Are you ready to downgrade . . . um, I meant upgrade?
We all know (and have heard) Vista seems to be a big flop. Lots of articles by many capable industry experts have expressed the many reasons. I have a much simpler and less-technical approach.
For the general public, three areas mark the main thrust and justification for upgrading to Vista: security, productivity, and graphics.
Security - Think back 5 – 7 years. Remember how the world came to a grinding halt every few month by a new virus or worm affecting Windows machines? Remember how much we hated Windows and deplored Microsoft? Well, Microsoft decided to act. XP has been spectacularly stable and secure. As a result, we have replaced our painful and hateful memories of Windows security issues with encyclopedic recollection of best performers on ‘Dancing with the Stars‘ and worst performers on ‘American Idol‘. And the new Vista-only features such as Bitlocker aren’t sufficient incentives for many individuals or businesses to upgrade.
Productivity - Yes, there are loads and loads of great features in Vista to improve your daily experience: more powerful searching, personalized view of files, tagging files, improved Start menu, live icons, file synchronization, and much more. But all the fancy and so-called productivity features in the world are completely worthless if your most basic, day-to-day needs are not met. Try deleting a file in your profile that you created in Vista. Why does it ask you for the admin password? Does it not know it’s your file? And why is it that you cannot find a global setting, within 30 seconds, that removes this requirement? Further, the new features either don’t work intuitively or are easily breakable. The new Windows search feature, intended to compete with Google’s search, can’t find files that you are able to spot with your own eyes. Productivity features and efficiency requirements always revert back to the most basic operational needs. Fancy toys are merely a bonus.
Graphics - There’s very little debate over the aesthetically pleasing 3D graphics in Vista. Windows Aero has propelled Windows out of its old, archaic-looking interface. But the consensus seems to be that without a very powerful machine and graphics card, this fancy new feature chews up your hard drive and reduces performance. In comparison, Linux Ubuntu Beryl is much nicer and more advanced than Aeros.
Vista’s other problems:
Release Schedule – This product was delayed many times, and some of the features Microsoft had promised did not make it in its first release. In general, the act of delivering a product (any product) late and with fewer features than promised stamps a lasting impression in customers’ minds.
Editions & more editions – Ultimate, Home Premium, Home Basic, Business, Enterprise. Seriously?! Why? You must be a rocket scientist to understand what feature-sets belong to which edition. At first blush, it seems as though Microsoft is doing its customers a favor by offering lower-cost options for Windows. But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Microsoft’s concept is otherwise. Offering multiple flavors is their way of extracting more money from people who cannot select the right edition for themselves, and are dazzled by names such as premium and ultimate. It’s the same concept as super-sizing. Who wants to have a smaller burger, fries, and drink? Who want a smaller house or car than their neighbor? As Americans, we are conditioned to go with the biggest and best – whether we need it (or can afford it) or not.
Drivers support – The awesome thing about Windows XP is its vast support for peripherals. Vista doesn’t have the broad legacy support. The legacy drivers that do exist for Vista seem to either not work well or break with SP1. Read this excellent article in Computer World by Eric Lai. It says it all.
In the end, most of us want to be on Windows. Over the past few years, XP has spoiled us. It just works! Sure, you must do 
the occasional reboot and, of course, it gets junked-up with programs and slows down over time. But XP has been a stable platform with pretty good security and great drivers support. 99.9% of the time, you can plug something in your machine and XP will recognize it.
Compare that with Linux and Mac. Most people lack required expertise and extra time to run Linux. We want to buy a printer or a camera, hook it up to our PC and just have it work. We don’t want to have 
to tweak anything. And as for Mac, Apple doesn’t have a driver nightmare because it supports only a limited array of peripherals. We Americans despise the idea of being limited. We want it all. But we don’t want to shell out too much money.
I’ll wait for Windows 7 (yes, there is such a thing, and it’s supposedly the successor of Windows Vista) unless I’m forced to upgrade before its release. Who knows, I may be able to afford a Mac by then.
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February 10, 2008 at 12:58 am |
sounds like you need to try os/2
February 11, 2008 at 2:58 pm |
Excellent thoughts, but you haven’t explored the likely motives behinds many of the decisions that have molded Vista into what was eventually delivered.
Remember the database file system? The idea was to use a SQL Server database as the file system for Vista. Nobody in their right mind thought that something so silly could work – and they were right. This would provide greater security and search capabilities.
But since security was not designed into the OS at its inception, the security model for Vista has merely become a series of dialog boxes that users quickly learn to ignore. Since the file system and its indexing scheme was not designed with robust search capabilities in mind, some bolt-on utilities have been added to compete with Google Desktop. Since DRM’d video will eventually require Vista’s hardware decryption requirements, the powerful graphics cards, gobs of memory, and gigs of disk space are now being used to inefficiently process an unnecessary and sure-to-fail copyright protection scheme instead of delivering blistering graphics.
Those defenders of MS frequently claim that Microsoft is constrained with being backward compatible for the benefit of their users who migrate, but with Vista even backward compatibility is thrown away (say, office file formats?) when it is convenient. So the result is a hodge-podge of a new interface on old utilities with new dialog boxes to allow the same old actions using new names for old technologies.
I think I’ll go plug my camera or my iPod or my flash drive into my Ubuntu system (it just works) and quit worrying about such silliness.