After SP1: Windows Vista still SUCKS
Even after the release of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Vista, the operating system has still not improved much. It is practically as slow and resource hungry as it was without SP1. So it’s no surprise that business still aren’t upgrading to Vista. The only reason why Microsoft has managed to sell as much Vista licenses as they have up till now, is because new computers come with it preinstalled. If it weren’t for that, sales of Vista would have been a lot more tragic than they are right now.
From the beginning I and many others have said that the prices were also extremely high for all versions of Windows Vista, with the Ultimate edition being the worst. I wonder what those who bought the ultimate edition got for the extra money they spent, because up till now, Microsoft has failed to deliver anything of extra value to those users. Recently they’ve been trying to cut prices as well, and you have to really appreciate the PR speak here:
Microsoft made the announcement on its website, in the form of a Q &A with Brad Brooks, corporate vice president for Windows consumer product marketing (must have a big business card).
Says Brooks:
“Windows Vista has been on the market for more than a year now, with more than 100 million licences sold in its first year. While this is great progress … we’ve observed market behaviour that suggests an opportunity to expand Windows stand-alone sales to other segments of the consumer market. Over the past year, we conducted promotions in several different markets combining various marketing tactics with lower price points on different stand-alone versions of Windows Vista. While the promotions varied region to region, one constant emerged – an increase in demand among consumers that went beyond tech enthusiasts and build-it-yourself types.”
So as you can see, Microsoft has “observed market behaviour that suggests an opportunity to expand Windows stand-alone sales to other segments of the consumer market.” Do you know what that means? I think the “observed market behaviour” was the behaviour of people not wanting to buy Vista. I think what he was trying to say was: “We noticed Vista isn’t selling well and are now forced to lower prices of stand-alone licenses so we can hope to sell some more of it since people don’t seem to want it, unless they have no choice but to accept it with a new PC.” It’s not selling, and they have no choice but to lower the exorbitant prices they were selling Vista at.
Recently Gartner explained why Vista is broken:
Microsoft’s operating system (OS) development times are too long and they deliver limited innovation; their OSs provide an inconsistent experience between platforms, with significant compatibility issues; and other vendors are out-innovating Microsoft. That gives enterprises unpredictable releases with limited value, management costs that are too high, and new releases that break too many apps and take too long to test and adopt. With end users bringing their own software solutions into the office… well, it’s just a heck of a sad story for Microsoft.
Those arguments probably don’t surprise you. (See Should Microsoft Throw Away Vista? and Vista Never Had Its Moment in 2007.) But the Gartner analysts offered several more points to show how Windows is in a whole new world of hurt. High on the list is Windows’ complexity, its lack of modularity, its hardware footprint (particularly on low-end PCs), and the increasing movement to Web-based and other OS-agnostic applications.
When I tried installing a fresh Windows Vista SP1 copy, I was surprised to find out that a problem I mentioned a year ago during installation still existed. This is what I wrote back then:
One area where it’s clearly visible how they rushed to get Vista finished by cutting out as much functionality is the Setup routine. If you’re not lucky, you might be presented with a message during Setup that it could find no supported hard drives to install Windows Vista on. It turns out that this happens when no partition on your hard disks is set as active. But here’s the thing: You can actually partition your hard disks during the setup procedure and format them, but somehow, Microsoft forgot to provide a small button somewhere where users can actually set an active partition after they have partitioned their hard disks during setup! How stupid can you get? So you provide the functionality to partition and format disks, but not to activate a partition, even though this same setup routine requires it to continue! Simply fucking amazing. I can’t tell you how much this frustrated me. I had to quit setup, then find out why I was getting this “no drives supported to install” message (THEY COULDN’T EVEN JUST PROVIDE A CLEAR MESSAGE SAYING THERE ARE NO ACTIVE PARTITIONS!!!), download a bootdisk CD to load another partition utility to activate a partition, then load setup again and continue installing. Needless to say, it took quite some time to figure it out.
Imagine how I felt when I was presented with that same message that Vista could not find any supported drives to install itself. And this, while right before that message, it presented me with a list of hard drives and partitions, and allowed me to actually select a partition to install to!! I lost more than an hour troubleshooting and trying to find out why it was doing this. And this time, it appeared that the problem was a USB memory stick that was attached to the PC. Only after I had removed it did the install continue. This is just an incredible example of the bad quality of the product.
I think Gartner is right about everything they said of Windows Vista. It has become slow and bloated. Everyday I hear about more people around me who switch to Mac OS X, because it is so fast and requires a lot less resources. Others are sticking with Windows XP for now. Microsoft has to do something totally radical if it wants to stay in the OS business. I think that the only good option they have is to start from scratch and build a new operating system from the ground up, without any backwards compatibility for current software and older hardware. That new operating system could then be released with a virtual machine containing an image of a licensed copy of Windows XP or Windows Vista so that users will still be able to use their older software inside that virtual machine. But for the new OS, everyone will have to at the very least recompile their applications, or significantly rewrite them to be able to run natively. With this approach, the new OS will be free of bloat, and as a result use a lot less resources and be a lot less complex, while at the same time it can be built according to today’s standards. It will also enable Microsoft to be free to innovate instead of being limited by the existing infrastructure and compatibility issues.
And if there are still smart people working at Microsoft, they are already looking into this.
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