple isn't "easy" unless you're a fairly expert user.

Re:What about the iPhone?

If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like.

That doesn't work for those iTunes songs that are still DRM-protected. There is no *legal way (according to the DMCA) to convert such songs to ringtones without buying them again or going through the cumbersome process of burning them to CD and then ripping them back to MP3 before editing. Also, Apple has tried several times to block users wanting to put in their own home-made ringtones.

Re:iPhone is #5 on the list

The only thing keeping most companies using MS Office is inertia. It would be too much work to retrain people on a new interface with OpenOffice or KOffice or any other alternative. And Microsoft blew that argument to hell when they destroyed the "proven" interface of MS Office. The learning curve to go from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 is *WORSE* than switching to OpenOffice, a point we have made very clear to our bosses where I work with regards to our recent switch to OpenOffice.

never thought

i'd ever see a new OS that would make people *want* to stick with XP.

As a developer...

It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista... Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster. But it still has to burn a little to have the reason you came to work for the past 5 years be labeled "The Most Disappointing Product of the Year"

Re:As a developer...

> It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista... Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster. But it still has to burn a little to have the reason you came to work for the past 5 years be labeled "The Most Disappointing Product of the Year"

The first heartfelt comment I've seen for a long time on Slashdot.

Go forth, my brother, and touch more.

Re:As a developer...

Go forth, my brother, and touch more.

Be careful of the advice you give. You can get arrested for that.

As another developer:

If you know anything about developing software, you know that a product that spends 5 years in development before release is going to suck. Has nobody at Microsoft read The Mythical Man-Month? Vista is OS/360 all over again. (Look over the chapter titles again. It's uncanny.) I thought Microsoft was supposed to have tough interviews; maybe they should just ask "have you read TMMM?".

Anybody at Microsoft who spent the last 5 years on Vista either already knew it would suck (before it was even released), or is at least finally learning a valuable lesson about software development. Nobody said life had to be easy; you don't win every time.

If you're working on the flagship product of the world's biggest/richest software company, releasing a "lackluster" product years late, and making every mistake enumerated by a 30-year-old book which is essentially required reading in the industry, that *is* horrible. I mean, that's practically the definition of how to be horrible. Short of going out of business over the fiasco, I can't imagine how to be horribler.

Alan Kay was right: "I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past". If they were a hardware engineering team and nobody happened to know how to apply Newton's results, would anybody be similarly apologetic?

Or a mathematician -- practically everything they do is standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. If you start from first principles in mathematics (like, say, Peano's Axioms), you're pretty much guaranteed to never produce anything innovative. If a group of mathematicians said "well, no, nothing new to report, but look, the old stuff again with this pretty 3d effect!", they'd be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.

So no, sorry, as a developer, I don't have a lot of pity for those guys. When you're 2 guys in a garage, it's fine to make rookie mistakes. When you're a $50B company, people expect more than "lackluster" results and a rehash of the industry's greatest blunders from the 1970's.

Glass half full

The chant at Microsoft, "We're number one, we're number one!"

Macbook Pro

"...and when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe." Why does that have anything to do with Vista? Isn't that just an indication that Apple make great computers?

Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink'

Probably going to get modded "-1 Troll" for this, but having seen and used the product, I don't think Vista is all that bad. Granted, I still wouldn't want to try and run it on a system that only meets the "minimum specifications",... but seriously, who's going to recommend such a system anyway? True, the extra "confirmations" are a bit of a pain, but they're really not THAT bad. I honestly can't say I've seen a Windows Vista system crash any more or less than a Windows XP system (or a Mac, for that matter). Compared to Linux, on the other hand, well,... there's still no comparison,... ;-)

As for all the extra "eye candy" ... yeah, it's probably a little over the top. But on that same coin, Linux and MacOS have been getting their fair share of extra processor-eating-eye-candy, too, so what's the big deal here?

Still, if you have Windows XP, there's still no reason to rush out and replace it with Vista (just not worth the hassle, really). But if you're buying a new PC, I wouldn't freak out if it has Vista,...

Re:Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink

The big deal with Vista, yes it's not that bad, but even in its best possible light, its a minor improvement on XP. In its worst light, it is actually worse then the product that was released before it.

Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.

I have found a great use for it though. I have officially taken the stance that I will "never buy Vista" and will also "not support Vista", which frees me from the usual role of having to do tech support for anyone that knows I am in IT. I will happily support a Linux distro and most XP problems have solutions on the net by now, so my "personal favours" workload has reduced dramatically.

