Vista Is Good
As Apple fanboyism has spread throughout the tech publications, so too has Vista-bashing. In short order it went from being the Windows operating system that even Mac users were digging to the biggest mistake Microsoft ever made. The major media outlets who in tech, as with a lot of niches, take their cues from the blogs these days, have slowly followed suit, though they’ve been much more guarded about calling it a disaster.
I think it’s a bunch of bullshit. Vista is faring almost exactly how you’d expect it to, and most of the common complaints are the same ones that crop up with any major overhaul of the OS.
First people complain that old programs and hardware don’t work. I installed both Vista and XP the day they came out, and let me tell you, they did a far better job this time. I haven’t found any software that failed to run yet, and the vast majority of my hardware worked perfectly. In fact my TV tuner (purchased in 2004) was a bitch to get working on a new XP install, and worked immediately with Vista. From reading around, there clearly are driver issues, but I think anyone who remembers the XP launch will tell you it’s improved quite a bit. And with millions, of pieces of hardware made by thousands of manufacturers, can you really expect it to be flawless?
Also, everyone is pointing out that a lot of enterprise customers aren’t upgrading. That, too, was the case last time. The reason is that enterprise customers don’t upgrade much. Inertia is a tremendous force in enterprise IT. Many companies have hundreds or thousands of computers, all of which are running however many pieces of software from however many authors. Upgrading takes a lot of time and manpower, so they don’t do it until they have to. They drive the metaphorical car until the wheels fall off, the doors rust shut, and the engine sputters to a halt.
If you don’t believe me, go into a bank and look at a PC. Chances are you’ll see one that looks like the old Packard Bell models from the late 90s, and an interface that looks about as user-friendly as a BIOS screen. In fact, I once entered that screen while fixing the computer of a friend who worked at a Fortune 500 company in order to make it boot from disc, and he remarked that the UI must have been made by the same people. The fact that these people aren’t clamoring for a new OS is somehow taken as a failure? Half of them are still running Pentium 2s.
Also cited are customers wanting OEMs to keep offering the old OS on new PCs. People did this when they retired Windows 98 as well. Probably many of the same ones. You didn’t hear as much about it back then, but “blog” wasn’t a word yet and Digg.com didn’t exist because you could probably still register Dig.com. People seem a lot more vocal this time, but that’s because they have a million times more places to shout.
Which is not to say that Microsoft didn’t make some mistakes in launching the OS. They clearly made a few. For one, they gave OEMs too much leeway in deciding what they could or could not slap “Vista Capable” stickers on. And even though it wasn’t entirely their fault that manufacturers screwed this up, it reflects badly on Microsoft. It’s just like when a program crashes your PC. It might not have been Windows’s fault, but you get pissed at it for not preventing it, because that’s its job.
They also should not have shipped with User Account Control on by default. It just doesn’t improve safety. Maybe in a perfect world where people actually paid attention to nag screens it would, but it quickly becomes so repetitive that any normal human being finds themselves just blindly clicking OK to everything. In a matter of minutes it becomes nothing more than a severe nuisance.
For the most part though, I greatly prefer the OS to XP. The built in search capability is what does it for me. I can hit the Windows key, then type in “poker”, and up will pop a list of any poker programs, any documents with that word in the title, and even Word documents or Outlook emails with that word in it. I can launch any program with just a couple keystrokes.
I could go on with a list of likes and dislikes, but this post isn’t meant as a review. It’s just to say that Vista is certainly not the abortion that the tech industry seems to think it is. The Silicon Valley groupthink never gave it a fair shake. It mainly just suffers from the same problems that anyone who has had a market leadership position in the OS space for decades and does a significant amount of enterprise sales could not possibly avoid. And MS undoubtedly made a few mistakes along the way, but for the most part, I think the launch went far better than XP’s did.
May 27, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I think Vista's bashing has been more about lack of value than any particular failure. Maybe XP was as much of a pain to upgrade, but XP added something. After 5 years, is it really reasonable to pay $100+ to the world's largest software company, in exchange for headaches and an upgraded search feature? Microsoft could give it away for free in XP service pack 4.
May 27, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Well, there's much more to it than the better search feature, and I don't hold their being the market leader against them, but on the whole I think you're right. It got so neutered by compromises brought on by missed deadlines that it left out most of the stuff that made it appear to be a compelling upgrade while in development.
May 27, 2008 at 11:54 pm
“It’s just like when a program crashes your PC. It might not have been Windows’s fault, but you get pissed at it for not preventing it, because that’s its job.”
Actually, that does have to be Windows's fault. Your program crashes = your fault. It doesn't matter how much invalid input you've received.
May 28, 2008 at 1:50 am
Unfortunately, Vista does feel to some extent like ME in terms of some features really being badly implemented and of course the hardware/performance issues.
But I have found that on the bright side, it does have advantages to XP if used by non-tech-savvy friends and family – I noticed a lot less unwanted maintenance is required due to the improved security.
Overall, my biggest grudge is that 1) it hasn't improved my productivity as a developer one bit and 2) that the search facility it ships with is fundamentally broken.
