Meet Microsoft's Antidote to Vista | Hacker News Reader

Meet Microsoft's Antidote to Vista

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35 pointspierrefar35 comments

I find it interesting how bad of a image Vista has. While there were obviously issues right off the bad with hardware incompatibilities, etc...it turned out to be a really solid OS from my end. I used it for over a year and a half with fewer problems than I had with XP.

Most people just seem to "know" that Vista is a terrible OS. The read some forum post that heard that it was terrible, or they saw some random news story a while back saying people weren't too happy with Vista. I've even heard some people claim it was Windows Me all over again.

Then you have some of the "advice" people give out for Vista users. My favorite, of course, is that the first thing a Vista user should do is completely disable UAC. Now, sure, those pop-ups can be annoying, but I'd prefer a quick second of annoyance when loading up a program over executables starting off silently with admin privileges.

In any case, I've used the Windows 7 beta as my main OS for a couple months now and haven't had any issues so far.

All those observations are coming from a technical person's point of view. One thing that MS doesn't seem to get is that first impressions matter, they matter a lot. I bought a computer that came with Vista. It took me close to 5 minutes - I'm not kidding - to start up the machine to the point I was able to use anything. And it was very slow even afterwards. You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great. You can't wash away those bad feelings with an SP or with your positive testimony. You just can't. Regular folks are far more emotional than that. This is something we as developers have to remind ourselves every day.

You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great.

I wonder how many "regular" users jumped on board at the very beginning while there were still issues? I rarely have talked to someone who has actual experience with the problems from Vista (other than it being included on a system with poor performance, which was an issue, I'll admit).

If Vista really was a poor OS, then Windows 7 would be just putting 'lipstick on a pig'.

It will largely depend on how well MS can control the vendors. In other words how they can prevent the vendors from installing crap on a computer. For the longest time computers would ship with 1GB of RAM with tons of applications in the startup. You really felt like you bought a car for $20K that can only go 20 miles per hour. Don't underestimate the importance of performance.

I'm torn. As I write this on a Vista box, I keep thinking that I should finally cut the cord, suck it up, and start using Ubuntu as my primary OS (it's installed on a VM now). However, I'm worried about the short-term loss of productivity.

But, like you said, Vista ain't that bad. Most stuff just works. I actually like UAC as a protection mechanism, but I understand why the questions posed are important.

Ubuntu and Mac OS X will, similar to UAC prompt you for your password to do certain things. This is not as easily disabled, especially on Ubuntu. UAC is Good and Wrong.

on Vista the password prompt looks different depending on why you are needing to elevate privileges. This struck me as a pretty huge bug, as anyone who managed to spawn a popup window might seem equally credible to the one generated by the OS.

Ubuntu's is exactly the same each time and looks very clearly like part of the OS. And it's not annoying in the least.

I've had the opposite experience. I don't use it myself (I even opted to buy a new laptop with XP over Vista) but I'm responsible for looking after a Vista laptop where I work and I have no end of problems. Networking issues, compatibility with Outlook 2003 issues (every now and again it just stops working, has to be rebooted to be able to send/receive mail again), it's incredibly slow even though the laptop is new (decent spec).

Based on that I wouldn't take the plunge to use it as a primary OS (even as a Windows user generally.)

I really made an effort to get used to UAC. The concept is good, but in the end I just got so sick of the pointless pop-up dialogs that I had to turn it off. None of my Windows installations has had a malware infection anyway going back to 1994, so I don't think UAC was doing much for me.

My experience is the same. I really feared Vista, to the point that I put off buying a new laptop. Then I started a new job, and behold, I have Vista on my work machine. It works fine. It's not amazing, but it is not even close to the nightmare the Mac ads or the rest of the rumors I'd heard would have me belive. It just works, and that's what I need.

That said, I'm probably going to get a Mac for my next laptop. My XP laptop died a week ago and I've heard so many developers rave over the Mac, I'll likely give it a try.

I think experiences vary wildly and that itself speaks volumes about quality of Vista. You've had a good experience, some people have had bad.

Personally, I don't like it. I bought it installed on a new laptop. UAC is annoying, but not overly so.

