According to InformationWeek, Microsoft has finally come clean and admitted its Vista mistakes (tip o' the antlers to Daring Fireball).
But what's an admission of guilt without spreading some blame around?
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is now acknowledging it screwed up with its initial launch of Windows Vista, and is ready to try again.
Oh. OK. So, wait, Windows will be five years late instead of four now? Huh? How's this going to work exactly? Has it used its vast resources to somehow turn time back?
"We broke a lot of things."
We broke your applications. We broke your hardware. We broke your collectible figurines. We broke your Aunt Elma's hip...
"We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain."
Particularly Aunt Elma.
"It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?"
Yes. They're thinking that. A year and a half after Vista's launch. That's awkward, isn't it?
If only there were some other operating system...
So Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, fessed up publicly this week.
Wow, bummer detail you pulled there, Brad.
"Say, Brad, this thing you're going to do at our Partner Conference next week... are you familiar with the Japanese tradition of seppuku? Here's an informative pamphlet."
Speaking at a keynote address at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Brooks signified that Microsoft was ready to admit mistakes and reposition itself to tell a better story about Windows Vista...
Yes! Because it's all about the "story" about Vista. Well, a minute ago it was about breaking things. But sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make a story omelette. Or something.
"You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it's time to take our message forward," Brooks said.
We didn't think it was so much "sleeping" as we thought it was "lumbering". Lumbering drunkenly down the hall smashing things and blaming everyone else when it woke up in a pile of its own filth.
In the coming weeks and months, Microsoft will launch a huge advertising campaign that's been reported to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Finally! Yes, please, Microsoft, make the pain go away through the power of marketing!
"We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there," Brooks said of Apple whose "I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC," commercials criticize Windows Vista. ... "We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message."
"iWay or the highway"? Microsoft must buy its tone-deafness in bulk from Costco or something. "I know our slogans are meaningless and our product names are vapid, but we got a great deal on them!"
Overall, the message Microsoft hopes to impart is that Windows Vista is ready, and that Microsoft will no longer take a back seat while word of mouth and Apple drive negative messaging about the company and Windows.
Look, the Macalope has actually been somewhat sympathetic to Vista. It's got a good security model -- certainly better than Leopard's as poor Brad rightly notes -- and a decent enough user experience. And he knows the audience was Microsoft partners who are looking for any kind of help they can get to mask the smell of Vista flop sweat.
But Microsoft made its bed by over-promising for six years and then delivering an OS that forced a lot of uncomfortable decisions. Marketing isn't going to clean this mess up. The horny one really isn't sure what is, frankly, but the "Get a Mac" ads aren't responsible for businesses choosing to stick with XP. Microsoft is.
The InformationWeek piece portrays this as an "about time" move, but this is more "my dog ate it" territory.
UPDATE: some delightfully shrill piling on can be found here and here.
Boy, those Mac users sure are shrill with their knee-jerk vitriolic hate of Vista, aren't they?
vista is sh*t.
Really MS needs to can that sh*t.
Vista is a pointless waste of processing power and space.
Not only is Vista crap but so is the company.
Vista is bloated, expensive and buggy as hell.
Oh, wait. Those are XP users.
And here the Macalope thought the only unwashed masses on the Internet who stoop to foul language and loutish comments were those cultish Mac zealots.
Every time Adrian Kingsley-Hughes blogs about Apple, a kitten dies.
Well, on the inside anyway.
This time out, AKH starts by noting how similar Leopard and Vista are.
Like Vista is [sic] long awaited...
Yeah. Six years, two and a half. What's the difference?
Oh, that's right. Four Three [Gar! Antlers must be growing into the Macalope's brain!] and a half years.
...like Vista the launch was delayed...
The Macalope will just point out that Bill Gates originally stated that Vista would ship in 2005 and it didn't ship until this year. Leopard was delayed six months. Even if you're inclined to be charitable toward Vista, it was still later by a factor of more than two.
...and like Vista, I got the impression that Apple rushed a bit to get it out of the door because the Mac fanboys were getting restless.
And we all know how Steve Jobs likes to base his decisions around what Artie MacStrawman thinks.
Sure, it's not unreasonable to get the impression Leopard was rushed for an October release -- certainly Apple didn't want to miss its already bumped release date. Kingsley-Hughes is magnanimous in his willingness to allow that Leopard -- an operating system delivered in two and a half years after a six month delay -- would have roughly the same level of stability that Vista -- delivered in six years after at least a year-long delay -- has.
Now, the horny one might think one would expect the operating system that took 240% longer to reach its users to demonstrably more stable but, whatever.
In the Macalope's experience over the last week with Leopard, it has been as solid as any major OS X release. He's experienced only minor glitches with some third-party applications and once trying to set up a new printer. The Finder -- while we still may not be seeing Apple's best work here -- is better and faster than ever.
Isn't that odd? An operating system update that actually makes your computer faster?
That said, I have to admit that I'm surprised and a little shocked at the types of bugs affecting Leopard, not to mention the volume of people that appear to be affected.
Well, that's weird. Wasn't the Macalope just pointing out how no one knows how many people are affected and there just isn't a good way to tell?
Yes. Yes, he was. Is this thing on? Hello? Hello?
Oh, and let's not forget the new Mac Trojan.
Yeah! And what about Scarecrow's brain?! And where's Jimmy Hoffa buried?! And how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?!
The Mac Trojan really has nothing to do with Leopard's release. It seemingly affects all versions of OS X, with 10.5 actually having the sole benefit of letting you at least see the malicious DNS server the trojan adds.
I'm hoping that updates are released before any of this stuff becomes an issue for me.
Adrian, you've got one Mac. Are you planning on upgrading from Tiger to Leopard on it again? Then you're not going to get the blue screen problem which really seems to have been the biggest. The Macalope frankly is not sure what crashing and performance issues you're talking about since you provide no link and, as he said, his experience has been that Leopard is as stable as Tiger and, in some key operations, is faster not slower.
Again, have people upgrading to Leopard had some problems? No question. As is the case with any dot-oh release (or, in OS X's case, dot-something dot-oh). Is the remedy to simply lock yourself in your underground bunker until 10.5.1 is released? Well, no. For starters, 10.5.1 might not solve all these issues. But also, you might not run into these issues in the first place.
Read up on the affected third-party applications and other issues, do a full backup (or two!) and go for it if you want to.
You're going to want to do those things anyway.
Seriously, these nattering nabobs of negativity who run around the silly punditsphere trying to scare people away from things they could use right now ("Wait for 10.5.1! Wait for the second rev of the iPhone! For god's sake, don't buy anything new and/or shiny!") positively drive the Macalope to fits of apoplexy.
This is not alchemy, folks. And Halloween is over.
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