How Vista Disappoints 731
MCSEBear writes "Writer Paul Thurrott has given Microsoft a verbal dressing down for what has become of Windows Vista. He details Microsoft's broken promises over the years since Longhorn/Vista was first previewed back in 2003. He demonstrates where current Vista builds fail to live up to Microsoft's current hype of the much reduced feature set. From the article: 'I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future ... It some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux, but not to the depth we were promised. Instead, Windows Vista will do what so many other Windows releases have done, and simply offer consumers and business users a few major changes and many subtle or minor updates. That's not horrible. It's just not what was promised.'"
Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in summary, the new Vista:
Thurrott says he still doesn't hate Microsoft for not delivering on all of these promises:
The world needs friends like Mr. Thurrott. He's a pretty forgiving guy. But, it would have been nice had Microsoft really been able to deliver this as promised. I was looking forward to buying a new upgraded computer!
A credibility problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista will dominate (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't care. Don't want to care. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since they're building DRM right into the core of the OS (including crap such as the Protected Media Path and all its ilk) I have absolutely no reason to think they won't allow corporate partners (RIAA, MPAA, BSA) to abuse this to kill pieces of "unapproved" media or "rogue" apps. What happens when the .*AA tells them Azureus is being used to pirate software or media? Shut 'er down! Even if you've only ever used it to share the latest fad video or big open source distribution, it won't matter. And that's wrong.
Whether I agree with them on issues of piracy or not (I don't approve of pirating software myself) I refuse to allow my computer to participate in extending or enforcing their policies, and I refuse to install DRM based media players. I'm going to keep XP on that machine for as long as it runs, or until I replace it with an open OS.
"The Bad Old Microsoft" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
This article and its points (good ones) make me respect Paul even more. Not to mention TFA has some really well thought out points. MS is blowing it, hard.
Re:Promises (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft marketed a load of vapor to people for years so they would wait for Vista. And if someone is waiting for Vista, they aren't installing Mac OS X or Linux.
Either Microsoft did this to intentionally slow the growth of other products while their product was in development, or they screwed up so badly in their development that they were forced to strip out all of these planned features. Neither one of those options says anything good about Microsoft.
Another Windows OS... So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
You think MS can rewrite the API with each release? ISVs want a consistent platform. If MS releases an OS that can't run software for previous OS versions, no one would buy it. The only reason for new OS releases is to keep siphoning money in exchange for "current version support". The whole idea is bogus and designed to maximize profit. The last thing MS considers is what is good for their customers.
It's Paul Thurrott... (Score:1, Insightful)
The notable thing here is that, despite having his lips surgically grafted to Microsoft's ass, he actually dared to voice any complaint at all about an MS product.
Disappointing? Certainly. But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Minor Upgrade...? (was:Comparison) (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:My Vista sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it wasn't supposed to be a year until the release. And yet they are having problems as severe as these?
Unless the folder he's trying to copy to is in his file cabinet, I'd say its a sign of mediocrity to come.
Re:Filesystem (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, WinFS would and *will* be nice, but it's not a deal-breaker.
I'm more concerned that Vista is yet-another-version-of-Windows NT. I honestly would like MS to risk it all and make a brand-new version of Windows, written from scratch, that only runs "old" stuff under emulation. Just start over. It'll never happen, of course.
Re:View from a non programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you meant to have that line as praise, but you've put the fear of God in me and anyone that's ever used a Flash-based UI.
Re:Don't care. Don't want to care. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't even hate corporations, but this DRM crap and trying to tell us how we can live in our home owns is way out of line. And people will care too much. Maybe M$ should talk to Circuit City about their successful attempt in taking over a homeowner's living room.
And when this mass realization happens.. tons of small startups will form everywhere to help get people off M$ to Linux or whatever else is viable.
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, to say something is a linux killer suggests that Linux is the mainstream OS that everybody is using, and so Windows will overtake their dominance.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but 95% of the world runs Windows on their Desktop.
Sure, Linux is dominant in servers and server technology. But I would never have claimed that Windows 95 would kill Linux as a server OS.
When Windows 95 came out, where as Linux? Linux back then WAS a difficult POS to use, a convoluted OS with a lot of potential and very little innovation. In fact, it wasn't until Windows 95 was released that Linux actually started to adopt a UI that people liked to use on it (i.e. no more X-Windows). Gnome and KDE all got a lot of big design cues form Windows 95.
Back then, people though Linux was going to kill Windows, and with each new version of Windows that was released since Windows 95, Linux failed to make a dent in the market.