May 28, 2008 at 2:24 am
“They also should not have shipped with User Account Control on by default. It just doesn’t improve safety”.
Are you mad!? A nagging UAC is better than no UAC at all. I say this because users I know who are not power users, who can't tell a an email from a virus, do not get a UAC prompt that often as they don't use use Vista to anything near its full. These are the people who will install nasty stuff by pure accident and the UAC will save them (hopefully) because its not habit just to click OK. The people who see the UAC all the time should (again hopefully) know what they should and should not be installing, clicking on or opening.
I do agree however, the UAC does pop up way too much for some users, some stuff just isn't important enough to need it. I like the way user privileges are elevated in Linux (Ubuntu specifically), you get a dialog you have to enter you password into but only for stuff that matters.
May 28, 2008 at 3:07 am
I'm one of the early Vista users at work. I agree with your sentiments on the UAC. The mistake is in assuming that the content of the UAC will 1) be read by non-technical users and 2) be informative enough to cleanly separate when users should allow and cancel. That #2 is a bigger problem than most people realize in my estimation. That the UAC pops up WAY too much and is very invasive has been beaten to death.
I'm not down on the hardware and software stuff. Unfortunately, that's the name of the game. It does bother me that my new laptop which would run XP screamingly fast is only running it normally fast on Vista. That's the name of the game, too. I just feel like I didn't get enough out of the deal. Also, there are some VPN and secure wireless related certificate issues in the office that only affect Vista and which apparently haven't been resolved yet. You might want to watch for that.
I like the new Start menu. I think the Win-Tab program switcher is lame compared to Expose because it obscures the screens that you're paging through and still takes way too many clicks. It might have just been a demo thing anyway. Vista also seems to eat more screen real estate than XP did. I think most OSes are moving in that direction
May 28, 2008 at 3:58 am
What are you saying? is it Windows or your fault? How is input relevant here?
May 28, 2008 at 6:59 am
I had mixed success with Vista. It recognized my hardware much better than XP, but ultimately it failed to run the program I needed the PC for (Solidworks 2007). If it can't run the program I'm going to be using most (I'm a mechanical engineer), it is useless to me. Additionally, it all seemed like a lot of cosmetic changes for the money, which really doesn't excite me in the least. I would be a lot more excited with a coherent set of 1st party apps, stability, REAL security, and a performance BOOST. Why upgrade if it is expensive, less compatible, and slower. I didn't find the “killer app” and ended up downgrading to XP again. Windows 7 either needs to be a bigger step forward, or significantly cheaper.
May 28, 2008 at 7:32 am
But Vista is still a memory and CPU hog; makes PCs run 10 times slower compared to Ubuntu or XP.
May 28, 2008 at 8:22 am
It all depends on what you do. I've heard bad things happen to gamers who are trying to run games made in the last year or so. Works fine on Windows XP but crashes on Vista. This is probably do to video drivers more than Vista itself, but an OS is only as good as its drivers. Blame Nvidia or blame Vista – to the end-user it's the same thing.
May 28, 2008 at 11:25 am
Nobody reads the nag screens. And even if they did, anyone who needs UAC to protect them from themselves wouldn't understand what they said anyway.
It's not as if the screen says “this is a virus, do you want to execute it?”. All the virus author has to do is name it something like “Windows Helper” or “Microsoft Program #189923″ and anyone will just click ok.
May 28, 2008 at 11:38 am
Brand new laptop. Dual-core 2.6Ghz processor. 2Gb of RAM. Replacing a P4/1.3Ghz/512Mb laptop running XP.
Guess which one takes four times as long to boot?
Guess which one runs at half the speed?
Guess which one has an 'unzip' application which takes minutes to expand a 10Mb zip file?
Vista doesn't suck? I read a lot of your stuff Matt, but I think this is the dumbest thing you've written so far.
May 28, 2008 at 11:41 am
I put Vista on a laptop that had XP on it and it boots up in about the same time and runs everything at about the same speed. No problems unzipping either.
Perhaps your OEM put a bunch of bloated crap on it?
May 28, 2008 at 2:10 pm
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vist…
May 28, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Who does this affect? The people who have a PC with Blu-Ray hooked up to their TV? What is that, like 8 people?
Everyone complains about Vista DRM, I haven't encountered one problem in 1.5 years of use. I don't even know anyone who has. It's mostly just EFF-style paranoia.
May 28, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I'm happy to stand on principle on this point. DRM is pretty much my only reason for not going near Vista.
May 28, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Then I assume you must not use any Apple products either? Nobody has done more to advance or benefit from DRM than them with their iPod and iTunes.
May 28, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Nope.
But hey, since you are the only person I've ever heard of getting as-good-or-better performance from it… good for you, I suppose.
May 28, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I definitely wouldnâ??t say it's better, but it's not noticeably worse.
May 28, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I just bought my first mac, as it happens (because ultraportable thinkpads don't yet come with linux). I don't own an ipod and I don't purchase songs with DRM on them. I refuse also to purchase anything
from sony. Does that sufficiently answer all your questions?
