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Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Sep 27, 2007 02:21 PM
from the seems-a-bit-harsh dept.
from the seems-a-bit-harsh dept.
mr_mischief writes "An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet's News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on. 'Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'"
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leave it alone!! (Score:5, Funny)
Its sales are flagging. Leopard made Steve Ballmer mad. He threw two fucking chairs.
Mr. Mischief turned out to be a blogger, and now he's posting stories to slashdot. All you people care about is quality and usability.
It's a version of Windows! What you don't realize is that Vista is just being Windows and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it.
Microsoft hasn't made a good OS in years. It prefixes everything with "Win" because all you people care about is WINNING! WINNING! WINNING!
LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even boots you bastards! LEAVE VISTA ALONE!
Please!
Don Reisinger talked about professionalism and said if Steve Ballmer was a professional he would've shouted "developers" a few more times.
Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash an operating system who is going through a hard time?
Leave Vista alone, please.
LEAVE VISTA ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.
Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now.
LEAVE IT ALONE!
Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Whatever (Score:5, Funny)
Thus far these are the only two reasons to buy vista, and even then, probably not for another year, and then as a secondary boot to linux...
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Re:Whatever (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Whatever (Score:5, Funny)
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Real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
The OS itself is becoming less and less relevant---to have a company spend billions on developing a NEW one is mind boggling. Look at how quickly Apple caught up in this business; without putting in nearly as much effort as MS!
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Re:Whatever (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:leave it alone!! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:leave it alone!! (Score:5, Funny)
That's easily the most fucked up thing I've seen in the entire month of September
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Re:leave it alone!! (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell did that get so many views?
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Re:MOD UP! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:leave it alone!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Huh? worst start? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Huh? worst start? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Huh? worst start? (Score:5, Funny)
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Second Edition (Score:5, Insightful)
Make it a logical step from XP so that companies needn't retrain their employees.
Mars rovers (Score:5, Funny)
And, for a fraction of the cost.
DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had to trouble shoot computers with it on there. I repeatedly found myself wondering why they had changed things that were so simply on XP to be so complicated on Vista.
Microsoft won't "drop" Vista, any more than they "dropped" their most horrible other operating system - Windows ME *cringe*. They'll just move on. They've already wrote the system. They'll keep updating it. The real question - the critical one - is how long they will support XP. They'll need to continue to support XP until they get a system out that is an actual improvement, and not just a corporate-ass kissing piece of crap.
It's not *that* bad (Score:5, Funny)
Feature bloat and reform. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure we're just heading into something of a reform in the world of operating systems. I think that Vista is going to be just one of many casualties of competition. In the end, I feel the users will win.
No! It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's being bundled with home computers, and your average Joe is NOT going to know about the problems. If he's lucky, he may have a friend who recommends staying with XP for now. But for many, many people, they'll just buy 'the whole thing' from PC World and be running Vista.
Like a lot of things Microsoftish, it may not be a running success out-the-door (Zune, Xbox), but it'll slowly get a foothold until more and more people start using it. Vista is here to stay folks, and in five-or-so years, it'll be the dominant OS. Microsoft won't support XP forever.
(Posted on a Mac mini!)
Doesn't make sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista. Those people are still paying for a Microsoft OS. Congratulations, you've decided to give Microsoft money instead of giving Microsoft money.
A lot of things could someday sink Microsoft. People choosing to buy one of their products won't be it.
(Unless one of those products somehow combusted and burned down a pack of orphanages, resulting in worse publicity and lawsuits.)
Nah, it will work out ok. (Score:5, Insightful)
Guy goes to an astrologer and he looks at the horoscope, does lots of calculations and says, "Jupiter is in the same House as Saturn. And Saturn will stay in that House for 7.5 years. All through that 7.5 years, you will have misery and misfortune. Your wife will leave you. Your son will usurp your house and throw you out. You will lose all your wealth and fall sick. You will be miserable for 7.5 years."
The guy, visibly disturbed asks, "What happens after 7.5 years when Saturn moves out of the House of Jupiter?"
The astrologer shrugged and said, "You will be used to the misery."
Same way, in three years the miserable performance of Vista will be defined to be industry standard fast tracked and approved by ISO and users will use 4GB of RAM to browse the internet.
How Software Companies Die (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista's Roots (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Vista's Roots (Score:5, Funny)
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The corporate lifecycle (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt Microsoft will take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion, if for no reason other than sheer arrogance.
Companies kill me, it's a corporate lifecycle that we see again and again, and very few seem to learn from it. Once a company gets so big, it gets it in its head that it's invulnerable. It thinks that it can do anything it wants, and people will flock to it because it's the latest and greatest offering from the King of the (Whatever).
