Vista Worse For User Efficiency Than XP

erikvlie writes "Pfeiffer Consulting released a report on User Interface Friction, comparing Windows Vista/Aero with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The report concludes that Vista/Aero is worse in terms of desktop operations, menu latency, and mouse precision than XP — which was and still is said to be a lot worse on those measures than Mac OS X. The report was independently financed. The IT-Enquirer editor has read the report and summarized the most important findings."

Aero != productivity

[TinBromide]

Aero was an overhaul of the interface designed to sell copies due to the "wow" factor. I don't think that pretty widgets were meant to be a productivity booster, and any article that says that you can be productive on a mac for more than the generic things and like 2-3 specialized apps has a built in bias.

I'm still of the opinion that vista is a productivity booster only for the RIAA/MPAA and microsoft's stock.

I keep my XP UI looking like Win2K

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because it's faster and familiarity reduces costs.

Re:Aero != productivity

[neuro.slug]

The best part is that it appears that the study didn't even factor in the UAC popups.

You are pointing out Vista's flaws. (C)ancel or (A)llow?

Original report unavailable

[eviloverlordx]

At least at the time I visited the Pfeiffer site. While I'm not inclined to deny their results, it would be nice to have a little more in-depth knowledge of their methods.

Huh?

[garcia]

Guess what? Despite Microsoft's efforts to provide for a more fluid and agreeable interface with Vista's Aero, Pfeiffer Consulting found Vista to be even worse than Windows XP (SP2) --and of course Mac OS X. Their conclusion is backed with cold, hard research.

Where? I don't see the in the article. All I see is that Windows Vista (which I won't ever be using unless they make me at work) sucks compared to XP SP2 and OS X. I don't see why or how they came to those conclusions.

Re:I keep my XP UI looking like Win2K

[EnderGT]

Your post is a bit offtopic, but it leads to an interesting point. FYI, I also set my XP interface to Classic Windows.

I recently downloaded Media Player 11, which shows off a bit of the Vista/Aero interface. Specifically, the minimize/maximize/close buttons in the upper left corner are done Vista-style. What I've noticed through use is that even though these buttons are physically bigger, they very frequently don't recognize my clicks, requiring me to go back and click it again, sometimes 3 or more times. Also, when I hit Alt, F, X (the sequence to exit using the menus in Media Player 10) about 4 times out of 5 the menu refuses to respond to my keystrokes, requiring me to stop, find the mouse, and click the appropriate action.

Obviously, because this is running on XP, I can't make claims as to the overall usability of Vista. However, if my experience is any indication of the way Vista behaves, I'm not suprised that such an article has been written, and I'd expect many more complaints as time goes on.

Article sounds like FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Mouse Precision supposed to mean? Clicking the mouse in Vista works exactly the same as it has in every version of windows. Exactly where I move the mouse is exactly where gets clicked. Can someone else explain what this is supposed to mean?

They claim a 16% reduction of speed in opening folders. I open folders in under a second on Vista. Why do I care if it now takes 1/8 seconds to open a folder instead of 1/7 seconds. Does this have anything to do with Vista installed on low end hardware? Also why didn't they talk about the parts of Vista that are noticably faster than XP: e.g. opening applications.

"Slow menus" in Vista are actually a feature. Menu's fade in an out in Aero. You can turn this behavior off if it bothers you. Most people don't care! I like it!

Re:Aero != productivity

[jo42]

The problem with the Vista UI is that it is an inconsistent mish mash of ancient, old and new ways of doing things. Sometimes it's a dialog, sometimes it's a window, sometimes its web browser like and nary a single lick of consistency anywhere twixt anything. Drives me up the wall. Someone need bitch slap silly the idiot designers at Microsoft for this pile of poop.

Re:Vista-bashing is reaching ridiculous levels

[Afecks]

Also people should remember that when you compare OS X to Vista you are comparing a complete hardware and software platform to just a software platform running on commodity hardware. Of course OS X is going to run smooth on hardware it was specifically geared for. Expecting the same with some 3 year old PC that you upgraded to Vista probably won't cut it. Why would you want to anyways?

I built a PC from parts and I spent about the same price I would for a baseline Mac Pro. However, I have a QX6700 quad core with 4GB ram and 2 8800GTS in SLI. Let me tell you, nothing on this beast is sluggish.

Re:Vista-bashing is reaching ridiculous levels

[drinkypoo]

But if you really think it's a horrible OS for the reasons cited in this article, you're venturing into Ted Kaczynski-like levels of MS hatred.

