Vista One Year Later

Is XP looking better? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

When Windows Vista came out in February of 2007, I wrote a fairly softball review, “A Vista That’ll Mystify”. It’s now about 14 months since Windows Vista made its debut. It sold well at first – 20 million copies in the first month. But then as word of its problems got out, the market penetration slowed considerably. As of now, only 14% of XP users have gone over to the “dark side” and an incredibly small 1% of business users have done so.

Briefly, here are Vista’s most talked about problems… The hardware requirements are stringent and were initially misleading. One company in Britain filed a lawsuit, because even after expensive memory upgrades the company’s computers lacked the correct graphics chips. Vista was cited for slow file access, (reportedly now fixed with SP1). It ran into controversies with OEM licensing and draconian Digital Rights Management. Last but not least is the “User Account” security feature that plagued users with “permission to continue” prompts. I call this the “Mother May I” feature. This was lampooned mercilessly on the Apple commercials with Justin Long and the PC Guy.

My own Vista experience has been rather dismal -- let me preface this by saying I’m not a Bill Gates basher and have enjoyed many Windows products. My Vista boot-up and shutdown times have drawn out to 10 minutes. Program invocation (by double-click) can have me drumming my fingers for a minute or two. The performance-tuning tool itself locked up and slowed my computer terribly. On another recent occasion, Vista kept reinstalling my HP printer driver and doing multiple copies of the driver (until I deleted everything and reinstalled the driver). I wanted to cry, or maybe toss it all in the trash and buy something not-Vista.

According to the MS sales group, Vista has huge advancements in security infrastructure. A security administrator could be infinitely pleased by these changes. However, these changes are lost on the end users. All we notice is that we have a snail-slow computer that keeps asking irrelevant questions. Customer experience is a popular buzzword expression now. It should be prominently on Microsoft's mind for the next OS go-round.

PC World labeled Vista as 2007’s “biggest tech disappointment”. InfoWorld ranked it #2 of IT’s all-time 25 flops. Microsoft has given clues that it may feel the same; they’re supporting XP though 2011 and coming out with a completely reworked Windows 7 in 2010. Let’s hope that the sailing is smoother in 2011. I’m typing this on my new MacBook that has Boot Camp dual boot to OS X 5.2 and what else – Windows XP Home Edition. I guess neither I nor the rest of America is sophisticated enough to appreciate Vista.

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