Microsoft Vista is a polarizing operating system: folks either love it or hate it. I have yet to meet someone that said “Meh. I can take it or leave it.” I’m not a Microsoft apologist, so it’s easy for me to focus on all of Vista’s many shortcomings; but the reality is that Microsoft did get some stuff right. And like any successful company, they’re learning from their mistakes in order to avoid making them again.
One of the biggest mistakes, according to Microsoft itself, was a disastrous stop-and-start approach to Vista development. The Windows 7 development team learned from this, and made a concerted effort to define features and objectives first, in order to avoid a similar staccato development cycle.
Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, said “our goal is to make sure customers can treat the beta of one of our products like a release candidate and treat the release candidate as a final version.” Huh? I sure hope that quote is taken out of context, because that strikes me as a grave misunderstanding of the release policies a corporate software vendor should be pursuing. If you encourage customers to treat a release candidate as a final version, you can bet someone somewhere will! And then, when said moronuser looks to get support, they’ll be out of luck.
Via Infoworld.
I don’t care for it one way or the other. Meh to Vista.
Is it just me or did this article starting going one direction and then immediately switch gears and go in a completely different direction. I’m not quite sure what the third paragraph has to do with the first two and I’m not sure why this article is called, “How Vista Changed Everything” when there is little to be said in the article about that.
Either way. I love Vista. It had a rocky start but they have worked out the majority of the kinks and it runs extremely well and I haven’t been let down at all. To this day, I have been running it on my lappy for almost 6 months now without one BSOD. Sure, applications crash from time to time but it’s rarely anything Vista related.
I’ve been using vista for a couple years now or so it seems and once I got 8G and the 64bit dfrivers and software for everything it’s been ok, but not completely ok…. there’s about 5-10 little things that I used to be able to do that I haven’t done for so long I’ve almost forgotten. Forsced me to update vistuallly everything and suprisingly I didn’t lose any hardware, everything eventually had drivers but becuase of the high overhead it made those cards next to useless.
I have been running Vista 32bit Ultimate for about 8 months and haven’t had any problems since Service Pack 1. However, I have disabled the UAC and security center alerts. The constant “Are you sure ?” warnings were getting unnerving. Windows Defender alerts and my Anti-virus alerts are still enabled so I should be covered for any outside threats.
It doesn’t seem they learned enough from the Vista debacle. They still put DRM in Windows 7. Sigh….
I think you spend too much time talking to other incendiary bloggers looking for a reaction. Just about everyone I know, thinks that Vista is a perfectly acceptable upgrade to XP, but nothing to get worked up about one way or the other. Just XP 2.0.
If it helps you, Meh. I can take it or leave it. There, now you can’t say you have never met anyone who said that. In fact my PC still has both Vista and XP installed on it, because a couple of my apps run better in XP, while most of them run better in Vista, and I could really care less which OS I happen to be using at the moment.
What I am far more worked up about is all the hardware vendors who refuse to make drivers for 64-bit, whether XP or Vista.
I’m another meh. I use Vista and XP and both are fine.
I think the biggest mistake Microsoft made with Vista is thinking that people would go out and buy powerful machines just to run the OS. The requirements of Vista are too high but if you have at least 2GB of RAM Vista is nice.
The biggest mistake they made during development was saying that Vista was going to boot up faster and run better than XP. Then during beta and toward release those two ”features’ disappeared.
Microsoft failed Vista & us.
first off you have to have a Brand new system to run Vista the way it’s supposed to be ran. In other words you need a powerhouse system.
my system specs,
Vista Ultimate 64bit
Phenom Quad core 9950
8 gigs of 1066 memory
dual HD 250 gigs 32 megs cache sata 3.0 drives in raid 0
Dual Geforce 8800’s 256mb in SLI
This setup gives me a 5.9 across the board in
Windows Experience Index
You can’t run vista on an 5 year old emachine.
I had it on my AXP 2400+ with 1 GB of ram computer for awhile. It ran fine for general usage.
I’ve stated over and over my opinion of vista (a positive one from launch)
One comment mentions that UAC is still in win 7 I actually look forward to that version of UAC because it has levels of protection that you can choose from which should be far less annoying than the current version that I don’t use. Also you can turn off the security alert notices if you wish and just keep an eye on your spyware antivirus software.
For once I am reading comments that are positive on Vista. I have liked it from the start and it has made my everyday usage of the PC much less problematic. I could only shake my head at the negative comments.
Personally I like Vista just fine (though I’m a bit partial to MS as a .NET Developer). I think the problem is that OSX was such a HUGE upgrade from OS9 and a lot of people were expecting Vista to be the equivalent of that upgrade (XP to Vista) and it clearly is not that.
Microsoft’s biggest mistake was not shooting whoever is in charge of Apple’s marketing department. Vista was a huge victim of hearsay and rampant Apple fanboyism. It’s been digging itself out of a hole for a long time for no reason.
I agree with this. I was trying very hard to convince my mother to get a pc with XP on it rather than Vista. But after I lost that battle (since XP cost an extra $150) and began using Vista, it was obvious that Vista was a good successor to XP. I would not upgrade to Vista on an existing XP machine, but I would want Vista if I were getting a new pc.
Vista made me change Vista out of my Laptop and get Ubuntu installed instead of it.
Thanks Vista for giving me the guts to say “Adios, Microsoft” once and for all.