No, it's a horrible OS for the reasons you state. It fails to provide any advancement in this particular area. It's a debunking of Microsoft's lie that Vista is more responsive. Why are you opposed to that?

Reminds me of a very "snarky" Mac Ad

[StressGuy]

It was a full page magazine add that simply read:

C:\ONGRATS.W95!

Poking fun at the fact the W95 can now support long file names.

Lost clicks and keypresses worst thing about MacOS

[Theovon]

I recently got a MacBook Pro, and while I really enjoy using it, and It's generally better than Windows, KDE, or GNOME, one thing I have noticed is that there is a tendency for it to lose keypresses and mouse clicks. This commonly occurs when switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard. For instance, if I use the mouse to click somewhere in this text I'm writing, there's a 50% chance that if I hit the Delete key, the keypress will be completely ignored. I have similar experiences with mouse clicks on window decorations or links in Safari being ignored. It's not a hardware problem, because use of the mouse alone is smooth, and continuous typing on the keyboard does not lose any keypresses. Moreover, people who have experienced this MacOS-knows-best loss of input events do not experience the same things when using the same hardware running Windows under bootcamp. There aren't very many frustrating things about MacOS (once you get used to it), but this problem is incredibly frustrating.

Re:On What Hardware?

[Stormwatch]

I'm using OSX 10.3 so it's not the most recent release, but I'm also running it on a Dual G5 2.0GHz with 2 GB RAM, which is a pretty fast machine by any standard. OSX is an absolute dog compared to XP on a Core Duo 2.16GHz with 2 GB RAM.

Isn't the Core Duo a whole generation ahead of the G5?

About the consistency issues, you're right; rumor is that Apple is trying new things to find what people like the best, and once they find, they will use that style consistently in the next OSX.

Re:Well, like the song goes....

[Fozzyuw]

This reminds me of the new Mac add [apple.com]. It's pretty funny (like most of them).

"Mac is talking to you, would you like to receive? Cancel or Allow?"

Re:On What Hardware?

[dal20402]

If you truly believe that OSX will make you more productive, then you are simply a fool

Fool here.

First of all, if Illustrator and InDesign are taking down your whole system, something is wrong with your configuration, your OS installation, or your hardware (RAM?). Illustrator is not the most stable app (although it's not that stable on Windows either) and I expect it to crash regularly, and once in a while InDesign freaks out, but I don't think either one has ever taken down my whole OS. One place to start: if you have the misfortune of having Adobe Version Cue installed, delete everything associated with it.

While PowerPC OS X is somewhat laggier than Intel OS X (which compares favorably to XP on similar hardware), I don't find the difference dramatic, and I don't see any usability problem on my PowerPC system. It's a 1.8GHz dual G5 (3GB RAM), so my experience should be nearly identical to yours, although Tiger is more responsive than Panther in most situations.

With that out of the way, I'll tell you exactly why OS X makes me more productive (and why this summer I'll pay through the nose for a Mac Pro, whose 4 cores and ECC RAM I really don't need, rather than buying a cheaper Conroe-based commodity tower). This is personal to me. YMMV. But judge for yourself whether I'm really a "fool."

1. Terminal. OS X is the only OS that can run Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and a full bash implementation natively and side-by-side. This is a godsend for those of us who really need to straddle both the business-computing and UNIX worlds.

2. Integrated color management. The OS's color management, while not perfect, is good enough to ensure relatively close color matching between different systems and between screen and print output, no matter what app I'm using. XP and all Linux distros I've used are a disaster in this regard. I don't know yet about WCM (the system in Vista).

3. Expose. I'm a very visual user and text-based taskbar buttons don't communicate the nature of open windows to me nearly as well as graphical previews.

4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)

5. Logic Pro. This won't apply to you if you're not a musician. But if you are, it's a fearsomely kick-ass mega-tool (sequencer + synthesizer + lots more) and only available for OS X.

6. OS X software development culture. OSS users are always amazed that they have to pay for so many Mac apps. But the shareware culture promotes developer accountability. Independent OS X software, by and large, is an order of magnitude more professional and useful than such software on either Windows or Linux. OS X's unique development frameworks also help with this by allowing developers to concentrate on usability and features rather than basic nuts and bolts.

7. Easily comprehensible directory structure. A non-n00b Windows or Linux user could start playing with the Finder and locate *anything* important to operation of the graphical side of an OS X system within a few minutes. This makes troubleshooting a simpler and faster process, especially when compared to Windows, where neither file nor folder names are remotely comprehensible.

