Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

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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 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.

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...

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.

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