We see it now with Microsoft and Vista. We're also seeing it from Sony on its Playstation 3. Sony thought, "Of course people will buy the Playstation 3. It's a Playstation, for crying out loud!" Anyone remember when Hayes thought that they had the modem market locked up tight? Or when IBM didn't treat clones as serious competitors?
Usually, companies like this end up either going out of business, or at least eventually become relegated back down into the fray because they stop asking themselves, "What do our customers want?" and become totally focused on "What do we want?
I see the same thing happening before too long with Apple and its iPods and even Google, which as recently announced that it's going to start running image and video ads and plastering ads on its YouTube videos. Once a company starts thinking about its own interests over that of its customers, it's the beginning of the end of that company's dominance.
Of course, who knows? They might eventually pull a Nintendo. Go into a slump for a few years, learn from their mistakes, and come back out swinging. Historically, though, that is rare, and we are talking about Microsoft here.
All businesses SEEK to become arrogant (Score:5, Insightful)
"The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality.... I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!"
The process has become somewhat moderated by antitrust laws, but the dynamic is still the same.
The phase in which a company produces good, useful stuff, and sells it to pleased customers, who are happy to pay money because of the value the product delivers... is just a temporary phase which all companies yearn to get past. It's just a ploy to expand market share in hopes of getting to the big payoff. The big payoff comes when the company is so dominant that it can stop pretending to be nice, and stick it to their competitors, their customers, and any meddling bureaucrats that have the nerve to try to regulate them.
Companies want to reach the stage where they can be arrogant, like Microsoft. It's not an aberration, it's what every good company is trying to achieve.
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Hyped too soon (Score:5, Insightful)
MS should've followed Apple's playbook. Release the OS according to it's already delayed schedule, let early adopter screw with it, but don't force the new OS on people who simply want new hardware.
Is Ballmer single? (Score:5, Funny)
There are worse fates for a failed project's lead, I guess.
So the question now is: is Steve Ballmer single, or will he just take on a mistress?
sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using this 'abysmal failure' as a primary OS for 8 months with nary a hitch. I really have. I spend every day developing various codes with various tools, for what turns out to be many different platforms. Among a few others I have a Debian box and OS X 10.4 within reach, on equally capable hardware and I don't even bother with them. To the point where I'll probably power them down to save money on the electric bill.
I suspect all the bad mouthing comes from people trying to shoehorn the thing into old hardware, or from people who fancy themselves capable with PC maintenance but can't handle simple configuration issues. Or most likely, by people who only ran a shoddy beta or have never run it at all. I'd really like someone to explain why the OS that I'm using right now without any problems doesn't work and should be abandoned.
oh, I know, not towing the party line here will get me modded down quick. but aside from the excited FOSS fanatics here and a few ad-hit grubbing bloggopundits and the like, millions of people are getting along just fine with vista. hopping up and down while shouting about what a failure it is doesn't actually make it a failure. sorry to break it to you all.
Just another "jump on the bandwagon" article. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a software developer myself I realize the fact that OS's are large and complicated and they all have some issues. I use Linux, I use OS X, and I use Vista. Each has their own merits and their own problems. The problem is that now, just like it was popular in the 80s and 90s to hate IBM, its popular to hate Microsoft. News writers see this as a bandwagon they can use to get articles read and website hits. The real fact is that Vista has no more problems than any other OS at this point in its life cycle.
I truly wish that for the good of all of the tech industry, people would see that every piece of software, and every OS has its place. Vista does a lot of things well... It just happens to have a few flaws and a few "features" that just seem to go against the grain of the most vocal people in the geek world (i.e. DRM) and thus we see articles like this that are ridiculous and inflammatory simple for being as such.
Oh Please. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Windows Vista is that the hardware has not yet completely caught up with the potential of the OS. Just wait till 2008, when machines with 4 GB or more of RAM become more commonly available and graphics cards that support DirectX 10 are more widely available.
Re:Oh Please. (Score:5, Insightful)
Win98 to Win2k was a great upgrade. Suddenly, I didn't need to reboot every few days. And it supported multiple processors once everybody got their act together on drivers. And stuff.
I just finally upgraded to WinXP at home, largely because WinXP handles hyperthreading properly and I have a hyperthreaded CPU and because I figure it'll last slightly longer in the market than 2k since I'm avoiding Vista.
But before that, I was running XP at work and 2k at home and noticed no real difference other than a few bits of eye candy.
Vista was doomed as soon as they realized that all of the really innovative features weren't going to work out and dropped them... so it ends up being a few fairly marginal improvements and a bunch of features that nobody wants.
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Tech-writers are like gold fish... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not to say that Microsoft couldn't suffer losses in this generation, but it would be more about the presence of strong alternatives than their failure to adopt a 'move on' strategy.