Today, in 2006, with Ubuntu being the lastest flavour of the mont Linux distro(but waining with rumors of other must have distros like a Google version of linux), Linux still is failing to captivate an audience for desktop users. In the past 10 years, Linux has failed to focus into a consise and effective replacement of Windows, failed to take 100 renegage distibrutions and consolidate it into one super-uber-distro that could rule them all and truely compete with Windows. Linux, and all its fragmeneted groups of developers still cannot unite to develop ONE good replacement to Windows, and while they all feel they can make a better Windows, none realize how damaging keeping seperated is having on their beloved hobby OS.
I have no idea where your coming from saying something like Vista will require driver disks if you plug your USB thingy into them. At least on Windows, drivers EXIST. Driver CD's actaully come with the product, and you can download the drivers online at least. This is unlike Linux where if you have new hardware, until some open source developer gets around to buying it you won't get any driver support for it. Even once you do, if the driver isn't for the specific nightly build of the kernel your running, your SOL for getting it to install properly without configuring scripts for hours.
Sorry, I know your trying to make a point about how cool and great Linux is over Windows, but you have to have some platform to stand on. Never once did I even consider that Windows needed to be a Linux killer. Linux speaks for itself, 95% of the world computer users say so. They all can't be mindless lemmings.
Re:I still waiting. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. The quote shows the author to be naive/uninformed:
I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future
This has always been Microsoft's MO. Late and with most of the intended features dropped out. They promise the world when they start development, but the new versions of their software tend to be the old version with a few tweaks, updates, fixes, a new skin, and all the controls in different places.
On the Programmers View (Score:5, Insightful)
The "home" edition of Vista won't support the interfaces. So, any software oriented toward home use cannot depend on the feature.
Corporate desktops are plain. The investment in the required dx10 infrastructure won't happen for years. So, the feature cannot be exploited in corporate applications either.
After eliminating home and coporate, what is left? AERO really won't have much of a place, outside of enthusiasts. Unless there is an application that can start in the enthusiast domain and drive the migration.
My prediction: the ONLY application that exploits this feature will be Vista itself. Possibly Microsoft may update some applications, but it must remain an optional part.
Microsoft will offer
Don't count on this feature as a platform for 3 to 5 (or more) years, though.
Ratboy.
I understand, but don't agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:View from a non programmer (Score:2, Insightful)
Interestingly, I'm interested in the complete opposite. I think Dashboard (and possibly Windows Sidebar) is a neat idea because it has the potential to make my life easier. At best, animations and colors make my life exactly as easy as it was before, and (as the article mentions in relation to the active window) they have the potential to noticably impede me. I want things that do stuff, I don't really care what they look like.
Re:Resistant to change (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't tell by the score 5/5.
Now imagine you get your college paper back with as much complaints and still get an A.
(Doesn't quite work like that, does it?)
No offense, but you've no reason to respect him even more.
That being said, the list of gripes is accurate and honest.
However considering how much money corporations and worse yet, individuals, have to spend each year fixing Microsoft's mistakes (viruses, security) I don't have the luxury of forgiveness that Paul does.
Re:Sounds like an apologist (Score:2, Insightful)
In the windows case yes, in the husband case let's just say that wives have incredibly high expectations.
Re:Vista will dominate, maybe, maybe not (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely the biggest market for Vista will be cosumers buying new systems from the likes of Dell or HP which will bundle the new Vista OS with the hardware. They won't have a choice. Unless those vendors continue to sell lower priced systems with XP and reserve Vista for the high end systems which are apparently is needed to see all the eye candy.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry. I don't see any compelling reason (or hardly any reason at all) to move from Windows 2000 or (for those couple of laptops of mine that have it) XP.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO it's isn't, NT had a unix-like security model (not exactly the same, but...)from the start. XP may created user accounts with administrator privileges by default, but the problem there is just a bad default, they could have changed it very easily in the vista code base or in a XP SP.
The vista security model is different. I'm not sure of what it is - some security expert may know better than me, all the information you can find today about vista is mostly full of marketing crap and the rest are docs about how to use what they've implemented, not about what they've implemented - but I'd say that Vista has a SeLinux-like access control thingy, which is really different from the typical unix security model.