However, I have had a Vista-specific process run wild and take up over 2 gigs of RAM. When I looked it up, audiodg.exe (for those who want to know), it turned out to be a process solely concerned with the DRM protection scheme of audio coupled with video. Neither my wife and I have watched an HD movie on the laptop nor consumed any form of media that would kick this process off. It just sat there, sucking up ungodly amounts of memory. The kicker is, if you killed it, you'd kill sound for the entire machine!

I'm sorry, but when I hear shit like that, it immediately turns me off of the OS. I don't care about any niceties it might have, if this is what happens just so MS could pander to RIAA and MPAA.

The networking dialogs in control panel, especially setting up wireless, were a nightmare worse than any phone tree. Also, my wife's laptop locked up so bad that she had to take the battery out to shut it down. After a week of doing this every day, she got a MacBook Air.

"The team tried to build an operating system...with manners, not one that constantly interrupts with bubbles, boxes and warnings that, data showed, people ignored or raced to close.

The Windows groups agreed in principle but old habits often reared up. Many Windows teams still wanted to be able to create alert bubbles for their functions.

"We've probably talked to every team in Windows about, 'No no no no, we don't want you to pop your notifications. Windows is not going to use these notifications to tell users things,'""

Great, getting rid of popup dialogs and notifications sounds like a huge step in the right direction - people are so used to not understanding or caring what they say they just ignore them anyway.

While I agree that users generally ignore notification bubbles in Windows, how should users receive notifications? I mean, sometimes you really do have to tell people stuff. Is it OK to pop up a notification bubble if you only do it every once in a while?

I feel pretty certain that a notification bubble is better than any system that steals focus from another window without responding to a user action.

Is there another accepted way of delivering notifications that I'm not thinking of?

I don't have any answers but I hope the Windows 7 team do.

As with you my main gripe is with dialogs that steal focus - especially ones that popup while you're typing, and only show for a split second because the focus is defaulted to a button and as you press the space bar you unwittingly 'OK' the dialog box!

I'm interested to see how Windows 7 works.

> Is there another accepted way of delivering notifications that I'm not thinking of?

Yes. Designing your software so that it minimizes the need for such notifications. E.g. Dropbox has not once shown me a popup yet it does some very critical file sync operations. Every other app I used before Dropbox kept annoying me with "do you REALLY want to sync this file even though the source is older?" Dropbox silently and smartly handles this (by keeping both copies of the file and naming them accordingly).

" Is it OK to pop up a notification bubble if you only do it every once in a while?"

No it isn't. For critical or really important messages that require user decisions, yes.

The idea of using pop-ups for notification of important or critical issues is not the problem though, he problem is so many teams within Microsoft and software vendors abused it. For example - "There are unused icons on your desktop."

Worse than that is the abuse by installing an icon in the notification area - have you seen the appalling state of many Windows users' notification area? 20 to 30 icons is not unheard of.

"More research and testing yielded a solution - the ribbon, which displayed different commands depending on what the PC user was doing. Then Larson-Green pushed Microsoft to get even more radical: to release Office 2007 without the hedge of a "classic mode" that would emulate the old look and feel for people who didn't like the changes."

The ribbon almost gives me a stroke every time I have to use office. I've always said that whoever developed it should be drug out into the street and shot. well apparently now we know who it was. The odd thing is that microsoft considered the ribbon a success?! even more stunningly they put ribbon lady in charge of their next OS. I swear it seems that microsofts enemies are making their top level corporate decisions.

This spells doom for windows 7.

I love the ribbon in Office 2007. It took a while to "get" the paradigm shift, but it works. As a developer, I don't use Office that much, but when I do, all of the commands I need are just a ribbon away. No more hunting through tabs of preferences or endless menus. It's also not just Microsoft that considers the ribbon a success, many other users do and they've won awards for the innovative UI.

"as a developer" this seems to be the problem with microsofts new user interfaces. The tech elite may like them, but they are impossible for the ordinary user. I posit that the vast majority of non technical end users utterly hate hate hate the ribbon. I imagine the same thing will happen with windows 7. In fact we've already been seeing it; the tech elite trying out the beta are liking it, which means that it will be unusable from the end user's perspective.

Everyday users never like change, sometimes change is needed to move forward.

If you honestly think that Apple doesn't do this, then you should compare the user experience from Jaguar to Leopard, while there is a lot of similarity, a LOT has changed as well, and people had to adjust to it.