What's really interesting about this /particular/ FUDy article is how quibbly it is. He appears to have three major complaints: the pricing scheme, specifically of the Ultimate edition, the UAC(and specifically, that it doesn't like a specific unnamed third party app which we're assured is from a 'well-known software company'), and DRM. We're not talking about blue screens and security holes here.
There is no compelling reason to move to Vista, and it seems obvious that waiting for SP1 is probably the right move for anyone who wants to upgrade. That doesn't mean that this OS won't succeed, however, and it's shown marked improvement on many counts since launch. Can we just call this FUD and "move on"?
Is it 2001 again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a few choice quotes from a 2001 "Techspot" review of Windows XP. They may sound familiar...
On installation...
On native drivers...
On whether to upgrade from Windows 98SE...
And as plenty of recent Slashdot posts supporting XP have shown, we all know how short sighted the last quote was.
As I said, we've been here before in 1991 with Windows XP yet Windows XP is now touted as Microsofts greatest OS. I expect the same will happen with Vista and be said about Vista when Microsoft releases it's next OS in a few years time.
Vista is Microsoft's New Coke (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes the new product flops. New Coke and the Sony PS3 are well known examples. Automobile models from major manufacturers flop regularly.
The problem for Microsoft is that they now have only one main OS product line. When Windows ME flopped, they had the NT product line almost ready for consumer desktops, and could afford to kill off the DOS/Win3.1/Win95 product line. This time, they only have one offering in the desktop/laptop OS space.
This is certainly fixable from the Microsoft side, but they need to recognize that they have a serious problem and fix it.
Cluestick to Microsoft: Focus on Fundamentals... (Score:5, Insightful)
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
- Expose. Enough said.
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!)
- The ability to re-locate, (or hide) the dam 'close' button
- Title bars that stop sucking up valuable screen space, instead of being small movable tabs like in BeOS
- Virtual Desktops
- An OS that gets FASTER from version to version (again BeOS)
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process.
- Unified widgets/gadgets: NO, I don't want seperate run-times for Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, insert flavor of the month company because they decided to do their own implementation.
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
- A file system that doesn't suck. YES, I want to be able to start my filenames with spaces for sorting purposes (Thx Explorer. NOT.) have my filenames contain colons, end with a period or question mark. And treat the underscore as a virtual space, so we don't have to quote filenames in our command scripts. A way to "tag" files, so I can visually see BOTH a heirarchy, AND flat filesystem.
- Config files that can be moved from system to system instead of hiding everything in the bloated registry
- Free dev tools would be nice.
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing.
All I want is an OS that doesn't suck... is that _really_ too much for a programmer to ask?
What I really mean to say is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Vista is less important than Bill Gates... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is that and also the fact the guy in charge of development is throwing chairs. Not something to be done when your system is called Windows
Seriously, while some nay sayers might be right they are often proved wrong in the long term. I am not moving to Vista, because I have no need and I seriously have to ask myself what went so seriously wrong. I am suspecting a certain arogance and disconnect with the user base. History has shown us that Microsoft seems to get it wrong every other release and then sorts it out. The way I see it is that people who want to use Vista will and those don't won't. Sure its an obvious statement, but it is one that seems to need repeating so often.
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Re:Vista is less important than Bill Gates... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Vista is the end of the company. The problem is that the software engineers are the second-class citizens of Redmond, and it's the marketers and the strategists who rule the roost. The dev teams certainly knew Vista wasn't ready, and delayed it as long as possible, but because Microsoft's long-term strategy absolutely requires a major operating system and Office upgrade every five years, and the delays were already fouling up The Plan.
It does create the rather unique event that Microsoft has generated its own major competitor. By folding to the demands of major manufacturers like Dell on continuing to allow OEM licenses of XP to be sold with new machines, they essentially ave created a situation in which Windows XP and Windows Vista are actually in competition with each other. If XP was like, say, Windows 98/ME and Vista was Windows 2000/XP, then Microsoft wouldn't have this problem, because there would be clear technical and feature merits. But XP is sufficiently mature, sufficiently well-supported and sufficiently popular that it actually directly stands in the way of the Vista upgrade path.
I'm not sure this has ever happened to a major software vendor before. Most other operating system manufacturers are as much in the service industry as in the licensing and distribution industry, so if someone sits around still using a ten year old operating system, you make your money with via support and maintenance contracts. You really don't expect systems to have a lifetime of just four or five years, so you build a business model that permits you to make $$$, support your R&D and keep the shareholders and customers happy. Since Microsoft has never been a support-oriented company, but rather a shiny widget company, they don't have that sort of model, and I think, after twenty years, they may be reaching the economic limit of their business model.
