Making sense of Vista's first year
Note: This is one in a series of blogs looking at the one-year anniversary of Windows Vista's consumer launch.
While many of you enjoyed "the Mom test," clearly there are lots more ways to look at how Windows Vista is doing. Here are three measures I typically use when trying to assess the impact of Vista.
• The "downgrade" / Stick with XP movement
The downgrade movement is an indicator of how the most disgruntled users feel about Vista. Most people buying a new PC will accept Vista because that's what nearly all computers come with at retail. So, the folks who are actively seeking out XP machines or downgrading their Vista machines represent a minority, to be sure. Still, it's a vocal and important minority worth some attention. What's more, this movement gained steam during the year, prompting Microsoft to make it easier for PC makers to include an XP disc in the box with Vista machines and extend Windows XP's stay on the market.
However, this effort is set to be further relegated to the fringes come June, when Microsoft plans to stop providing XP to large computer makers. Windows XP-based systems will still be available from smaller computer makers, known as system builders, and Microsoft has indicated the date might not be set in stone.
"No changes are planned at this point, but we continue to listen to our customers and partners about their needs," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail interview.
Although computer makers will still be able to offer XP downgrades in the box, they'll have to buy those discs ahead of the June 30 deadline, according to the Microsoft rep.
Another option for those unhappy with Vista's performance, but not looking to make the dramatic step back to XP, is a little-known program called vLite, which strips out many of Vista's optional components. Microsoft, is of course making its own change to Vista, the Service Pack 1 release due out before the end of March.
• Sales numbers
There are three sales figures that matter: business adoption rates, new PC sales figures, and retail boxed sales of the operating system.
New PC sales and boxed copies are easy to track, but don't necessarily provide a direct indication about enthusiasm for the operating system.
Boxed copy sales have not shown nearly the jump seen with past new versions of Windows. Typically, enthusiasts snap up copies of the new version to upgrade older machines. Less than robust sales of boxed copies could be an indicator that hard-core enthusiasts are less jazzed about Vista, but there are other factors that probably are playing a role as large or larger.
One is the fact that both the absolute hardware requirements as well as the horsepower needed to really make Vista sing make an upgrade a poor choice for all but high-end or recently purchased machines. The second reason, which dovetails with this, is that PC prices are far lower than they were when XP debuted. A strong case can be made that if you have to upgrade the video card or memory of an old PC to run Vista, you are better off just buying a new PC.
PC sales have indeed been robust in the last year, allowing Microsoft to reach its much-touted 100 million mark for Vista licenses sold. Again, though, PC sales are not a true indicator of Vista demand.
It is hard to even guess at an estimate of what percentage of buyers for whom Vista was the reason, or even a primary reason, behind their purchase.
Shifting back to the realm of the anecdotal, in a year of writing about Vista, I have yet to have anyone tell me they bought a new PC because they wanted Vista.
Perhaps the most important indicator of true demand for a new operating system is how quickly businesses start using the product. There's no foolproof way to track this, with corporate surveys of deployment and intent to deploy probably offering the best indications.
Microsoft has said that Vista deployment has fallen short of its initial goal, an optimistic forecast that businesses would snap up Vista at they had Windows XP.
• Software/hardware compatibility
Microsoft executives have conceded that software and hardware compatibility, while numerically higher than with XP, wasn't where it needed to be when Vista debuted. This story has improved as the year has gone on.
What strikes me, though, is that even with 100 million Vista licenses sold, there continue to be darn few applications written specifically for Windows Vista. Ahead of the launch, Microsoft was touting the fact that application developers were taking advantage of things like Vista's new presentation engine and other features to create Vista-specific software.
A year out, we haven't seen much of that. One of the initial applications, a Vista-specific version of Yahoo Messenger, took months longer than expected to arrive in test form, while there haven't been any marquee announcements in recent months. Asked to offer some counterevidence, the best Microsoft could point to was DxO Optics Pro, a high-end photography application that uses Windows Presentation Foundation to enhance the photo-editing program.
