Why hasn't Vista sold well? | Hacker News Reader

Why hasn't Vista sold well?

marco.org

88 pointsblasdel96 comments

Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP. It is the same thing as DVD vs Blu Ray. To a videophile, the difference is obvious. To a normal person, the difference is noticeable, but irrelevant.

Vista is blu ray and I suspect that windows 7 will be as well. I honestly think we've reached a point in desktop OS development where the average user simply does not care anymore. Things are moving onto the web now. People care about facebook doing a redesign, they do not really care what their desktop looks like beyond "does it work?".

Agree. For most people todays OS is 20 years ago's BIOS boot code.

20 years ago the BIOS was there to startup the OS so we could run all our desktop apps.

Now, the OS is there to start the browser so we can get to all our websites/apps.

This is precisely why the desktop OS market represents a huge opportunity right now. If not an opportunity for startups then for significant innovation by the existing players. Our usage has changed so much that the standard patterns implemented by all popular desktop OSes don't even come close to meeting users' needs any more.

I blogged about this recently (http://shoptalkapp.com/blog/2009/10/15/the-real-web-os), but I really hope that OS vendors are coming to the same realization. Creating an OS that is only useful for firing up a browser, which basically cripples the applications that run inside it, is pretty obviously a broken model. Yet that seems to be exactly what Google is working on with Chrome OS (admittedly, no one knows for sure what Chrome OS will look like at this point).

If I had the resources to make an OS that actually embraced the web, I would totally do it... hmm YC application time?

I'm not sure what you have in mind, and why you think a browser based OS is an broken model. Most people simply don't need an OS in the current form. They just need something light that can run a browser and handle the hardware.

For me, it seems pretty likely that the OS will continue to diminish in importance to the point that some machines just bootup into a browser and don't have any other capability.

The advantages for users are large - no virus issues, no resource hungry desktop apps, no issues if the computer breaks/hdd fails.

I can't see why/how the OS has a long term future in desktop computing for the common man.

And from a business perspective, I don't think there's much opportunity there.

I disagree.

Unless by OS you mean OSX/ARM, Android, WM7, etc

I see there being 3 computer systems people will use in the future. The small screen / communication device (Think iPhone/Android. fine for email, facebook, communication) The Big screen device. PVR/Set-top box/xbox/Apple TV. Consuming major media content/games/video The workstation. This is for content creation. Writing essays. Editing Videos. Recording Music. Photoshop. etc.

Number 1 and 2 run OS's - but you don't really see them. Number 3 is the computer as we know it - but most people don't need that! I think the computer market / OS's will exist - but they will/are declining in popularity. I don't see them being taken over by webOS etc, because I don't need a computer for that - I need an iphone.

I think this is it. Up until Windows 2K and XP the OS upgrades were marked improvements over previous versions. Not just that but hardware usually improved considerably from windows OS to windows OS. But XP finally was an extremely stable platform (finally).

Now you have large swathes of corporate users that can use older (2-5 year old) PCs that run XP well enough for their purposes. I used a 4 year old Dell Latitude with XP for years and it served its purpose fine with nothing more then a RAM upgrade. Prior to that I needed a new computer almost every 2 years.

There's no longer the same urgency to upgrade to newer HW and software for IT departments to justify upgrading computers with the same frequency. There still isn't really a good reason to upgrade until MS pulls support for XP.

You could even say that people are downgrading their hardware to run XP with the advent of netbooks.

First, I agree with you on the Vista argument. I never upgraded to Vista because there are absolutely ZERO reasons why I need anything more than XP. Most of what I do is in the browser, and my apps are running fine. I have ZERO reasons to upgrade to 7 as well.

However, you lost me on the Blu Ray argument. If you have a 19" TV, no, you are not going to notice, or care, if you are watching a movie in HD or not. But on 50"+, it's so awful watching a regular DVD it completely ruins the experience.

So, back to your response, if you have a small PC with basic needs like coding, website updates, browsing the web, email, upgrading the OS is a waste of time and money. But, if you have a big PC and big needs from your apps, you may have a reason to upgrade.