They haven't made the case for upgrading. They clearly haven't convinced a lot of peripheral manufacturers to pull their driver teams off of other projects to make Vista high priority. Computer manufacturers, at least for the business consumer end of things, are the 800lb. gorilla.
In the long run (over the next two or three years), I'm sure Vista will pick up the slack, but what has got to be filling guys like Ballmer with fear (and ought to be concerning Wallstreet) is what happens in four or five years, when the next Windows comes out.
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Re:Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well the headline (and summary, and article? Didn't RTFA yet) doesn't suggest that Microsoft should abandon Windows totally, only Vista. They could realistically retreat back to XP, backport any Vista features/improvements that are actually good, and start from there.
Honestly, I don't think the failure of Vista will come anywhere close to breaking Vista, but hopefully it will make hardware and software vendors question their strategy of only supporting Windows. If the future dominance of Windows is called into question, the developers may look to support other platforms instead. Then, hopefully, theoretically, you could have all the software you need running on Linux. In that case, Microsoft can still compete in the OS market, but they just won't be able to use vendor lock-in as such a huge barrier to switching to another OS.
Personally, I'd love to see vendors generally developing cross-platform solutions. Ideally, people should be able to choose their operating system on the strengths or weaknesses of that operating system, and not on the basis of what software it can run.
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Re:Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if it's not any worse than other Windows releases, it does seem to have gotten a bigger backlash than previous releases.
I've been working in IT and support Windows machines since WFW 3.11. I've gone through pretty much every version of Windows between then and now, and I agree, each transition has caused problems (well... except for 2000->XP and 95->98, neither of which hurt too much). However, I've never seen so many IT people generally pissed off about a Windows release, and so few that are enthusiastic about it.
It's not necessarily because it's worse or more buggy than previous Windows releases, but I get the sense that people are fed up. It's like, "Oh no. Not this shit again." After so many years and so many upgrades, having the same problems with each upgrade, people would like to see Microsoft learning from its mistakes and doing a better job anticipating the problems they're going to cause with the updates. Also, it seems like a lot of people are genuinely having problems with Microsoft products, but they've been having the same problems for over 10 years and none of the upgrades actually solve the problems.
I think people are just getting tired of it all, thinking that there should be better solutions by now. It was excusable when desktop PC were still considered novel and new. Now people want to be able to take the technology for granted, and Microsoft isn't doing a good job of filling that desire.
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Re:Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is FREE, you don't have to shell out your life savings in order to get it and use it effectively.
This is a really tired and lame argument in favor of Linux (FREE as in BEER). Only a moron would choose an operating system because it's free (as in beer). If Linux cost as much as Vista did and Vista was free, I'd still use Linux. For a lot of reasons, but for one thing, it runs on EVERYTHING-- a 15 year old PC, Mac hardware, the Power PC chip in my networked drive (Kurobox). When I need to automate on one I can write a script that will run everywhere-- write once run everwhere works for me and I don't even need Java. Then again, I like the command line as it allows me to do a lot of stuff in parallel. And for another thing, it's pretty darn reliable and I can easily make it conform to my workflow rather than me having to work around bogus assumptions (as is often true on the Mac), or buggy & inconsistent design (as is often true on Windows).
Choose Linux when it's BETTER, not because it's FREE (as in beer)...
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Re:Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me upgrade now!
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Re:It's disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Drivers and kernel aside, Vista changed one huge thing: through UAC, people can no longer write files to Program Files.
It's shocking how many programs did this in the first place. Almost every game in existence writes saves to their folder in program files. For work, I'm forced to maintain 10-15 different programs which allow the users to view "documents" (that's an entirely different story) - and half of them copy the file from the temp folder, to another temp folder... in Program Files.
Vista is trying to be secure. And, if you run Vista and Vista only, it is secure. Other big Microsoft products (MSSQL, Office, Visual Studio) all run happily - as a guest user. Admin to install, guest to use.
Sound familiar? It should. This is slashdot. We all use Linux, right?
So Microsoft comes around and says, "you know, enough of this, we're going to make the OS stable by preventing unauthorized programs from writing files where it shouldn't" - and everything dies. Dies horribly.
Microsoft has many sins upon their heads, in the software realm. However, countless program incompatibilities because software designers have no clue what "multi user" really is - is not Microsoft's (direct) fault. Vista was in beta for an extended period of time. Then they pushed an open beta. It's not like they made these changes behind closed doors and shipped it.
The day that the complaints will stop is the same day that the third party developers get a clue how to design a program around the fact that they can't always write files everywhere they please.
It could be a while.
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err...how is that MS's fault? (Score:5, Insightful)
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