8. Security (yes, this is a productivity booster). No UAC; the machine rarely asks for admin rights, and when it does, you need to give a password. No time fighting malware of any sort. No instability or slowdowns from malware.

9. OS X text rendering. Compared with other OS's, it's magic. Preserves both character shapes and legibility without any visible compromise. Not only does the increased legibility improve productivity, but it also is a big part of the reason people find OS X systems so visually striking.

If I thought about it longer I could probably figure out a few more -- but I've got work to do... productively.

Re:Aero != productivity

[dberstein]

I'm a developer, a web developer. Within my daily tasks besides coding is ssh'ing to several machines, do some cvs|svn dancing, etc.

I've switched to Mac almost a month ago. I would never, ever, return to Windows. I don't care about the UI (though it's elegant and efficient). The selling point to me is having a nice bash prompt right in front of me, and having good hardware support (I don't care it's "closed" hardware).

I turn on my Macbook and voila! Skype is ready for me. I can video chat with my collegues while at the same enjoying the bsd heritage.

To me Mac OS X is like Windows XP with cygwin tighly integrated minus DLL hell, registry hell and all that crap.

Intel Macs are the best thing ever invented!

Re:Just in from bash.org

[newt0311]

now if only CMD was as good as bash and you could use it exclusively (like me). Somebody needs to do a comparison of efficiency when using a GUI (any GUI) and the terminal and see how that pans out.

Mouse precision? Seriously? LOL

[Assmasher]

They are measure hardware accuracy and blaming the OS? Why?

If I use my precision gaming mouse I get much higher precision than with a standard old ball mouse, so how can I blame the OS?

The fundamental reasoning behind such a test suggests a desire to paint Windows in a bad light (like you need to go to such lenghts to begin with, lol), I mean, what kind of crap passes as a study today?

If I write a driver that interacts with my hardware and I get quality input from the hardware, I'll get quality results mapped to the screen. It's that simple.

Re:Just in from bash.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometime in 2004 as part of my job as the Database Kernel guy, I had to figure out why exporting 60,000+ tables from the Database into CSV files was taking unbearably long on Windows 2000. It lead me to CreateFile() Win32 call.

Then I did a benchmark of simply creating files and deleting them. For 60,000 files it took about ten hours to create, and delete did not finish after a whole day or so. The same thing on Linux (more or less similarly configured H/W) it was much faster, about a few hours.

Unless this shiny new thing has a completely redesigned file system, I would be surprised if your delete 36,000 files finishes in half day. And my benchmark was a simple C program.

Re:I'll tell you one way its worse

[vtcodger]

*** I really don't know how else to explain some of the boneheaded changes they have made. And they wonder why sales are off.***

Well don't blame me. I went right out last week and bought a brand new AcerPower 1000 -- with XP. Figured it might be my last chance to avoid Vista. So there you have it. Solid evidence that Vista is GOOD for hardware and software sales.

Re:Just in from bash.org

[Spikeles]

Ok, here's something. I have a music directory. Filled with.. well.. Music!.. I wanted to search for a file i KNEW was in there. So i typed it in the Vista search ( with indexing ) and it gave me a bunch of files.. None of which i was looking for. So i turned off indexing and tried again. Better results but still not what i was looking for. Started up cmd.exe, chdir to the music directory, and used "dir /s/a *mymfile*". It found exactly what i was looking for. It's stuff like that which put me off the search function in Vista.

Re:Just in from bash.org

[Vancorps]

How the hell did that get mod'ed interesting in a day and age when you have powershell on both XP and Vista available for use which is just as robust as bash. Furthermore, there is nothing in Vista you can't script with hooks provided. The only tool you need is powershell. The comment makes no sense whatsoever.

I use powershell to script changes to my Exchange server and I could use it exclusively if I were so inclined but I don't need to do anything to my servers often enough where it would matter.

You're right about one thing though, someone should do a comparison of efficiency in administration using a GUI vs a CLI and compare it across platforms. This is the single biggest leap in Vista that would make it attractive to corporate America. Now everything can be scripted and a group policy can govern anything the machine does. That level of control in quite difficult to attain with OS X as I don't see too many management tools for Apple products. Unix, Linux, and Windows all have very powerful native management tools, hell, the BSDs do too, I can't imagine it would be too difficult to extend them to control the GUI interface on OS X.