I'm going to politely disagree. I have been lucky enough to be able to afford a pretty sweet home theater setup. The screen is ~8ft (I don't know the exact size, sorry) and while I might care about the difference between DVD and Blu Ray on it, most people really just don't.

Once the "omg that is cool!" affect wears off, people forget about it. They certainly don't care enough to spend the thousands of dollars it takes to upgrade their theater systems to it. I suspect that they also won't want to spend the hundreds of dollars to upgrade their computing equipment.

The sad thing I have seen many times is when people buy a new HDTV, but don't bother to buy a progressive upscaling DVD player. They watch their dvd's with their old dvd players that output ntsc resolution. DVD's already come in a resolution that is higher then their tv (720x480) so having a player that can upscale or even just send the 720x480 to their htdv rather than sending a downscaled ntsc signal will give them the "wow" they can show their friends without having to spend money on a BluRay player and disks.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you fall in the "videophile" category. My wife doesn't usually notice the difference between fuzzy broadcast SD and 1080 HD unless I point it out -- let alone the difference between upconverted DVD and blu-ray.

> But, if you have a big PC and big needs from your apps, you may have a reason to upgrade.

I upgraded to Vista on my old laptop because I wanted the new Media Center, however my work PC qualifies as a "big PC with big needs" and it's doing just fine on XP.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you fall in the "videophile" category.

Maybe. I'm not a videophile, but watching Football in HD is amazing to the point that I think anyone who likes sports with large fields and/or small balls would appreciate it. With movies and television I don't think it's nearly so important.

I agree, sports in HD is nice but I find it acceptable on standard. For movies or anything else, it doesn't matter. VHS tapes are good enough for me, and in fact preferable because they are so much more user friendly than DVDs.

A while back my wife bought a cheap Lenovo. They pre-installed a lot of crappy software and Vista. It ran painfully slow.

I formatted it and installed Ubuntu 9 and she's been computing happily ever since. Here's what she cares about:

1) Does it run relatively fast? Is it stable? Is there a noticeable delay because I am waiting for some unnecessary GUI special effects?

2) Does it run Firefox? Can I read reddit, watch videos on YouTube/Hulu, and check my email?

shrug

I'm using Vista as a Media Center PC on an ancient T43 Thinkpad maxed out to a whopping 1.5G RAM. With all the GUI nonsense effects turned off, it runs just fine. Seems about the same as XP. And the Media Center is quite good. (Myth wasn't an option since there were no Linux drivers for my capture card, but I like the Media Center interface better anyway)

"Seems about the same as XP."

Not exactly a great reason to upgrade.

Agreed. The Media Center is a lot better. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

This is the big part of Microsoft's Vista problem: without software which uses the many system-level improvements, users don't see a benefit. As long as developers are targeting XP that's not going to change - it'd probably be worth it for them simply to give away free 7 upgrades at this point just to boost demand.

Does flash run well on 32-bit Ubuntu nowadays? I have a hard time with it on my 64-bit PC. Ubuntu and Hulu didn't play nice last I checked.

It works fine on firefox with 32bit ubuntu.

I've not had a problem with Flash on Linux in the past 6 years or so.

Yea, same here until I did this:

http://riteshm.blogspot.com/2009/05/fullscreen-flash-problem...

[edit: specifically it jerked in fullscreen]

How does it handle printer, camera, other devices requiring drivers?

Ubuntu handles older devices better than Vista, for the most part.

Most newer ones are fine, too. I installed Ubuntu on my mother's laptop and she's been very happy. Her camera works fine, just plug it in and it works. I've not had any issues installing printers.

They had a GPS device they wanted to use, and that didn't work since the driver is very specific and it's not very common. For most purposes, though, it's quite easy to set up.

Even though it's gotten a little better in recent years (presumably because more vendors are releasing Linux drivers), the trick is really to make sure whatever device you want to use is Linux-compatible before you get it.

Following that rule, I haven't had any problems recently, running Linux on a machine that doesn't come with it pre-installed.

