Windows Vista - Hate It Or Hate It

Like many of you out there I use Microsoft Windows, in this case XP. Sometimes my use of Windows has been dictated by my employer, other times by the need to be compatible with others also using Windows.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with Windows. There are many things that Windows does very well. There are also many things that Windows does poorly. Up until Windows Vista, the good outweighed the bad. But with Vista, that balance has shifted to favor the bad.

Despite what some pundits are saying, corporate America has been shying away from upgrading to Vista because too many computers the corporations already have are not capable of running the new OS or their existing software won't run under Vista. That's a big expense for corporations to undertake just to upgrade to a supposedly improved OS.

My own employer's IT department has already declared that Vista will not be deployed, mainly because it would also require new versions of much of the software we use. While we do have a couple of Vista machines in our engineering department, they are used exclusively to test software we've written for our customers.

The pushback Microsoft has received from corporate customers has caused them to extend the length of time they would continue to support Windows XP as well as extend the deadline when XP could no longer be sold. That does not bode well for Vista.

Some, like John Dvorak, are waiting for Vista to die, believing it is an inferior product with too many flaws, too many versions, and requiring far too many resources from the computer in order to run properly.

So what went wrong with Vista in the first place? Let’s start off with the elephant in the room. The product was overpriced from the outset. Why was it so expensive? What was special about it? All the cool and promised features of the original vision of Longhorn were gutted simply because it was beyond Microsoft’s capability to implement those features.

This failure to deliver what was promised—even after several delays in the product’s release, by the way—did nothing to excite anyone. It made the company look bad. It directly resulted in a no-confidence vote that was manifested in a lackluster reception and low sales. Microsoft should have scrapped the project two years ago and instead patched XP until it could deliver something hot.

Microsoft’s initial approach to marketing this turkey was obviously going to be to put it on just new machines, which would eventually saturate the market, but the PC manufacturers squawked and demanded the continuation of XP sales.

In the past the manufacturers were on board for new releases of Windows. But this time around they didn't like it one bit and that should have told Microsoft that something was seriously wrong.

For the time being I'll stay with XP and expand my use of Linux. At least I know they both work and on the present hardware we have here at The Manse.