Re:Start menu has always sucked

It's hard to find a specific program, and when you are looking for a program to do a specific task, you have no idea how to find it

I think you have about nailed the description of linux on the desktop, with 1325134 programs that start with the letter K or G followed by names that do not have anything to do with what the program is about (konqueror/internet explorer, krita/photoshop, amarok/windows media player, need I go on? Aren't the names on windows just a tad more descriptive/obvious?).

I swear last week I had to resort to using yum search to figure out just which k* program was a no-frills command line picture viewer because doing an ls /usr/bin/k* gave me a ton of stuff I had no clue what was for (and I have been using linux since 1993, so it's not like I am a new user). If the linux devs used simple boring names like ksimplepictureviewer or kphotoeditor or kinternetbrowser it would be a lot easier, but no, application names in linux make perl look like self documenting.

Re:Start menu has always sucked

I think you have about nailed the description of linux on the desktop, with 1325134 programs that start with the letter K or G followed by names that do not have anything to do with what the program is about (konqueror/internet explorer, krita/photoshop, amarok/windows media player, need I go on? Aren't the names on windows just a tad more descriptive/obvious?).

You have apparently managed to seriously screw up your menu. I suggest you go back to the defaults, which are much, much easier to use that what you describe. Look at my current K menu (Kubuntu 7.10):

At the top level, we have three sections:

• Recently Used Applications
• Applications
• Actions

The Applications sections contains:

• Development
• Games
• Graphics
• Internet
• Multimedia
• Office
• Settings
• System
• Utilities
• Add/Remove Programs
• Help
• Strigi - Desktop Search

The only thing I think could possibly be improved there is perhaps the "Settings" and "System" -- it's not always clear which one I'm going to find the setting I'm looking in.

Now to address the core of your complaint, let's look at the contents of one of the categories. I'll pick "Multimedia":

• Amarok - Audio Player
• K3b - CD & DVD Burning
• Kaffeine - Media Player
• KAudioCreator - CD Ripper
• KMix - Sound Mixer
• KRec - Recording Tool
• KsCD - Cd Player
• Kaboodle - Media Player
• KMid - Midi/Karaoke Player

How much clearer and simpler can it be?

Of course, this being KDE, it's configurable. If you don't find the application names useful, you can turn them off and have only the description. In fact, there are four options:

• Name only
• Name - Description
• Description only
• Description (Name)

The second is the default, obviously.

GNOME handles things differently, of course, but uses the same concept. Programs are categorized sensibly, and then both names and descriptions are available.

So, please tell us, just how can this be improved? And in what way could either the Windows or OS X approaches possibly be better?

You seem to have chosen to criticize one of the things that the major Linux desktops get most right.

Re:Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink

If your comment was about XP and not Vista, I might agree. I'm a very happy XP user. However, last weekend I bought a new laptop when my old one crapped out. Obviously it had Vista, so I tried to use it for a couple of days. Between the fact it was abysmally slow, consumed a gig of memory just sitting there, kept asking me if I wanted to do things (yes, I know about limited user privileges, but this is Windows, for god's sake, where everything needs administrator), and I couldn't find a damn thing, well... the best compliment I could give it was that it was pretty. Add to that the fact I don't even get a damned OS install disk anymore, and I was significantly less than thrilled about its long term sustainability.

So, I decided to downgrade (upgrade?) back to XP. HP's own website basically said "DON'T DO IT, MAN, IT'LL NEVER WORK" and provided exactly no XP drivers, only Vista. Yeah, like I'm going to believe that. So I did, and after nearly ten hours of collecting drivers from other sources (occasionally having to change vendor IDs and the like to get them to load), I had it running perfectly.

The thing that bugs me most is that HP has the drivers - the hardware in this new box isn't anything all that revolutionary, or different from what was found in their old XP offerings. There's no reason they couldn't have put up the necessary XP drivers - most of them I got from HP's site, just under other models. The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.

Oh, and yes, it dual-boots into Ubuntu 7.10 just fine.

Re:but this makes no sense

You're new round here, right? Microsoft pwns the PC vendors. They push Vista, or they get the hose.

It is the price that is wrong

Vista would be fine if MS was selling it for $10 a pop.

No surprise here, but ...

... to complete its humiliation, Slashdot has managed to confuse PC Magazine [pcmag.com], which has nothing to do with the article, with PC World [pcworld.com] which is where the article actually appears: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html [pcworld.com]

Re:No surprise here, but ...

I think he's retired. His successor is a drinking bird [wikipedia.org] that periodically presses the "Approve submission" button on whichever article is currently pending approval.