That's very true. And here I am, such a dunce for buying a scanner without checking for compatibility.

I figured Canon would be up to speed by now, but unfortunately not so. Fortunately scanners are cheap. No more Canon for me.

> Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP.

I get your point here and I agree, but... in many ways, it was not only not much better than XP, but quite a bit worse. It took more memory, it crashed more often, it didn't run with (whatever peripheral you have that worked fine before), it was slower, it moved things into other places you couldn't find them, etc.

With that going against you, you have to REALLY step up other areas to compensate, and as you say, Vista simply didn't.

Or, it was to reset the bar so low that Win 7 could do almost anything to be considered "great"... =) (No, I don't believe that.)

Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP

Contrast this with Apple. They seem to have realized this and they have been putting things in recent OS releases that are truly useful and nifty. (Spotlight, Time Machine, Quick Look, to name a few.)

The brilliant part of Apple's strategy is that they control the hardware, so they can afford to do a maintenance/64-bit prep release like Snow Leopard that's light on new features because there's no bargain basement Mac clone shop to eat into their sales if the new OS release requires less hardware.

With Microsoft there's a perverse incentive to keep upping the system requirements. I'm not saying they do it consciously, but if this theory of why no one upgraded is correct then it puts MS in a very difficult position.

People rush to upgrade macos the day it is released. Upgrade is cheap for em too. Oh and no need to format (yea beat that microsoft)

Trying a mac os upgrade is not a big deal, you can rollback and all works fine. Do that with windows let me know how ot goes. I never upgraded because I didn't feel like formatting I'm just lazy and if I don't like it I gota spend another day installing xp? Aaaagh.

I used it a bit it is actually quite an improvement on xp in terms of simple administration like setting up wifi and getting meaningful error messages. Not a big fan of the new start menu. Performance on 1gb of ram is attrocious. Why would they even sell it that way?

Or for some people a significant degradation in the quality of the user exepience, combined with a significant increase in the cost of the hardware required. And what benefit does the latter give the ordinary user? Nothing, that I can tell. I have Win XP running on a 4-year old laptop and it's fine. My mom bought a new laptop with Vista about a year ago, and it's horrible. So horrible it literally makes me yell when I'm forced to help her with it. It is so bad I can't help but think that whoever made it does not "eat their own dog food". Apple eats their own dog food. That is probably why their user experience rocks.

Because of the above, I will be getting her onto a Mac laptop as soon as I can.

offers a marginal improvement of XP

I have to disagree. I think that computer users have become progressively more savvy over the years. I think users would certainly welcome an OS that was a small but notable improvement over the fairly good XP. The reason that Vista failed was it was noticeably worse than XP. Not a small improvement, not any improvement. Worse.

A notable disfunction among Vista's many disfunctions is the sensation that you are not in charge of the computer. The computer brings up all sort of things in an opaque fashion and this entirely annoying to anyone who expects to use the computer to accomplish a task since you don't know what roadblock will appear in your way.

There is a certain school of interface double speak which constantly bleats "Of course an experienced user might be bother by feature X but this is actually comforting to an average user (who is a combination moron, chump and victim, it seems)."

Vista was one place where the majority of computer users gratifyingly refused be this "average user". I hope this portends well for the future.

we've reached a point in desktop OS development where the average user simply does not care anymore.

It's very true. Even the browser is not a matter anymore. That is because computers became mainstream long ago, and an average user of internet nowadays is hardly able to read English (think about all development countries). So, simplicity with minimalism and some visual effects (Chrome, iPhone) is all what they needed.

Ask people around the world what is computer and internet? The answers would be - email (gmail, hotmail, yahoo) and google and facebook, hi5, and regional (Chinese, Japanese, Russian) social networks. What OS you're talking about?!

Vista didn't sell well because most of the good changes were under the hood and most of the bad changes were visible and affected usability negatively.

