

They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know - prakash
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html?ex=1362718800&en=2204425bed58d728&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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TheTarquin
It's sad that Microsoft felt the need to sell another OS. They CAN put out
decent software, when they put in the requisite development time and energy.
The windows machines I work on are Windows XP SP 1, which I think was kind of
the last decent MS OS. And you know what? At the risk of drawing some ire,
it's pretty good. For 99% of what I need to do, it Just Works. And with good
anti-spyware, anti-virus tools, I don't have any problems with malware.

Really, I think that most of the problems with Vista can be traced to
Microsoft thinking that they needed to make grand, sweeping changes, when they
had a perfectly serviceable operating system already. It's like reinventing
the wheel and starting by saying "okay, we've done the 'circular' thing, what
other shapes could we use?"

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pmjordan
I don't know the nitty-gritty details of what went wrong in the development of
Vista, but I can't shake the feeling that they simply waited too long between
OS version releases. I think they could have avoided a lot of trouble had they
realised, say, 2-3 years after XP that Vista was in trouble and ported some of
the new stuff over to a less ambitious upgrade to XP/2003. The remaining
planned changes could then have been done in the following version.

Previously, their product cycle was around 2-3 years, except for 2000->XP (1
year), and NT 4.0->2000 (4 years). They took almost 6 years to upgrade their
desktop OS with Vista, and made changes almost at every level. People hate
change. That includes both end-users and developers of end-user software and
hardware drivers.

I don't think you can just force large-scale changes to something as
fundamental as an OS, you have to spoon-feed it to the users. Breakages in the
layers on top of it won't be too catastrophic, are fixed more quickly and thus
pissing users off. (I didn't really follow anything Mac-related during the
time of the MacOS 9->10 switchover, so I don't know how they got away with
that)

Note: I primarily use Linux; I only have Windows (XP) installed for playing
games and testing, and I'm putting off the Vista upgrade for later. In
contrast, I usually upgrade my Linux system shortly after a new version of my
distro (OpenSUSE) is out, which is typically every 6-8 months: the changes
between versions aren't massive and the inconvenience caused tends to be
minor.

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easyfrag
This is really bad for Microsoft, not the content of the story which was known
weeks ago, but the fact that this is now the most emailed story on the New
York Times site. What was common knowledge in the IT community is now
spreading in the "real" world where the consumers live. Not good for the
brand.

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chaostheory
this reminds me of what happened with the Xbox 360... if they only spent a
little more time and money with quality upfront, then MS wouldn't have had to
spend an estimated 1 billion dollars fixing it...

a 33% failure rate in an industry where 3% is the norm is just ridiculous -
especially for something that costs people 350 - 450. (quality has recently
been improved so that 360s only have a 10% failure rate; it's still over 3x
the norm)

Sadly, I'm one of the morons that bought one, with wishful thinking that if MS
controled both the software and hardware like Apple things would be better...

~~~
aston
I don't really understand why you, as a consumer, would care about a company's
hardware failure rate. Sure, that hurts their bottom line, but as long as you
have a working Xbox 360, shouldn't you be happy? It's not really analogous at
all to Vista, since Vista isn't "failing" so much as it's something people
don't want.

~~~
chaostheory
When I mean fail, I mean not working at all until I send it to MS tech
support, they fix it, and sent it back. I have to wait 4-6 weeks every time my
xbox 360 breaks; that's why I care. it's happened once before... and given
what I read online it'll happen another 2-3 times

~~~
aston
For what it's worth, I've only seen it happen once, given the probably 10 Xbox
360's I've seen ranging from launch day to recent purchases. Clearly, your
mileage will vary.

Back to the real point: you want your Xbox 360, you don't want Vista.

~~~
chaostheory
good point, you're right... I guess what I meant to say was that the same
thing that plagues 360 that affects Vista's desirabilty, is quality. granted
it hasn't stopped me from wanting to play 360... but in the next war I think
Sony will learn from its mistake and I won't have to want MS's future crap...