Take for example IE 7 running under Vista. In Vista, IE 7 runs with *less* privileges than the user running it, which means they can allow the browser to run activex controls *and* ensure nothing bad happens to the user, because IE is not allowed to write/read files even if the files belongs to the same user that is running IE (unless you allow it). In theory you can extend this to every program connected to the net (email client, messenger). Even if lot of Linux distros are already using SELinux, I welcome this change in vista. Now, as Paul says they may have implemented a horrible UI, but that's another problem...
Re:But when? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, I can't really figure out why he, or anyone else for that matter, finds this surprising. Windows 95 was precisely the same kind of beast, as was Windows ME. Even Windows 2000, while one of the better MS operating systems, still didn't live up to expectations.
It's not as if MS is the only guys out there that pull this stunt, but why does everyone still, after all this time, act as if the new MS release is such a disappointment. It's almost as if they actually believe the hype coming out of Redmond, which, to be honest with you, would indicate some pretty big failures in the critical analysis abilities of such people.
Re:It's Paul Thurrott... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, why would trust a guy that admits and critizes Microsoft problems when they exist, that admits that most of the things in vista are inspired in mac os x, and that owns a mac and likes mac os x? [winsupersite.com]
Re:So just for perspective... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
You can sum up Vista like this:
Microsoft spent years and billions of dollars redesigning their operating system around the idea of DRM... designing their operating system around a feature that not one single consumer wants... and that makes your computer do less than it could before.
Champion... money well spent.
Re:Insightful (Score:3, Insightful)
The Cairo prject was M$'s attempt to finsih killing off OS/2 and kill off the various desktop UNIX distro's (HP had a nice candidate with the 900/712 with Lotus 123 and Ami-Pro running natively on HP-UX). Kind of thinking that the WinFS idea is like speech recognition (or Duke Nukem Forever) - remember reading Jerry Pournelle quoting Bill Godbout about the 80286 will be powerfull enough for speech recognition, this was ca 1982.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like sudo?
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's Paul Thurrott... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Posix and security (Score:5, Insightful)
So, no, Linux/Unix has not been doing this since inception. There's been military versions of Unix that have done it for a long time, but it's hasn't been a generally available feature (and still isn't on the desktop even for SELinux distros).
But you keep coming back. (Score:2, Insightful)
Happens with every release of Windows. The happy users just keep coming back. Classic abusive relationship.
Somehow, I don't think you are average (Score:3, Insightful)
Virtual desktops? Do you have any concept of how confusing that would be to most people? (Do you have any idea how many free virtual desktop programs you can download if you really want the feature?)
And follow mouse? Just plain annoying.
Shell? Most users never even know it's there.
Re:Vista will dominate, maybe, maybe not (Score:3, Insightful)
As another poster mentioned Vista won't make an appearance on any of my home rigs for some time (if at all), it reminds me of the Windows ME release; over-hyped and dysfunctional trash.
Re:Posix and security (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:3, Insightful)
- Browse the web? No.
- Check email? No.
- Write some papers? No.
- Spreadsheets? No.
- Taxes? No.
- Games? Umm..err..
;) (it is better than a couple years ago, most *major* games are at least dual platform)
I would imagine that very few people actually *have* to run Windows. They use it because it comes on the machine they buy, much like the reason they use IE. Those who *have* to, could use some emulator (hardware or software) or virtualization program. Maybe people will realize that it doesn't have to be so bad and move past the MS monopoly. Don't accept the status quo if you can help it, and when it comes to computers, we can help it.Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Apart from gaming, who really needs a new PC every time ?
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't read about the permissions scheme in vista but I do know something about how both Unix and NT handle them. Mind you, I won't talk about Unix ACLs, because I've never used them, which is in turn because there are not convenient userspace tools for dealing with ACLs. (And it will never be as easy to handle them on the commandline as octal mask perms.)
The biggest difference between classic Unix perms and NT perms isn't ACLs, though. It's the fact that Unix gives most permissions, and NT gives least. More accurately, Unix perms are additive, while NT perms can be either additive or subtractive.
In Unix, permissions are OR'd together. If you or any of the groups you belong to have a permission, then you have it as well. In NT, permissions are more complex. There is both a permit and a deny, and most significantly, deny trumps permit. If you belong to both the "good guys" and "assholes" groups, and good guys have read permit, but assholes have read deny, then the deny wins (supposedly) and you don't have access.
I still don't know what NT is doing to perms... but the common use of NT perms is superior to the common use of Unix perms (since practically no one uses ACLs in spite of the fact that assorted Commercial Unixes have had them for aeons.)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
If Vista is a disaster, they don't seem to have another OS ready to tweak to replace it. All their eggs seem to be in this basket.