Vista made some good advances. For example, the number one cause of hard crashes (blue screens) in Windows 2k/XP has been video driver crashes. In Vista and Win7 if the video driver crashes the OS can recover, instead of lost work and frustration as your computer reboots you get a little pop-up in the system tray. Yet few users appreciate this because MS is bad at marketing this sort of thing.

Out of the box, Vista's default configuration made for a hostile user experience for both novice and sophisticated users. Vista was still a decent OS upgrade over XP, but it took a lot of work (in learning and reconfiguring Vista) to get to the point where it was worthwhile.

Moreover, there quickly sprouted up a negative user impression of Vista, even among those who had never used it. Given that there was little in Vista that was "must have", this hurt sales greatly. In reality Vista was as much, if not more, of an upgrade over XP as XP was over 2000 (another flawed, but overall worthwhile OS upgrade). Yet excessive negative public opinion squelched the regular upgrade path.

Overall, Vista's lack of success was a boon to MS because it forced them to buckle down and really succeed with Windows 7. It's better to fail spectacularly and get a wake up call than to fail a little more with each release until your product is irrelevant and unprofitable. Win7 is a truly worthwhile OS upgrade, MS should thank whatever deity that they got a kick in the pants when they did.

In Vista and Win7 if the video driver crashes the OS can recover, instead of lost work and frustration as your computer reboots you get a little pop-up in the system tray. Yet few users appreciate this because MS is bad at marketing this sort of thing.

i'm not sure how you would market this to the non-geek audience without it sounding something like this... now when windows crashes you won't lose work.

> the number one cause of hard crashes (blue screens) in Windows 2k/XP has been video driver crashes

Where did you get this from ? A reference would be nice.

The Wikipedia article mentions it, but the source there is MS themselves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death

I've read it other places however, and generally agree that crappy software/driver is typically the cause of most Windows crashes. Never had a barebones box BSOD on me.

I've never seen figures for 2k/XP, but here are some for Vista from when it was relatively new: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/vista-capable-l...

I don't know on windows, but it certainly holds true across the fence in linuxland.

So much even, that the kernel team implemented a feature specifically so they wouldn't have to deal with crash reports from people who run binary drivers. (Kernel tainting)

It's an issue of lack of economic incentive: Few users even know to attribute crashes to drivers; when the os goes down, they blame the os. The driver writers work at the driver until it reliably works for them, then ship it and forget about it. Demanding for all our drivers to be gpl seems to be a working solution.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsibl...

NVidia caused 30% of Vista crashes in the early Vista days.

That graph is by incident, to make it meaningful you'd have to normalize by distribution. In an absolute sense Nvidia caused a lot more driver problems than others but if you don't weigh that with the relationships between the number of installations then it's hard to say that the problem was an Nvidia problem or that there are serious issues with the Vista driver architecture because all manufacturers had these issues.

I'm not current on the relative distributions of say Nvidia vs ATI, but all the machine here have either Nvidia or Intel graphics in them, not a single ATI one.

Don't forget about creative's sound drivers and such.

MS is doing the right thing. They showed Windows 7 to the world for a year. Gave people public testing (to get ppl excited) and now are doing major stability tests before release.

I heard wonderful things about Win7. So honestly its a good thing. About time MS got a kick in the shin about making shitty operating systems. If they bounce back, they are a good company, and I don't doubt they will. Apple can't ride the "cool" wave forever.

That's all from previous age. What configuration? What drivers?! Computer should be as simple as mobile phone (almost everyone on the planet are familiar with). Apple got the point, while Microsoft still trying to impress people with variety of "cool features". Just consider IE's and Safaris's UI.

"However, with an estimated 330 million internet users as of January 2009, it has been announced that Vista usage had surpassed Microsoft’s pre-launch two-year-out expectations of achieving 200 million users.".

The question isn't why hasn't Vista sold well, it's why do people think it hasn't sold well?

I personally think that Vista do well because it is bundled with PCs and laptops (no other reason). If Vista competed with XP I doubt that it would will.

A lot of lay people have problems with Vista. Stupid things such as the box that comes up if you want to install anything and speed. People also got used to XP.