For those of you who like Vista

And I suspect you are many. How do you address the following issues?

• increased support for DRM which inherently decreases my freedom, especially when applied to broadly
• continuation of Microsoft's dominance which I have found through experience indirectly hinders my ability to choose the software and hardware that I can make use of
• the artificially high cost attributed to this operating system
• the continuation of apparent willful vendor independent standards
• the continued use as leveraging tool to push Microsoft specific, and often closed psuedo-standards

Re:For those of you who like Vista

Well I can't say I like it, but I do use it, so i'll bite:

This DRM complaint thing - what's the deal? Vista doesn't prevent you from doing anything XP will let you do. They added the ability to play restricted formats, which simply isn't included at all in XP. If you don't like HD-DVD playback, then don't use it! It's not like MS could have offered it without DRM (and not been sued to high hell). I can still rip DVDs and CDs with aplomb.

Its true, but as an IT professional I need to stay current on MS technology, or risk unemployment. At home I use Linux and OSX primarily, though I do play the occasional game on Vista. Hardware though? I don't think Windows restricts your hardware options too much... most stuff works on other OSes too.

Yeah Windows is pricey at retail, but OEM copies aren't that bad (similar to OSX pricing). I agree, though. I got my copy through our MSDN subscription of course so it doesn't apply to me.

Their standards (un-) support is extremely frustrating, probably my #1 complaint. Also why I have to keep a Windows machine around - to find out how to get everything else to work with it. Did you know they broke CIFS again in Vista/Server 2008? Yup.

I use Linux because it's so functional, OSX because its enjoyable, and Windows because I have to.

BFD

Seems every OS and gadget from 2007 is listed here, including the media darling, the iPhone.

Leopard is listed, which came as a bit of a surprise until I read this:

Adding insult to injury, some upgraders even reported a Windows-like Blue Screen of Death when upgrading from previous Mac OSs.

There's nothing Windows-like about it. There's a big difference between a kernel panic and simply stalling during the boot process on a screen which happens to be a shade of blue.

In mid-November, Apple released an update to Leopard that fixed some of the bugs, including the firewall glitch. Repairing Apple's reputation, however, may take slightly longer.

It speaks volumes that Apple fixed some problems 2 weeks after the OS was initially released. Their reputation is OK with me.

I don't think anything would please the author of this article unless it wiped his ass or gave him a spontaneous orgasm.

(sorry for the sort of off-topic-ish post)

Not to rain on your parade

The w3Schools OS Platform stats [w3schools.com] for November:

Vista 6.3%
Growing at slightly under 1% a month.
This train may have been slow leaving the station, but it is building up momentum.

XP 72.8%
XP's loss is Vista's gain?
The so-called "upgrade" migration to XP is beginning to look like just another Geek fantasy.

W2K 5.1%
Some good news for the die-hards.

Linux 3.3%
Slow erosion all year, and not much to show for four years of "The Year of Linux"

OSX 3.9%

A healthy niche, but ending the year where it began.

Web developers, you clod.

So, 6% of the w3schools's viewers, web developers, migrated from previous versions of Windows to the latest. Developers, dude... That Windows 2003 Server has a whole freaking 2% should have said something to you. Have you ever used IE under Win 2003? It's locked down like Alcatraz.

Even if that statistic represented the whole market, almost all new PC's come with Vista preloaded (due to customer demand? HARDY, HAR, HAR!), and the PC market is still growing. Vista's share WILL grow, because the market is stuffed to the gills with Vista PCs. It'd better be growing pretty damned fast before you start trumpeting Vista's success.

This is my favorite part though. The very page you linked to sums it up best:

Statistics Are Often Misleading

You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.

Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers.

Can't get much clearer than that.

While I do not defend Vista...

part of it is that MS put out Vista when there was no need for it. A refresh of an operating system brings new drivers for new stuff, a bit of a different look, and built-in support or roughed in plumbing for what's coming down the pike. With the exception of gamers and videographers, for most people the PC, Mac, what have you, was fast and good enough three years ago. Most people browse the net, post here and there and do some mail/sms. They won't bother with computer or OS upgrades for quite some time, like only if their machine breaks. Companies, well, they dislike change, and the expense it brings, and for their limited computing needs, Vista brings nothing to the table.

The gamers, videographers and other hobbyists, they will have more than enough power to run Vista anyway so that won't really be an issue. That there is not enough superior to XP software for them available in Vista, is another matter.

Really, if Vista fails, it is because MS tried to make a market when there was none. The halcyon days of the 90's when people upgraded like buying shoes is over. Somebody just didn't get the memo.

what didn't make the list?