Just because people don't like change, doesn't mean there should never be change. Isn't that part of the issue that holds innovation back when it comes to Microsoft? They could of done something drastic like Apple and dropped support for their old OS (Classic > OSX) instead of catering to the masses, and probably produced a better product, but they can't upset the masses who are 'used' to things.

Those who are new to any version of Office like the ribbon. For those who used previous versions and know where stuff is it takes a little bit of adjusting, but they end up liking it too.

No, you have it completely backwards. That was the problem with their old UI's. They were built by developers for developers with minimal thought towards everyday users. This was the first major shift away from that and it seems to have worked. It took into account how people used Office and is the result of countless focus groups and studies. As I said earlier, it takes a while to grok it, but once you do, there really is no going back.

My wife is an excellent example of a non-tech user. I surreptitiously installed Office 2007 on her computer when I upgraded her HD and reinstalled Windows. She hated it at first because it was different than what she was used to (Office XP). She hates change as most people do. But as she used it, she got used to the new UI and now has said she loves it and wishes more of her programs worked that way.

I hate to sound like a Microsoft homer, but seriously, the ribbon UI is one of the more innovative and fresh ideas to come out of Redmond lately.

The problem is when I want some relatively obscure command, like to record a macro. I had to google where the menu had gone because it was a feature you had to go into the system options to turn on. The ribbon looks pretty, but it's worse than the hidden "context-sensitive" menus that only show you the most used commands. The ribbon could be much better if it changed according to the user's knowledge and capabilities, and gave power users the more familiar list of everything.

Agreed. While I'm the type of person who wants to play with everything new and shiny, I had no problems adjusting to the ribbon, and I think it was a fantastic step forward in usability.

I think the ribbon(and all of Office 2k7) was a huge step forward for UI in general, and they executed it amazingly well. (I'm not a fanboy for any side of the OS world, I go between all of the OS's).

I agree.

On one hand I think it's great that they are trying something new and that trying is the only way they are going to find something that works better. In the case of the ribbon however, I think it falls flat. The reason for this is that it breaks many user interface conventions without significantly changing the context in which these conventions are used.

Imagine making a fundamental change in the way a car works without changing the roads the car drives on.

I disagree that productivity software should be designed to be easy for new/casual users, especially when this design potentially decreases the productivity of regular/professional users. This has somehow become the standard in user interface design in the last ten years and why we have seen little progress in the productivity gains these applications are supposed to provide.

You might be surprised to hear there was extensive user testing when designing the ribbon. Jensen Harris blogged about some of the design work here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F... Here's a presentation from MIX: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-o...

Fortunately you don't have the power to get people dragged out into the street and shot.

MS should take some time to write an HIG document and put it online for everyone to see. That would help a lot.

I also hope MS uses fewer "violent" colors in Win7. I'm a Mac user, and I love the way the Mac UI just recedes into the background with gray as it's dominating color. I don't like the reds and greens in the Vista UI. Of course, I could turn on classic mode, but why should I have to do that? I like the modern Aero UI, and I want to keep it - sans the violent colors.

All those horrid bright colors make the Vista UI distracting, especially for someone who spends a lot of time in CLI environments.

Is she being set up for the Carly Fiorina award?

>>> create a good user experience <<< >>> User interface is customer service for the computer <<< >>> centralized planning, in contrast with the old culture that let Windows subgroups set their own agendas <<<

seems like to me that not only are they moving towards a more "mac-like" focus on user interface, easier-to-use software. They are also copying apple's approach to software/hardware design, which is centralized around steve jobs.

oh come on

No kidding.

How is delivering a good user experience and designing a product-appropriate development process Apple's property? Shouldn't everyone who writes software try to do those things?

I think he was referring to the fact that they're trying to centralize more what everything is happening into the different sections in charge of developping windows and it's subsets.

The contrast here is being made between two development styles: A centralized, controlled, and focused production system at Apple, versus what Microsoft apparently had before Windows 7: A network of fiefdoms which fought each other over implementation and design details but nevertheless had to secure each others' approval for changes. This brought about stalemates and some truly bizarre outcomes. Here's the famous story about the Windows shutdown menu relating to this:

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

If Microsoft has overcome these [alleged] problems, it would represent a significant change in their development style.

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