More to the point, there are better competitors out there. Back in 2000 Apple was still selling the Classic Mac OS, and Linux on the desktop was quite crude. Now Apple is currently selling an OS that is at least as good as Vista and will release a new version that will probably be much better than Vista around the same time MS releases. Desktop Linux is starting to look really good, and the whole movement towards virtualization could conceivably provide backwards compatibility for people who want to move away from MS products (this is what Boot Camp and the rumoured virtualization in OS 10.5 are about).
There's a scene in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Steve Jobs confronts Gates about plagiarizing from Apple. Jobs claims he will win because Apple has better stuff, but Gates points out that this doesn't matter. The Gates character was proven right. But now this might bite the real Gates in the ass: Desktop Linux is probably not going to be as good as Vista, but that doesn't matter. Microsoft beat Apple because Apple had hardware lockin. Linux will beat Microsoft because Microsoft has software lockin, and because Linux these days is pretty much good enough.
We can only hope.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
He's not talking about filesystem security. And, yes, Linux didn't get ACLs as quickly as Windows did. UNIX, however, has had them for ages, before Windows was a commercial product.
UAP is a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator. Other than OS X, I know of no Unix-like OS that even attempts this.Umm... how about all of them? As far as I know everything UNIX-like can run sudo
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
It [NT4] had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems?
ACL's are a filesystem feature, not an OS feature. NTFS has them, FAT and FAT32 do not. Ext2 does not have ACL's, though hooks were left for ACL's from the beginning and support can be patched [bestbits.at] into 2.4 and 2.6 kernels for Ext2 and Ext3. AFS (Andrew File System), which is the original king of ACL's, could be used on Linux in 1998. ReiserFS has them (don't know for how long). SGI's XFS is the same (I think this was pretty recent).
I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux.
Evidently, people don't miss them, because the option has been available to Linux users about as long as NTFS has been on the scene. I would hazard a guess that ACL's aren't the "make or break" feature for most people's filesystem choice.
Now, I'm not going to seriously rain on your parade as the point of this argument seems to boil down to: NTFS is a great filesystem. I agree. NTFS is some sweet technology that works real nice in the here and now. But it isn't the only game in town for high performance journaling file systems (with ACL's no less). The fact that people don't really seek out ACL's on linux is simply that ogw permissions are so well understood by so many unix admins, and most of the time, ogw permissions are good enough.
Regards,
Ross
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
More to the point, ACLs are an OS feature, not a Kernel feature. To linux-the-kernel they are irrelevant. To linux-the-os they are important, after all you need implementations in the filesystem, the file utils, system libraries, gui file browsers, et cetera, to really implement them fully.
The grandparent was making the point that linux-the-os, in whatever flavor, was less mature than windows-the-os. Personally, I don't see that anything you said goes against that point, other than by pedantically treating linux as a kernel only.
Re:Filesystem (Score:3, Insightful)
As you'll recall, is was quite evident that Apple had been working on this long before Microsoft announced it. They hired Dominic Giampaolo, the co-creator of BFS, the first commercial file system with live search (AFAIK), some time in 2002. And since BeOS introduced this in 1996, around 10 years ago, nothing Microsoft is doing with search or even WinFS is original.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason they use such a bad default is because a lot of programs require admin rights to run and your average user doesn't want to bother (or doesn't know how to) use the "runas" feature. In this regard, the security model is bad. It should be more like OS X where the system knows when you need admin to do something and it automatically prompts for a username/password with admin rights. This is a superior security model for a consumer desktop, IMO. It has one great thing going for it: It is dead simple. Microsoft has gone out of their way (as usual) to make things very complex. One wonders if they've ever heard the old engineering mantra: Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS).
-matthew
Re:Transparent Windows: learn from Apple's Mistake (Score:3, Insightful)
And what makes it worse for MS is that they have such a long release cycle. So people are going to be "stuck" with a bad GUI for many years. Of course, you can probalby shut it off, but peopel are going to be impacted by the first (default) impression and some may not even think to try to fix it. 5 years from now, people are going to be buying new Dells with the same horrible defaults as Vista. Apple, on the other hand, has released several major versions of OS X in the time between Windows XP and Vista. And each time they tweaked things just a little bit... and almost always for the better.
-matthew
Re:I still waiting. (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what MS delivers or doesn't deliver. That's the beauty of a monopoly. You have to eat whatever comes out of their bowels.
Very interesting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more interesting is that half of the features missing from the stripped down version of Vista are already in Apple's OS X and have been for about a year now. And Leopard is right around the corner.