Every major tech development is on that list as most disappointing. Lets see, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, The entire security industry, the entire cell phone industry, the entire social networking space, the entire VoIP industry are all on the list. Google isn't on the list, probably only because they didn't really release a *New* product in 2007, if they had, they'd be right up there. Both Microsoft and Apple made the list twice, Microsoft for Office and Windows, Apple for OS X and the iPhone... I guess we'd all be happier if these companies had just sat on their thumbs this year?

This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?

Still don't get the Vista hate

In real world use I see it as:

1. An excellent home OS where applicable

2. An OS that has no place in the enterprise

The hardware constraints (somewhat beefy hardware, drivers issues, etc...) make it nearly impossible to considering implementing in the enterprise in the near future.

But for a home OS I fail to see the problem. It's stable. It has a lot of nice little features (great indexing and file management (probably best I've seen by default in any OS to date), finally something that nicely uses previously wasted RAM and CPU cycles, improved user management and security, nice built in backup features, much better multi-media management (this one sorts goes with indexing and file management I supposed) etc..).

I know, there's ton of issues out there even for those where it should work. But there are for any OS. And for every "my network slows down when I play music" on Vista there's a "if you lose your network drive in the middle of a file move, your file goes *poof*" on another OS.
Sure, your old sound card might not work with Vista. So don't upgrade to it. I don't see that as a knock on the OS. Legacy support is always a give and take when upgrading. The "beefy" requirements to run it are always overstated around here. Turn off aero and your middle of the pack 4 year old CPU will run it just fine with a gig of ram. I don't know if there's enough of a reason to want to upgrade over XP for the cost. But surely after using both a lot I'd much rather have Vista, it's sandbox, and it's interface (even without aero, window thumbnails, and transparent windows) then XP.

Generally I think Vista just gets railed because no real "geek" should run windows, and because for some reason it's not OK for MS to release *new* software only meant for *new* hardware. The negativity isn't based on the actual product because the actual produce isn't that bad.

Tasteful, Muted Applause

And to those who claim Vista has been treated unfairly at /. by a bunch of snobby, anti-Microsoft uber-nerds, there is is in black and white. One of Microsoft's major sources of free publicity has just offered to speak at the funeral.

It takes one back. The sneaky-peaky buzz about something called, gasp, "Longhorn". The breathless, it's almost-just-about-nearly-any-day-now blurbs.

And now, this. The honeymoon is truly over, and the groom is sporting a frying-pan-sized lump on his forehead.

teh irony

http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/1267/vistanokx6.jpg [imageshack.us]

Personal opinion

Background: I work for various schools, managing networks. Have done for years. Linux fan (Linux-only at home) but always recommend most sensible solution at work, which means XP at the moment (and for the past few years) when you have Windows software you need to run. Schools can't really do non-Windows when their local authorities are demanding they use Windows packages for finance, inventory etc.

Vista is a heap of rubbish. We looked at it when it first came out, and didn't even bother to keep the OEM-installed Vista image on the hard disk on the trial computer that we used. After ten minutes of trying it out, we wiped it back to XP. Nothing new, nothing useful, nothing that saves us time, in fact the exact opposite. Verdict: No benefit.

Later, having moved schools and been given more time and complete say in a new network, I installed it on a laptop that, ironically, we'd specified as XP only but happened to come with OEM-installed XP and a Vista Business Key/Disk. Install procedure was fairly unobtrusive. I remember one or two quirks though, where I heard myself say "I'm not an idiot, just do what I want."

Got into Vista and followed my standard "join to domain" procedure. This involves installing the usual Flash, etc. players and Office and configuring network interfaces, turning off certain options etc. Installs went fine (albeit blighted by the UAC which I eventually turned off completely because I couldn't have that bugging me, so my users certainly weren't going to tolerate it) and then I got round to doing things like setting IP's/DNS, proxy servers, setting up local users, etc.

Then it just turns into a nightmare. Everything's moved, quite often to even more nonsensical places. "Classic" modes for anything don't actually put things back how they were in older versions of Windows. Some options gone completely (like turning off that "new" Login window which, incidentally, totally stopped my usage of the machine - if my users have to type RANDOMSERIALISEDMACHINENAME\theirlocaluser they aren't going to bother. Instead of just selecting from a drop-down box like in XP... there I was thinking that computers were supposed to save you time and having to type in long, obtuse commands. And what happened to the double-Ctrl-Alt-Del classic login? Or the option in GP to turn it back?), some just weren't powerful enough any more.