Perhaps you find my principles hypocritical. At least you can't dismiss me as a fanboy or apple/EFF fanatic. There's a huge difference between copy protection and preemptive quality degradation because copying is theoretically possible. And I vote with my dollar against it.
It's comparing two evils. Perhaps apple will do something worse tomorrow and I'll switch to Vista 'on principle' (or finally take on the pain of installing linux). I realize I live in an imperfect world.
At least I don't go around calling apple 'good'.
May 28, 2008 at 6:34 pm
At least you're consistent. I think you're aiming your dollar voting at the wrong target though. Microsoft doesn't want DRM, they do it to offer you the choice of having a Blu-Ray player. The studios want that to come with DRM. That's partly why Apples don't ship with Blu-Ray. I can't fault Windows for offering people reduced functionality Blu-Ray over no Blu-Ray at all.
Apple has said since the beginning that they included DRM because it was the only way they could get the labels to agree to iTunes. I'm not so sure, given that they didn't open the standard up to competing devices like MS did. But if it were true, it would hardly be their fault.
Good is all relative. But I think a DRM feature that affects probably less than 0.1% of customers wouldn't disqualify anything from consideration.
May 28, 2008 at 8:44 pm
It's fruitless to speculate on the intentions of corporations. But if apple can hold out against outrageous studio demands surely M$ can too.
Don't assess future impact purely by the common case in the present. What is uncommon today won't always be, but we'll find ourselves stuck with the implications of today's decisions. DRM isn't the most
important thing in the world, but the difference between commercial OS's is minor enough that it's the biggest differentiator between them IMO. I'm not sufficiently moved to take to the streets in protest, but there is negligible cost in taking a stand with my dollar.
—
I commented on the tone of some of your writing here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202927
I would have done that over email if I could find an email for you. I dislike talking about others behind their backs, and talking about
things like tone is so super boring that it's impossible to justify cluttering up the airwaves with it.
I intended the comment to be constructive. Judging from the difference in tone between your last two replies to me, I speculate that the audience in your mind when you write is often more the fanboy than the thoughtful kind. You mentioned in a previous exchange that you delete a lot of 'fanboy' comments. I suspect you'd bring those down without
reducing meaningful conversation if you spoke to the meaningful conversation rather than to the fanboys. It would also lead to less of that boring and distracting chatter about tone.
May 28, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Apple hasn't held out against anything. They've buckled from the moment they launched iTunes. Microsoft hasn't done any better, but they haven't done any worse.
I use the word fanboy because it describes a certain mindset of someone whose good sense is overridden by brand loyalty. Apple fanboys, in particular, have gone so far as to compromise the tech media industry's integrity. It gets the point across well. If that means I have to delete the occasional nasty comment, I don't mind.
May 28, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Apple wasn't the first to distribute DRM'd music. MS is the first to
proactively reduce quality because of 'security audits'. They're still the only ones after all these years. That indicates it's a big deal.
I didn't mean to say certain words weren't meant to be used, but that
your tone (which stems from how often you use loaded words, but that's only part of it) is a distraction to me and perhaps other readers. I
think one's tone when writing varies based on the audience one has in
mind – whether it's the 2 thoughtful guys or the 90 vapid ones. But it
was just a speculation. Tone is one of those things it's near
impossible to verbally capture, and I have no sense of who if anyone
reacted as I did. C'est la vie.
May 29, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I think you are underestimating how much the “vista-capable” stuff hurt people's perception Windows Vista. When you buy a computer for roughly the same as the last computer you bought and it runs slower new then the different model you bought two years ago that is a PR nightmare. People don't enjoy buying a “upgrade” and then getting worse or, at best, the equivalent experience. In the sub $1000 laptop market I have myself wiped clean vista installations for XP and had very large increases in performance as a result.
Only on expensive new setups will vista run well. But guess what, most people just want to browse, email, word process and maybe play a little solitare. By ignoring this and making a OS that is really only suited for the cutting-edge of hardware MS shot themselves in the foot big time. Oh, and a big section of the cutting-edge hardware market is gamers and vista didn't exactly do them any favors either.
Vista isn't a abortion because of UAC or driver issues, while annoying they are pretty small-time, Vista is a failure because while hardware has moved forward quite a bit Vista makes the average user feel that their computers' have slowed down or stayed the same in responsiveness.
June 8, 2008 at 6:28 pm
The real issue which is what makes it a turd is that it is SLOW!!!! It offers NOTHING to justify the amount of speed that has been robbed. AND..it offers NOTHING that MacOSX has not already offered for awhile with much better performance than Vista could even hope to achieve.
June 9, 2008 at 11:11 am
It looks pretty and has some nice features, sure.
The “are you sure” security model is stupid, and it offers relatively little new functionality in exchange for serious hardware upgrade requirements for the business desktop.
Most of my mid-market customers have laptops or desktops with 512 mb ram, and somewhere around an old pentium 4 or celeron processor. The execs and IT admins don't see the value in vista for a major hardware refresh.
June 9, 2008 at 11:16 am
If it did say “this is a virus, do you want to execute it?”, I still think the majority of users would still click Yes.