Microsoft also pointed to a handful of Web sites that take advantage of Vista's presentation engine, as well as games like Crysis that support DirectX 10, which is built into Vista. Crysis also runs on XP, but without taking advantage of DirectX 10.
I expected more at this point. A few key applications that really sing on Vista would really help Microsoft's sell with Vista. Their absence makes the move to Vista less than compelling for consumers who are happy with their PCs.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
So my choice then comes back to Vista or one of the Linux builds designed for HTPC use. Looks like I'll be researching Linux...
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy
How did I solve my woes? Simple, I brought my Mac laptop into the office and got back to being productive with an OS that got along with everything else and just worked. What a simple concept!
Count me as a new Microsoft hater. Vista re-affirmed my love for XP and the Mac OS X.
Jeff Maloney
maloney1@pacbell.net
I'm curious as to what programs. One reason asking is over the weekend I had dug out my old, support portflio with all my old Netware and NT4 win95 cd's. I found an old game in there on CD "Orcs and Human's"
http://www.blizzard.com/war1/
I poped it in the cd drive, and pop up came a dos box and away ran the install. I had to quess at what the IRQ, and memory address's were for the memory card but the dos installer plinked away.
And wham up game the game. In all it 256 color glory. And my daughter played it for a few hours.
But what I really have enjoyed about Vista... It just works.
So now I'm "stuck" with a very nice Toshiba laptop running Vista. It's mostly ok ever since I turned off the UAC and made it revert to the Win/2000 look. But I would not recommend Vista to anyone not doing Tibetan on a computer. By comparison I'm very happy with my XP system at my day job.
I run Vista without problem on 8 computers, and my slowest machine is a 4 years old dual-proc @2GHz with 1GB RAM. If you can't run it on a quad the problem is not with Vista...
It kind of reminded me of Microsoft BOB, anybody remember that? Well I'm not going to go so far as to compare Vista with MS-BOB but comparing it with WinME is spot on.
The ONLY reason to buy Vista is for a tighter integrated Entertainment PC with TV tuners and sitting under a giant flat screen with a couple of TB of disk and a really souped up system.
Vista on a laptop with integrated graphics and a 4200 or 5400 RPM drive is a waste of time and it's "eye candy" kills battery life.
As for the compatibility issues, an awful lot of people had problems really early on and almost entirely due to 3rd party drivers. This should come as no surprise, XP went through the same thing and Win2K was worse still while WinNT NEVER got the drivers quite up to par. Mac's are about are pretty terrible here too, but you rarely see the issues because people use such a tiny subset of hardware on Macs vs. PCs.
In the end though, people who don't like Vista mostly come from one of three camps.
1. Those who don't like it because they don't like the new interface. This is perfectly fair in my books as user interfaces are highly dependent on the individual user.
2. Those who don't like it because the hardware requirements make it fairly slow on their computer (Vista does kind of suck with less than 1GB of memory, though with 2GB of memory costing $30 these days that is a total non-issue in my opinion, if they can't afford the memory then they definitely can't afford the $100+ for software and are probably illegally downloading Vista anyway).
3. Those who don't like it because it's Microsoft and they like to whine.
I thought that Vista Ultimate would tightly intigrate and be very beneficial from a media perspective in preparing presentations and combining a whole bunch notes and documents using OCR thru Office Pro 2007. I never dreamed that there was no native scanning and imaging software that could recognize a HP All-in-One Color Laser device. No Recognition no drivers and NO WORK!!
Back to XP Pro SP2--No problem--Except approx 300 man hrs to retro my computer. Very high end quasi server-turned into a slug w/ Intel Quad cor, maxed out RAM, Nvidia 8800-760DDR3,1 Terabyte drives,fiber optic net. Go figure?
It takes me days to reformat Windows and re-install my apps....something that has to be done every couple of years because of pitiful Microsoft housekeeping. Sad thing is most people just throw out their systems at this point and buy a new one. Those are the idiots that keep Microsoft afloat. As a software engineer for over 25 years, if people could look under the hood of that OS, and understood what they were looking at, they would NEVER use it.