Keep up the good work Bill & company.
Re:Disappointing? Certainly. But... (Score:5, Insightful)
How does Microsoft make money? 1. Selling software. 2. Selling Books for that software. 3. Selling Certifications.
So what happens after everyone who is going to buy an OS, Book, & Cert has bought them all? What does Microsoft do? They announce that the old stuff is no longer supported, everyone has to buy the new stuff now! Then the mayhem starts. Applications slowly begin to break. Interfaces are no longer "flashy" or "in style". Then it hits the mainstream. "You don't have the new version yet? Wow, that OS is like 6 years old. You must not be on top of the IT world after all." Adoption hits critical mass, consumers start to flock to the new software. Now even the hard-core techies have to learn the bullshit new interfaces, programming languages, etc.
Point is, Microsoft's business model relies on breaking things. They can't sell the new stuff until they break the old. This is why Microsoft is dangerous to business on the whole.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
The 'PC Revolution' came about when an MS-DOS machine could be had at low cost and could do the now-considered-limited things that a PC in that era could accomplish. Which was VERY liberating at the time, because the only other computers to be had were locked-down multiuser systems that the regular person wasn't even allowed to be in the same room with.
The Microsoft 'a computer on every desk and in every home' was a cool aspiration. The fact that it's now time for those computers to no longer have much (if any) software from Microsoft doesn't make it a less cool aspiration.
To a person who liked writing graphical programs in GW-Basic, who got into the hardware and learned how to do cool low-level things with, say, Turbo C 2.0, any modern system makes your computer do less than it could before. Simply because hardware abstraction and a modern 'security model' took that all away.
It's point-of-view and what you want to do with the gear that determines 'more' and 'less.' To some people 'more' is a DRM-enabled system they can download crappy TV shows onto.
But don't you remember the good old days? (Score:2, Insightful)
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Not one single consumer?
Im quite happy with Unix security model. Im a Linux noob and it took me few hours to get hang of the basics of UNIX security concept. Root / user division in user accounts, filesystem and devices. I much prefer this security approach to windows one (or should i say lack of).
Maybe *nixes aren't just your thing? Im not saying that security model is ideal (tho i cant think of better for myself), but i fail to see how it's so hard to use or uncustomizable. OSX users don't seem to have so hard time with it either and sure you can set up sudo for other *nixes too if that matters.
Re:Resistant to change (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a second - why would OpenGL performance be crippled (this is a serious question, I didn't know MS was intending to cripple OpenGL at all)?
Vista runs all graphics via DirectX now. This means for a application to use OpenGL they hand the OpenGL calls to the OS, which hands them to DirectX, which hands them to the hardware. Basically add all the bottlenecks of both graphics methodologies together plus some additional overhead. This is their attempt to kill OpenGL entirely including OpenGL support in graphics cards.
How do we know that indexing will be worse than the other vendors pushing it, when we haven't seen and tested the final product(ok, rhetoric)?
So far the demoed feature (from what I've read) does not support plugging in new file formats for indexing. This means a search won't find files that contain the search term in an OpenOffice file, or any other filetype MS does not bother to add themselves.
Why isn't the Windows shell environment usable? The ability to shell script in Win2K3 surpasses any previous version of Windows to date.
According to MS, they planned to add the following features into the new shell environment:
Aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution, command discovery via reflection APIs, object-based properties/methods, many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete.
That has since been "delayed." Note, most of these are features *NIX users take for granted and lacking them makes us cry. Every Windows machine here in engineering has Cygwin installed to perform a few simple tasks that for some reason are impossible or very hard with the normal Windows (DOS) shell environment.
As for the security enhancements, well honestly I find it laughable. The reviewers probably never used Linux or OS X, so they probably aren't used to the limitations of not running as Admin/Root/whatever.
The reviewer compares some of it to OS X, mentioning that OS X does not seem to make you click through seven dialogues to do a basic task. Some of the screenshots show also show some truly wretched UI built around it.
The other big complain from Mr Thurrott? It's taking too long, it's not delivering on promises, blah.
If you haven't noticed, Apple tends to under-promise and over-deliver. Linux is an open process and everyone can actually look and see what state of development features are in. MS on the other hand, tends to intentionally over-promise extravagant features to be released "real soon" in the hopes that people will delay buying from competitors and just use MS offerings. It works too. Obviously all software will have some level of bugs, especially if they announce a deadline and meet it. That does not excuse delivering buggy versions of features years late or not at all.