IMHO I don't think that a lot of people upgraded XP to Vista. Operating systems have become a commodity in a large part.

How many of those numbers are new PC sales and how many are actual upgrades?

No idea. It occurred to me after I posted that the question might be "why were Microsoft's expectations so low".

Does that even matter? People always point to how many new OS purchases were via new machine buys but hasn't that always been the case? And even if it weren't does it matter how the OS gets on the machine? What's the distribution among Mac users, is the upgrade rate higher?

I think it matters because the OP's thesis is that XP is "good enough" and that Vista's competition is XP, not OS X. If Microsoft allows its HW sluts^H^H^H^H partners to offer a choice between XP and Vista with new machines, Vista sales reflect people choosing Vista. But if Microsoft doesn't allow their partners to sell new machines with XP, the sales numbers appear high but those number don't reflect anything except a large number of people that would have bought XP any ways.

In fact, the numbers are crazy-bad with new machines, because some vendors insisted on the right to sell XP, and Microsoft gave them the right to downgrade Vista machines to XP. So even if a large corporate customer buys 1,000 systems with XP on them, Microsoft records it as 1,000 Vista sales!

I'm interested in sales reflecting choice, but it is not clear to me how Microsoft's accounting practices help us understand that at all.

I was pleasantly surprised that this article was not simply bashing Vista (whether it could do so justifiably or not), but rather focused on the observation that nowadays there's hardly ever a reason for average computer users to upgrade their OS, discounting the one you get when buying a new computer.

However, I'm unsure whether to agree with interpret his assertion, "The upgrade market for average PC owners is dead." This may well be true for PCs, but I've known a lot of Mac users over the years who have shelled out for OS upgrades. Sometimes they've been fairly technical people, sometimes not. I wonder how Apple's numbers would compare to Microsoft's in the home PC market if you adjusted for technical know-how.

I think a lot of Apple upgraders treat it like dues to a club membership. Apple has done an outstanding job of making their customers feel like they belong to an exclusive club (Microsoft obviously has not!).

I'm not a huge apple fan (but I use Macs) and haven't felt the SLIGHTEST itch to upgrade to Snow Leopard. There's just no OS pain for me that it solves.

Me neither. There won't be until Mac developers get to grips with GCD. Then there will be some compelling reasons.

How about shipping with llvm?

Hmm? llvm has been shipping in various forms since 10.4 at least.

1. Snow Leopard is faster than the previous OS version. Not something you see in the Microsoft universe.

2. Snow Leopard has added protection against hacks and bugs in e.g. Safari.

3. A lot of small UI nuisances have been fixed. See http://finerthingsinmac.com/ It simply feels more polished and well-designed.

So Snow Leopard is not a revolution with tons of checkbox features, but more like a tune-up for your car: it can still drive to/from work without, but it feels better when the motor runs smoothly.

Could we please stop this Apple users bashing: that Apple users are dimwits that only buys Macs due to the glimmer? It is so 90'ies.

Um, where did webwright bash Apple users?

Well, webwright implied that many Apple users drink the marketing Kool-Aid.

But I don't think that makes them dimwits. Blatantly abusing the apostrophe, on the other hand...

2. Snow Leopard has added protection against hacks and bugs in e.g. Safari.

Didn't Snow Leopard ship with a version of Flash with known vulnerabilities? :p

/bash

Snow Leopard shipped a version of Flash which (may) have been vulnerable and which was the latest version available at the time the Snow Leopard GM was pressed, yes. And then they updated it.

Apple OS upgrades have also been generally priced much more reasonably than Microsoft's.

If Vista had been a $29 upgrade instead of a $299 upgrade, I think it might have had a lot more uptake, and people would be less likely to complain if it were not "perfect". For $29 people don't expect as much as they do for $299+.

Yeah, nobody else has mentioned price. Vista is / was expensive! Like half a new computer expensive. Why would anyone buy it for an old PC at that price? Win 7 is too expensive as well. MS just doesn't seem to care about retail sales at all, let alone upgrade. As far as I can tell they actually price products to kill that market and force everyone into OEM sales (where they have no obligations for support).