There is no way that my users could do some of the things that Vista demanded of it. They are not going to sit and click through twenty-odd UAC dialogs that make absolutely no sense just to install their local software (this is why they get a local login for out-of-school use - so they can install their own software for testing, evaluation etc. for the next academic year without buggering up their network profile), nor are they going to remember to type in the machine name, or even have a clue where that was stored when they do need it.

Everything was suddenly more complex, like going back ten years. I could seriously look at Vista and XP and if I didn't know better I'd say that Vista was a first over-reaching attempt to improve on Windows 98/2000 and then people complained and it was replaced a few years later by the much calmer and more friendly XP. It really is that bad.

And that's before I even bothered to look at activation, program compatibility, etc. which would (from my own research) be killers for the types of places that I work. We run a lot of different programs. At least 25% just weren't avilable/updated/ready for Vista at all and still aren't - but the fact of the matter is that most of them were nothing more than a few webpages stored on a CD with a simple executable interface or children's games using things like Shockwave to display. I don't mind Vista breaking compatibility, so long as it provides advantages. We had to upgrade most (not all) software in the 98 -> XP era anyway because of similar problems but we got advantages by doing so - better security, better network integration, etc. Vista just takes

Sysadmin hell

I am the part time sysadmin for a small (40 people) design company that runs on 80% Macs (Designers and file servers) and 20% Windows (CAD and consultants) and Linux (mail, web, dns, dhcp). I am fairly used to supporting the oddities of the various OSs and personally use WinXP about 80% of the time myself. I have found that Mac OSX is generally an incredibly robust system and requiring generally little in the way of user support. Second WinXP is also fairly robust these days, with the caveat (this also applies to OSX to a certain extent) that if your users are allowed, as ours are, to install whatever they feel like, some will install all sorts of little gadgets and widgets that will bring the system to a crawl and, in the case of WinXP, make the system very unreliable. By and large, my largest support task on WinXP is Office support.

One user got a new Lenovo top of the line T61, with nVidia Quadro in September this year. With Vista Business. To support possible future Vista installs, I got and installed Vista Ultimate on a Mac Pro tower (Quad Xeon), where, after careful tweeking, it runs quite well, albeit far slower than OSX or WinXP on the same machine. Vista on the Lenovo Laptop, coupled with the usual insane amount of crapware that comes with Thinkpads preinstalled, is an absolute abomination. The GUI is actually less responsive than the first release of OSX 10.0 was on my old 333MHz PPC Lombard Powerbook 6 years ago. You can cure the slashdot "I'm sittnig here at my freelncer gig.." trolls here.

Vista on that laptop, a 2.2Ghz Machine, 2GB Ram, etc, is so bad, it almost makes me cry. The UAC nightmare, while supposedly making the system more secure, also makes it almost impossible to do any normal work (any control panel stuff requires a UAC clickfest from hell). Turning UAC and Lenovo's Account management crap off is an improvement, but it brings up the point of why one would use Vista anyway. A lot of software, such as our Inventory clients, will simply not run. Working through custom DNS or DHCP settings is a major PIAS.

Every time I have to use Vista, I am more convinced that Microsoft has lost its edge. I can not see ANY company interested in productivity and efficiency using Vista. Microsoft has more than enough cash to last it through years of losses, but if that does in fact come to pass, MS will lose its standing business and get a bad reputation that will be harder to fix than merely better products will do.

There is a stylish rival to Vista

OS X Leopard, especially on PowerPC feels like you downloaded a beta torrent by paying $130 (more in my case, family license).

There are inexplainable issues, they simply make no sense and I am not speaking about that "move files" bug, I never moved any file on any OS, I always considered it a risk.

In my case, OpenGL is 40% slower (tested multi, multi tools) than Tiger 10.4.11. As Nvidia says "it is up to Apple" for drivers, I reported to Apple and never heard back except one really redundant and irritating question.

Those people doing a massive job to port thousands of open source tools to OS X have to start over. Developers never had final version before it hit shelves by a childish (I think) reason as "They are leaking them". There is a blame game going on and those tiny Mac fanboy fascists are trying to censor every kind of feedback on web. I am not speaking about posting a security issue to public forums and whine to slashdot when it is deleted.

I am patiently waiting for 10.5.2 update, I will see if it fixes anything or gives slightest hope and if it doesn't, I will do my first OS downgrade since Atari 800XL DOS 3.0 back in 1985.

I don't like to post bugs to public but I have seen some idiots modded down (using overrated censor) some posts making sense here.

Vista? I have used it for 3 days, I haven't seen major issues but it was a professional developer machine.