The Trouble With Vista
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Microsoft’s announcement of the release of Vista in 2007 was, even by the Redmond Giant’s own ground-breaking standards, a hubristic affair. Promises were made of killer features, powerful security and ground-breaking visuals. The hype hit new heights. The operating system has, to put it mildly, not lived up to it. This article is the first part of a two-part series on Microsoft’s widely-publicized problems with Vista.
By the time Vista finally arrived it was, perhaps inevitably, something of a let down. Not because it was especially terrible - it wasn't. There have, however, been a number of serious and predictable issues. These include the lack of hardware drivers, and the fact that running it at a reasonable speed required hardware capable of controlling a NASA mission to Jupiter.
The main problem with Vista was that, while the bad things were bad - DRM and overzealous security for example - the good things were, simply, a little nondescript. For example, 3D desktops might be good to look at, but not so good that you would fork out for a new PC or put up with working at a crawl just to have them.
Now the dust has had time to settle, the consensus among users is that Vista has not added a great deal of significance to their computing experience, and has come at a heavy price in terms of the restrictions it imposes. And as Dave Winer pointed out in a recent article at scripting.com, "the days of excitement happening in OSes is long past."
The thrust of Winer's article is that Vista seems to be set for dramatic failure, and this may not be as unlikely as it sounds, despite the vast resources Microsoft poured into releasing Vista and then into defending it. Publicity stunts such as the infamous 'Mojave' experiment may not cost the earth, but Jerry Seinfeld doesn't come cheap, and the decision to bring him in to prop up the ailing operating system smacked of a certain degree of desperation: a view supported by the affair ending almost as soon as it had begun.
On top of all this, the message emerging from Redmond seems to indicate the probability of an earlier than expected release date for Windows 7. So has Microsoft decided to throw in the Vista towel, ME style, cut its losses and advance swiftly on to the next version? In this two-part article I'll be taking a look at what is really wrong with Vista, discussing the best solutions to these problems, and wondering just what the future might hold for the beleaguered OS.
Next: Laying out the Problems >>
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