Microsoft is forced to price Windows higher than OSX, because their product is the actual OS, whereas Apple makes their money on the hardware.

Does Microsoft price Windows higher OSX? What is the average OEM price of Windows? What is the premium that Apple targets based on the OS part of their user experience? I think the OEM price of Windows XP on my NetBook was something like $15.

No, not really. The upgrade price for either OS is about $130 retail. The difference is that MS is talented at producing bad PR by listing the 'full' retail MSRP at some ridiculous price that no one ever actually pays.

If Microsoft had done 10.6, it would be a service pack and would be free. I'm surprised so many people paid $29 for it.

Don't forget 10.6 drops PowerPC support meaning for many users a the price of a 10.6 upgrade is not $29 but $599+ (the price of a mac mini) and Apple were still selling PowerPC macs in 2006.

Isn't Window 7 a "service pack" for Vista?

Companies will charge more if they can, and Microsoft can.

It is also worth noting why MS Service Packs have been free: it has been the case in the past that the released OS is not ready. Hence the reason why corporate IT departments used to wait for at least a service pack before installation.

OS X pricing hopefully will help bring the cost of windows down. It's clear to see we've been fleeced for years.

One of the biggest mistakes with Windows Vista was the product strategy. Most consumers probably recognize that the latest version has improvements that will make their experience faster, more secure, etc, but get bogged down when trying to make the purchase.

Since most people don't use the features of their operating system anyway, why would anyone need to compare "home basic" (reads: worse than what you have now), "home premium" (for better homes?), "business" (what kind of business? filmmaking or accounting?), and "ultimate" (320 bucks for windows?)

Can't I just pay you for the version that works like what I have now but better?

I have a theory that one of the things hurting the PC industry is the availability of cheap, easy, external storage. There was a time only a few years ago when the average mainstream PC user who is scared to open their computer had basically no options for expanding storage. They would just go buy a new PC every few years and get a bigger HD included. Today you spend $99, plug-in a cable, and you're all set.

The bigger issue though is there's no new technologies out there driving hardware sales. Arguably things like USB2, CD/DVD burners, decent sized LCD displays, etc were big practical things that could drive a customer to go buy a new computer. What do we have today? BluRay? 802.11N? Not good enough for the mainstream. USB3 could be an important technology to drive hardware sales but we're probably still a few years away from seeing its real impact.

Was there ever an application released that took advantage of Vista and didn't run on XP? On the Mac side, there are a fair number of programs that needed 10.5.

Shhh no one is supposed to know about this little nugget of Apple genius.

There's a reason Apple does yearly OSX updates, think of how many versions Mac users have had to buy in the last 7-8 years in the time it took MS to release just two OS's.

MS's strong suit has always been it's compatibility which has the side effect of killing one of the 'reasons' to upgrade.

If that's Microsofts strong suit, they really don't have much going for them. Upgrading to Vista was horrific!

As a user and developer, I much prefer annual/biennial releases because in both cases, I get an continually improving OS, but also upgrades are far easier to deal with. And anyway, you'd have a hard time finding any OSX user in 2007 who preferred using OSX 10.0, whereas in the Windows camp, everyone was in that situation, using a 6 year old OS. Well, 8 year old now…

"What if the reason why most PCs are still running XP has nothing to do with whether Vista is “good” or “bad”, but rather is the result of indifference on the part of whoever owns these untold millions of XP machines, be they at home or in a corporate IT environment. I.e., that switching to Vista, regardless of Vista’s merits, seemed like too much work and too much new stuff to learn;"

No, no and no. Vista is just horrible, usability wise. I bought a laptop for my parents, and I curse I didn't wipe it out, and install xp instead. I get twice more "how do i do this' request, than I got with XP.

Finally, last month my dad asked me if I could install the older OS he had on the other computer, as he liked XP much better.

Horrible product.

I have used it personally at work, and at my home computer I sticked with XP.

Change the theme to XP/Classic and you'll find there really isn't much to learn.