It still kills me that Bill Gates became the world's richest man with a product that crashed on national TV with nearly every new version.
except that Microsoft is losing their touch with ordinary
consumer. My first impressions of Vista was its way to Mac like
but a lot more awkward. Like it wants to be OS X but fails in
many of those areas because after all its Windows.
But Vista is really for those who've graduated from the
troubleshooting days of DOS, Win95, WinMe, Win2000 and XP.
After all if you can put up with those past versions of Windows
(LOC - load of crap). I mean, you'd probably still have a candle
burning, with hopes that Microsoft will atleast improve the next
version right? VIsta - Win7. anyone? What a joke.. hehe
I went from XP x86 to x64 over a year ago and in comparision, Vista x64 Ultimate just works, and works well. It is much more stable than XP SP2 x64 ever was and finding the neccessary drivers are a snap if people know where to look for them.
I use practically all the Adobe CS3 suite and have at least two or three of these heavy weight apps running. I do a lot of design work, web work, publishing, and listening to my massive (legal) music collection that is all ripped in lossless technology. I also utilize Office 2007 and have outlook open 24/7.
I am a professional and need things running smoothely between my workstations and servers (running on Server Enterprise 2003) Not only do I have these machines, but several laptops within my home all having Vista x64 running on them. I do not have the slightest problem.
I realize people out here are nowhere near as technical or as demanding as I am, I make a living in the IT Business, and business is great. Vista x64 is a perfect fit. I realize perhaps that I am very fortunate to be one of the few that sat down, read the books, researched, implemented, and thriving on Vista.
There are many operating systems out there, people ought to spend more time and energy finding one that works for them and cut down on the whining and snivelling, its rediculous.
With virtual PC installed, I can use different versions and different language versions of Windows alhtough I cannot use 16 bit windows since they are not supported.
Also, it's a real plus that I can utilize more than 4GB RAM with it because RAM are cheap these days.
Only thing I wish is that Sony VAIO could support 64bit drivers soon.
An actual pro would've known that ;)
/P
1) User Account Control is annoying and ineffective. The least you can do if you are going to make a feature like UAC is make it remember what you did already, not prompt you for trivial stuff, and never bother you if you turn it off.
2) Vista assumes too much and remembers too little. In Windows XP, when you make changes to a folder, it sticks. In Windows Vista, you have to "customize this folder" to get any changes to stick. Sometimes, it will go back to the list view the next time you open that folder. And quite often for no good reason, folders will grouped by something, usually by type.
3) Vista replaced the simple, easy to understand boot.ini with a complex, difficult to understand boot loader. Supposedly the new BCD is compatible with the ultra-rare EFI motherboards (unless you are Mac fan). But why couldn't Microsoft make something that is EFI compatible AND simple?
4) 8 mass-consumer versions. Yeah, that won't confuse people.
5) Too much goes on in the background. I have found that performance INCREASES when you turn off the features that are supposed to increase performance. Turn off SuperFetch and Search Indexer and your hard drive may last more than 1 year.
6) The Network and Sharing center feature will give you trouble on a high speed internet and router. Quite often it won't get an IP address. So, you go to the command prompt and type "IPCONFIG /renew" and you get "This requires elevation." Yeah, spyware LOVES to renew your IP address. Turning off UAC fixes that problem, but not the Network and Sharing center having a hard time doing what Windows 98 does easily. Over time, it doesn't mess up. But still, it should work from day 1.
7) What happened to the run command? It is off by default. Unless you turn it on, you must use the search box, which isn't ideal, ever.
8) And the control panel requires you to use the search box to find anything at all because there are so many menus and sub-menus and choices.
9) In my 64-bit Vista, sometimes when browsing, the window for freeze for several minutes. XP x64, which was also based on Server 2003 like Vista, never had this problem.
However, just so you know I'm not blindly hating on Vista, there are some good things about it. It is pretty. It does have a service which detects when you are playing movies and gives the movies a higher priority, which is clever. All in all, once you customize the start menu it is better. I love the DVD maker. It is the best DVD making program I've used to date. And I love sharing HD movies from my Vista to my XBox 360.
