twitter's Journal: IT Week's Big Vista Dissapointment

IT Week's Daniel Robinson is the latest Vista victim as he tries to make his S.O. happy. He got what every one else has, unforgivable technical problems, UI issues and software compatibility problems all for the sake of DRM and other useless features. His voice joins the Vista Sucks Chorus with all the main points but user freedom.

it became my job to help pick out a model that would meet both her needs and her budget. As always seems to be the case, this advice could be parodied as "buy the most powerful processor and the largest memory capacity you feel you can afford". Job done, I thought. Oh, but all the models she was interested in run something called Windows Vista is that a problem? Not at all, I said. How wrong can you get?

The laptop takes an eternity to boot up, and seems to spend an inordinate amount of its time chugging away at the hard disk.

[the UI] is actually a retrograde step from earlier versions ... thrown together in a hurry by someone desperate to differentiate it from other operating systems and earlier versions of Windows. The Boss expressed her frustration at the disappearance of familiar landmarks as 'My Computer' and also her utter contempt for Vista's much-vaunted search facilities ...

Then there are the compatibility issues. ... it's not as simple as Microsoft saying that a program will not work; instead, one particular application installs and runs fine, then in the middle of being used, throws up an odd bizarre error message that gives little clue about what might be causing the problem. ... You might argue that all new versions of Windows have thrown up compatibility issues, but these were minor compared to the troubles Vista seems to have.

Vista is possibly the biggest ever change in the Windows platform, full stop.

People who understand software freedom realize that non free software will never really do what they want. Daniel thinks that employee training and compatibility with all the "needed" applications make Vista something that can be considered, and we can see how he's already compromised his expectations. Vista only has to do most of what he wants and become familiar enough to his employees and he's sold. It does not have to be efficient, cheap or do everything. Hopefully, he will realize that there's software that's mostly free that will do everything he wants right now for less and that the Boss will like it better.