Gotta agree. I prefer Vista to XP. Maybe I'm in the minority, but since the latest service pack, it seems rock solid.

Of course, I also know how to remove malware or avoid it in the first place, and how to actually uninstall programs/clean the registry.

Bullshit. We have a machine here with Vista we use for testing, it is torture to try to get anyone to use that machine. I won't, unless I have to.

Vista is a piece of shit. I can't belive that any reasonable person would say otherwise. Maybe 7 ain't so shit, but that is not high praise.

Because Vista requires at least 2GB of memory and/or a complete machine upgrade. When it came out virtually no one (other than gamer geeks) had a machine capable of running it. The press was so bad that few wanted to.

Even now I see machines with only 1GB of memory and Vista, and I have seen friends of mine sold laptops from reputable companies like HP with only 1GB of memory. Those machines do not work in any way shape or form how a new machine in 2009 should work.

And then there is netbooks which can really only run XP partly because they only come with 1GB of memory.

I think this combined with as the article said there is really nothing new in Vista that people really care about. For most people typing facebook.com in somewhere, is all they want from their home PC.

Through the lens of the average user fearing OS updates, the whole "online application" makes a lot more sense. These average users can be more comfortable with online applications because there is no update that the end user is responsible for (or that they know about).

Also, when they replace their computer in order to "get rid of" their malware, all of their online applications are still there.

I'd never thought of web applications from this perspective before, but it occurs to me that maybe we can thank Microsoft's horrible upgrade path in the early '00s for the large market for online applications today.

Another factor is automatic updates which stream down fixes constantly to XP machines- something that 98 and 95 never had. The jumps from 95 to 98 and 98 to XP usually meant a clean, virus-free OS. XP has remained solid because of the ability to update it - something only realistic with larger broadband adoption. I personally can't wait until your average store-bought computer is some dumb terminal that boots off of a network. Less questions from friends, acquaintences, etc when all of their sheah's in the cloud.

DirectX 10 was one of the few "hooks" or killer features Microsoft assigned only to Vista. I'm wondering if they should have spent more time looking for similar killer features before shipping.

I tried really hard to make an old XP machine last until Win 7 came out, but the hard drive decided otherwise. Having heard too many horror stories about Vista the first thing I did with the cheapest replacement machine money could buy was spend 4 hours going through 99 performance hacks for Vista and deciding which to install. I would say it is now adequate, while still having a few Vista annoyances.

I upgraded my work desktop to Win 7 last week. It's what Vista should have been.

Do share the url for your performance hacks. Still have some Vista machines that could use a tweak.

Black Viper guides still relevant?

This is what I used http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2238

Along with the other reasons, I think price plays an important part of the upgrade decision as well. Several years ago I upgraded a PC from Windows 98 to XP but only after I found the upgrade for under $50. Now, in addition to my 2 XP desktops, XP laptop, and my primary Vista desktop, only the latter will I even consider upgrading. However, looking at a $120 upgrade to 7 I have to decide is it really worth it - and right now my thinking is it's not.

This doesn't explain all the downgrades to XP people bought, but otherwise summarizes the situation well

Yeah, people just don't care. That's the thing now. They're scared of new stuff and if the old stuff still works, even if it's slow/crappy/whatever, they'll fight tooth and nail to keep everything exactly the same.

Maybe it's a problem or maybe it's not, I don't know.

But people have never really cared. And they've always been scared of change.

XP had the same 'why upgrade?' problem as Vista when it showed up; despite following on the heels of the ME train wreck. People were still largely satisfied with 98SE and didn't see a compelling reason to upgrade.

But eventually they did buy newer, faster hardware and peripherals. Microsoft wisely never patched improved USB and WiFi support into 98, so people learned to tolerate XP.

The biggest difference now, is that there isn't a very compelling argument for new hardware either. Particularly amidst the Current Economic Conditions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_vs_PC

Because vista's drivers were not solid during release.

Bsods killed it

High spec requirements killed it

People selling pcs with less than 2 gigs of ram killed it

And the gains the user got were overshadowed by shitty performance, bsods, and the software they need not working. Not to mention the whole upgrade to a priucier version to get the nice ui feature you want.

