They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know | Hacker News Reader

They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know

nytimes.com

42 pointsprakash24 comments

It's sad that Microsoft felt the need to sell another OS. They CAN put out decent software, when they put in the requisite development time and energy. The windows machines I work on are Windows XP SP 1, which I think was kind of the last decent MS OS. And you know what? At the risk of drawing some ire, it's pretty good. For 99% of what I need to do, it Just Works. And with good anti-spyware, anti-virus tools, I don't have any problems with malware.

Really, I think that most of the problems with Vista can be traced to Microsoft thinking that they needed to make grand, sweeping changes, when they had a perfectly serviceable operating system already. It's like reinventing the wheel and starting by saying "okay, we've done the 'circular' thing, what other shapes could we use?"

I don't know the nitty-gritty details of what went wrong in the development of Vista, but I can't shake the feeling that they simply waited too long between OS version releases. I think they could have avoided a lot of trouble had they realised, say, 2-3 years after XP that Vista was in trouble and ported some of the new stuff over to a less ambitious upgrade to XP/2003. The remaining planned changes could then have been done in the following version.

Previously, their product cycle was around 2-3 years, except for 2000->XP (1 year), and NT 4.0->2000 (4 years). They took almost 6 years to upgrade their desktop OS with Vista, and made changes almost at every level. People hate change. That includes both end-users and developers of end-user software and hardware drivers.

I don't think you can just force large-scale changes to something as fundamental as an OS, you have to spoon-feed it to the users. Breakages in the layers on top of it won't be too catastrophic, are fixed more quickly and thus pissing users off. (I didn't really follow anything Mac-related during the time of the MacOS 9->10 switchover, so I don't know how they got away with that)

Note: I primarily use Linux; I only have Windows (XP) installed for playing games and testing, and I'm putting off the Vista upgrade for later. In contrast, I usually upgrade my Linux system shortly after a new version of my distro (OpenSUSE) is out, which is typically every 6-8 months: the changes between versions aren't massive and the inconvenience caused tends to be minor.

This is really bad for Microsoft, not the content of the story which was known weeks ago, but the fact that this is now the most emailed story on the New York Times site. What was common knowledge in the IT community is now spreading in the "real" world where the consumers live. Not good for the brand.

this reminds me of what happened with the Xbox 360... if they only spent a little more time and money with quality upfront, then MS wouldn't have had to spend an estimated 1 billion dollars fixing it...

a 33% failure rate in an industry where 3% is the norm is just ridiculous - especially for something that costs people 350 - 450. (quality has recently been improved so that 360s only have a 10% failure rate; it's still over 3x the norm)

Sadly, I'm one of the morons that bought one, with wishful thinking that if MS controled both the software and hardware like Apple things would be better...

I don't really understand why you, as a consumer, would care about a company's hardware failure rate. Sure, that hurts their bottom line, but as long as you have a working Xbox 360, shouldn't you be happy? It's not really analogous at all to Vista, since Vista isn't "failing" so much as it's something people don't want.

Isn't that the very definition of failing in the marketplace?

No, people are buying the Xbox 360.

When I mean fail, I mean not working at all until I send it to MS tech support, they fix it, and sent it back. I have to wait 4-6 weeks every time my xbox 360 breaks; that's why I care. it's happened once before... and given what I read online it'll happen another 2-3 times

For what it's worth, I've only seen it happen once, given the probably 10 Xbox 360's I've seen ranging from launch day to recent purchases. Clearly, your mileage will vary.

Back to the real point: you want your Xbox 360, you don't want Vista.

good point, you're right... I guess what I meant to say was that the same thing that plagues 360 that affects Vista's desirabilty, is quality. granted it hasn't stopped me from wanting to play 360... but in the next war I think Sony will learn from its mistake and I won't have to want MS's future crap...

From the company that emphasized, "Eating your own dog food", they bring to you, Microsoft Windows Vista (Super Duper it will order groceries for you edition) ;-)

One danger about "eating your own dog food" is that your entire company can get blind to the faults they forced themselves to overcome/stomach initially.

"Eating your own dog food" gets you to find major flaws that get it working for yourself, but once it is "working for you" (even if that took a lot of workarounds and sacrifices) you've become accustomed to it "not being as bad as it was".

Working at a major MS partner and seeing Longhorn alphas/CTPs/betas/etc, I got a sense that they got too much into "this is acceptable" mindset while others were screaming "don't ship, don't go, ouch, danger".

This doesn't imply that eating your own dog food is bad. But perhaps you should always be aware that you can fry your taste buds on bad dog food.

I think it might be better to swap eating your competitor's dogfood and your own every other month or so to keep it fresh.

Yes, very much agree. I used to work at MS and one problem is that many employees (even devs) have no experience with the other people's dogfood, ie. Linux/UNIX.

Because of this, you'd have situations where people would want to write C to make a quick string parsing tool, rather than perl or bash script.

If you're the CEO of Coke, you'd better know what Pepsi tastes like. "Company Loyalty" can be a convenient excuse for ignorance of the competition.

Last resort strategy to make Vista better than XP:

"Mistakenly" push a Windows "Update" to XP that makes it excruciatingly buggy and borderline useless.

you mean push out Vista as an upgrade, oh wait never mind :-)

Lol, yeah, and say it's a lot more secure.

A fair criticism. There are plenty of Microsoft employees that don't use Microsoft products. I doubt the corresponding percentage is as high at Apple.

Apple employees have to use different operating systems from time to time. There's a lot of software, especially in hardware design, that only runs on Windows or Linux.

Though this is quite interesting, I'm not sure why it's a sign that Vista is a disaster. I would hope that a company's internal emails about a product are extremely critical -- how else will you get the feedback needed to fix it?

Good software design (and most design) is extremely iterative. You stop when the product is good enough for the market to support. It seems to me that there weren't enough internal emails like this.

So the main problem Microsoft is having is poor third party support. Peripheral makers not updating drivers, though they had an unusually long period of time to do so. OEMs mislabeling laptops as Vista ready/capable/whatever when they clearly aren't.

How could MS have handled this better? Make drivers for every known product themselves? Micromanage Vista Ready certifications(that one seems plausible at least)?

> Peripheral makers not updating drivers, though they had an unusually long period of time to do so.

Not so, according to Dell:

http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18002573FE006B7...

They might have had a lot of time, but looks like the goal posts moved very late in the game.

> OEMs mislabeling laptops as Vista ready/capable/whatever when they clearly aren't.

OEMs don't set the standards, Microsoft lowered them.

See: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080305-the-vista-capa...

> Micromanage Vista Ready certifications

RTFA, Microsoft dumped "Vista Ready" and replaced it with "Vista Capable", which will just "run these core experiences at a minimum."

See: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyor...

I just wish Apple wasn't taking cues from Vista. http://www.tomsguide.com/us/leopard-osx-problems,review-1028... but one overview.

the last great OS from MS was windows 2000 pro...

as for vista, its horrible. has anybody tried to run google desktop search on it? Don't bother, just know it is so slow you wonder if it was by design.

XP Pro is a good alternative to Win2KPro so long as you strip all the extras.

Microsoft's Vista : Software = White Star Line's Titanic : Transportation

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