Still, the good doesn't even come close to outweighing the bad. I even told Microsoft in my TechNet subscription that Vista is bad. Until Vista fixes the many annoyances, I recommend to my customers to avoid Vista like they would get a deadly plague. I'm not blindly hating on Vista, my hate is defined over lots of time using it.
On the other hand I love the search functionality, and the pretty effects. All of my video codecs work perfectly with WMP11, so that's a plus. I think that IE7 has a memory leak because if I open and close a lot of tabs in a single window, it eventually freezes up or the menu options disappear. So you've got to kill the window and open another.
All-in-all I think that Vista has great potential to be a brilliant OS, but it's simply an incomplete and rushed OS. I'm hoping that it will be a lot better in it's next incarnation, "Windows 7".
I especially appreciated your thoughts on folder customization. This drives me CRAZY. coming from XP where it "just works" to this random crap shoot drives me nuts.
Vista was a lot of work for so many people not to like it. I think I would have just taken XP 64-bit stripped out the parts that didn't work well, and replace them with updated code. Added hardware support for new technologies (high-def, solid state drives, hybrid drives, SLI, multi-monitor, wireless (LAN file sharing)) and large ram support.
Then just modify TCP-IP and focus around heavy server loads and quick responses. Better support for multiple connection downloading. I would have left the DRM sitting on the curb if it was just going to drag the product down. Basically just brought XP in line with hardware advancements that have been made. (blueray, HD-DVD burning).
Maybe try some sort of software partion locking for program files, and system files instead of UAC.
Then stripped out the GUI technology, and add the new one. I maybe even would have drawn a cutoff line for backwards compatibility on super old software, but where I don't know. Maybe not. But that possibly would have allowed some shrinking of the kernel, and a chance to reorganize the default file system into something cleaner.
I would have just let all 32-bit versions die. Obviously MS had problems dealing with two versions. It also makes it slightly harder on device manufacturers, and consumers. Focusing purely on 64-bit would have been better for everyone assuming it worked.
Then add a simpler background file indexer that just indexes certain folders (My Documents, Share Folders) and can report shared folders to a server or over the LAN to allow index searches of files over the LAN.
When it comes to .NET in my opinion they wasted a lot of time with WinFX, WPF, WMF and all that crap. A few good APIs to write better web framework code, and client code to communicate with your web apps would have been plenty enough I think.
That may have bombed to, but oh well. I would say that's why MS makes the OS and not me, but now they're slipping to so I don't know.
It will eventually be assimilated by The Cube (Beryl/Compiz).
Resistance is futile....
It is irrelevant because it offers nothing new and it badly copied good ideas from Linux and OSX.
A poor copy is never relevant.
I do recommend a clean install of Vista (if you are upgrading) and a separate video card if you have only 1MB of RAM. Vista works just fine with my older PC.
In my opinion, alot of the criticism I hear about Vista is overdone and misleading.
Ugh, 2 weeks later I loathe the thing, and any performance increased I'd get from DX10 are easily negated by the bloatedness of Vista. It's back to XP for me...even if it does cap the RAM limit at 3GB. Couldn't be happier.
1. what actually do you like.
2. Compare point-to point Vista vs. XP and Win2000
Thanks
p.s.
less bla-bla-bla, more info... please
expectation bar [in-windows-world] is so low that ... some people actually think that Vista is OK... sad but true, it's a cruel world after all!
- Vista and Tablets
- by TaintDeli January 31, 2008 11:21 PM PST
- I am by no means in love with Vista, I still run XP on my primary desktop computer, however I have upgraded my aging Toshiba M200 tablet to Vista. Tablets really benefit from the fact that the whole tablet functionality has been integrated into Vista's core, rather than the way it was all lumped on as an afterthought in XP. To run tablet functionality on XP, there were excessive amounts of processes running at start up. Vista just feels much smoother and well-integrated than XP in this aspect. I also appreciate a lot of the improvements that have been made for mobile PCs in general. My M200 feels like a brand new computer with Vista, and actually seems quicker/more responsive.
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