Also the netbooks can't handle vista so that entire market died.

Also harder to priate = noone using it at home = not evangelizing at work :P

Interestingly, Apple handles all these problems (save the last one) by having full control of the hardware. This is one of the reasons why Apple OSX comes off as much more stable. MS needs to design an OS that can work with everything. It's inherently easier to design an operating system where there is a small(er) set of variations. Whether this is the right way to go over the long haul is yet to be determined.

This is why I switched back to Mac when OS X came out (after the IE6 beta trashed my HD, and I didn't have a floppy of CD-Rom driver, so I had to reinstall Win95 from 18 floppy disks, ugh). Yes, I pay a premium for hardware, and yes, Apple abandons my old hardware in 3-4 years, and selection of hardware and software is not what it is in the Windows world.

However in exchange for that, I get real progress in the software, and when something inevitable go wrong, chances are someone else has had the problem because there's such a limited range of configuration options. As a professional developer it's pretty easy to justify the Apple tax on that basis alone.

Actually, Apple has a good track record of supporting old hardware for years.

They just ended that record with the Snow Leopard/Intel requirement, but that seems like a reasonable thing to do.

And your old PPC hardware runs fine with 10.5.

It's not terrible, but it's nowhere near as good as Microsoft. This is just my impression after owning lots of Apple hardware since 1985... I got left out in the cold a lot.

Any tips on installing Vista on my Alpha?

> It's inherently easier to design an operating system where there is a small(er) set of variations.

It's not quite that simple. I spend a fair amount of time writing OSX drivers for, erm, non-Jobsian hardware. With a little hackery (not even programming-level hackery these days), OSX can be remarkably stable on a wide range of system configurations.

Specifically, Apple seems to ship (and test?) drivers for a good deal more hardware than you'd expect. Point example: the 8800GT card that they ship with the Mac Pro--the driver actually works on any 8x00* card, as long as you can disable the check. The GMA950 driver works on a wide range of Intel cards. The ATL1e driver works on a lot of Atheros chipsets. AppleHDA works on a lot of sound cards (If your motherboard has an Intel chipset, it probably works with minimal hackery). Similar to the way Linux drivers work, OSX drivers tend to cover lots of similar hardware. So AppleHDA might replace 100 separate windows drivers for separate sound cards, and the big ones even do several chipset companies.

Lots of the hardware work (some of which makes it into mainline OSX) is done by the Darwin people. I've seen tons of straight-up ports from Linux (SpeedStep for non-Core2Duo processors, for example). There are lots more.

All of that to say, the OSX hardware landscape is far beyond the four-at-a-time macs that Apple actually ships. With respect to driver support, OSX isn't far behind Linux. I'd put OSX's superior reliability as a consequence of their architecture decisions rather than their (purportedly-lack-of) hardware support.

The real sunk cost with hardware support isn't driver development, (paying 4 grad students $400k) but paying people to answer the phones and troubleshoot the devices, paying FedEx to ship the things around, EETs to diagnose and desolder, somebody to write the technical documentation, Geniuses to take tests on the part numbers, etc. Guarantee Apple tests lots of hardware they never end up shipping because it can't clear the reliability hurdles; all those things need drivers.

If Apple takes it upon themselves to write/test drivers VS relying only on the manufactures to do it, then you are sure that since apple has a stake in it, they will test it well. This is a consequence of controlling what hardware goes into your computer. If you want to plug your soundcard into a mac, better get in touch with apple. Since they know about all the sound drivers, video drivers, etc, they can group where necessary. Being *nix based also gives benefits of having open source drivers.

In any case how many different drivers are out there for Windows Sound? How many are out there for Linux? Bash ALSA or OSS all you want, but they support a ton of hardware, port that sort of support to windows or mac and you got yourself ONE driver heavily tested by freaken' everyone which makes debugging easier with a central point of service.

Hmm. Because it's steaming pile of shit, perhaps?

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