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prakash
From the company that emphasized, "Eating your own dog food", they bring to
you, Microsoft Windows Vista (Super Duper it will order groceries for you
edition) ;-)

~~~
thorax
One danger about "eating your own dog food" is that your entire company can
get blind to the faults they forced themselves to overcome/stomach initially.

"Eating your own dog food" gets you to find major flaws that get it working
for yourself, but once it is "working for you" (even if that took a lot of
workarounds and sacrifices) you've become accustomed to it "not being as bad
as it was".

Working at a major MS partner and seeing Longhorn alphas/CTPs/betas/etc, I got
a sense that they got too much into "this is acceptable" mindset while others
were screaming "don't ship, don't go, ouch, danger".

This doesn't imply that eating your own dog food is bad. But perhaps you
should always be aware that you can fry your taste buds on bad dog food.

I think it might be better to swap eating your competitor's dogfood and your
own every other month or so to keep it fresh.

~~~
kalid
Yes, very much agree. I used to work at MS and one problem is that many
employees (even devs) have no experience with the other people's dogfood, ie.
Linux/UNIX.

Because of this, you'd have situations where people would want to write C to
make a quick string parsing tool, rather than perl or bash script.

If you're the CEO of Coke, you'd better know what Pepsi tastes like. "Company
Loyalty" can be a convenient excuse for ignorance of the competition.

------
Hexstream
Last resort strategy to make Vista better than XP:

"Mistakenly" push a Windows "Update" to XP that makes it excruciatingly buggy
and borderline useless.

~~~
prakash
you mean push out Vista as an upgrade, oh wait never mind :-)

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aneesh
A fair criticism. There are plenty of Microsoft employees that don't use
Microsoft products. I doubt the corresponding percentage is as high at Apple.

~~~
jmtulloss
Apple employees have to use different operating systems from time to time.
There's a lot of software, especially in hardware design, that only runs on
Windows or Linux.

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irrelative
Though this is quite interesting, I'm not sure why it's a sign that Vista is a
disaster. I would hope that a company's internal emails about a product are
extremely critical -- how else will you get the feedback needed to fix it?

Good software design (and most design) is extremely iterative. You stop when
the product is good enough for the market to support. It seems to me that
there weren't enough internal emails like this.

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mattmaroon
So the main problem Microsoft is having is poor third party support.
Peripheral makers not updating drivers, though they had an unusually long
period of time to do so. OEMs mislabeling laptops as Vista
ready/capable/whatever when they clearly aren't.

How could MS have handled this better? Make drivers for every known product
themselves? Micromanage Vista Ready certifications(that one seems plausible at
least)?

~~~
DougBTX
> Peripheral makers not updating drivers, though they had an unusually long
> period of time to do so.

Not so, according to Dell:

[http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18002573FE006B7...](http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18002573FE006B7266.html?ref=technology)

They might have had a lot of time, but looks like the goal posts moved very
late in the game.

> OEMs mislabeling laptops as Vista ready/capable/whatever when they clearly
> aren't.

OEMs don't set the standards, Microsoft lowered them.

See: [http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080305-the-vista-
capa...](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080305-the-vista-capable-
debacle-intel-pushes-microsoft-bends.html)

> Micromanage Vista Ready certifications

RTFA, Microsoft dumped "Vista Ready" and replaced it with "Vista Capable",
which will just "run these core experiences at a minimum."

See:
[http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyor...](http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/capable.mspx)

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boredguy8
I just wish Apple wasn't taking cues from Vista.
[http://www.tomsguide.com/us/leopard-osx-
problems,review-1028...](http://www.tomsguide.com/us/leopard-osx-
problems,review-1028.html) but one overview.

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eaken
the last great OS from MS was windows 2000 pro...

as for vista, its horrible. has anybody tried to run google desktop search on
it? Don't bother, just know it is so slow you wonder if it was by design.

XP Pro is a good alternative to Win2KPro so long as you strip all the extras.

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gibsonf1
Microsoft's Vista : Software = White Star Line's Titanic : Transportation

