Why Vista Will Fail
Setting aside for the moment that I am pretty anti-Microsoft, the more I look at the news on the upcoming Windows Vista the more I seem to think that this is going to be a monumental failure. I think the very premise of Vista is wrong. The real reason Microsoft is releasing a new version of Windows is not because they have something worth saying, its because they need some reason to justify keeping the Windows business unit around. In any matter, that was purely speculation, there are some solid reasons why Vista will flop.
Complete lack of innovation. This is pretty subjective but when I look at what Vista is it smacks of Windows XP trying to catch up to Mac OS, and not doing a very good job of it at that. What does Vista really bring to the operating system market? What is new? Well they did revamp the user interface (or “user experience” for marketing people) however what value does this add? I have got to say that in my opinion XP is ugly, the blue new-style theme takes up too much screen real estate and the gray is… well… gray. The new UI look is kinda cool but realistically your going to need a pretty beefy computer to enable all the transparency effects anyhow, plus from what I have seen of Vista its still not nearly as sexy as OS X. What else? Well there is the typical Microsoft-style half-assed attempt to duplicate iLife. Windows “entertainment” applications have always seemed inferior to everyone else, thats why most serious Windows users use Winamp or iTunes instead of Media player. I will refrain from ripping on IE 7 and Outlook Express, everyone else on the internet beat me to it.
Crappy security. Sure, Microsoft touts Vista as being the most secure operating system they have ever written. Anybody want to take bets on how long it takes for the black hats to rip it a new one? My money is on 2-3 months. It also seems that Microsoft has added a lot of security features that mean well but haven’t been well thought out. For example, patch guard, the system that is supposed to protect the kernel from patching. The only problem is that this makes it just that much harder for people to write drivers for Windows and do more advanced processing that could take advantage of patching the kernel instead of using the slower APIs. Plus, if Windows Defender is the best indication of the best Microsoft can do to prevent spyware then we are in very sad shape indeed.
Licensing and validation. This is a pretty big hot-spot issue for me. It seems like with every new release of Windows Microsoft adds more licensing security to their product. Every time I mention this it never fails that someone points out that Microsoft makes the most pirated software in the world which may or may not be true but there have got to be better ways of dealing with this. The more activation and validation they build into their products the more I feel like my computer is treating me like a criminal. Also, it really rubs me the wrong way when a vendor thinks they should be able to dictate their wishes to a customer. Earth to Microsoft, I am licensing the product from you which means I should be in control of what I do with it not you. Sigh… I could go on forever on this one but it tends to become a cyclical argument loaded with fallacies that neither side really ever wins. The main point is that when the software treats me like a criminal on my own computer that is a bad thing which consumers should speak out against.
Given all those reasons and also noting that desktop Linux is starting to become a viable alternative to Windows thanks to Ubuntu I would say that Vista is going to flop. People are starting to realize that all the really cool stuff is happening in the Apple and Linux circles and are starting to adopt alternatives to Windows.
Full Disclosure: I am primarily a very happy Gentoo Linux user who also happens to keep a Windows XP computer and a Macintosh around for fun. I use Windows primarily at my day job and I administer a mixed Windows/Linux network as a consultant. I am heavily biased against Windows for many reasons.
I’m surprised it took redmond this long to copy osx myself… at least they don’t have a perpetual license to it though…
luke said this on November 15th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Vista WILL flop. It’s to demanding. Look at all the people who hung on to windows 2000 when windows XP came out because there Pentium 3 with 256mb ram couldnt handle it. XP minimal requirments weren’t that high either. Now take a look at what Vista requires. Now I will need at least a $200 graphics card to run it. I already have a better card now but gone will be the days of the $389 Walmart special PC. I expect to see “standard” PCs starting in the $800-1000 range for Vista due to the graphics. It’s just a bunch of bells and wistles. Think about this. What can XP do now that Windows 98 couldn’t? Not much. Now Intel want’s to Bloat up another OS with little if any gains in function.
-J
jeff said this on December 17th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Vista pretty much HAS to flop. Let’s be honest here — Muckro$loth was built on the premise that the “Average” computer user was somewhat less intelligent than a brain-dead Chimpanzee on crack. Quite simply, that’s less and less true — if for no other reason than most places’ “tech support” drones are becoming worse and worse over time.
With as many people are doing p2p stuff (no matter what you may think of that scene), Vista is going to be a giant pain in the ass for them, simply because it’s going to really cramp what vast numbers of people want to do with their systems. (I sincerely doubt that the massive amounts of cracked software and ‘pirated’ movies and whatnot on the p2p networks and elsewhere is JUST because of ‘Warez D00ds”). Vista is pretty much the last gasp of the old paradigm view that the “end-user” is oblivious. It will be an infinitely better world if Muckro$loth self-destructs (like is should.) Anybody who actually “upgrades’ to Vista frankly deserves what they get.
Henry Emrich said this on December 23rd, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Why bother with Vista at all, and its OSX-tainted interface?
If it compels you to use a 512MB vid card, dozens of Gb’s worth of harddrive space, 4GB’s of RAM, 4ghz dual core processor to get some 3d version of a damned rolodex running, as well as to see the desktop through some pointless translucent window toolbars… then be that stupid.
An operating system is just that… to operate. Not to require a high-end gaming rig just to run the thing. I want to point, click, and run my application. Anything else is just hogging up valuable system resources and wasting my performance along with cash.
Or at least try and be less stupid by attempting to look cool by installing a x86 version of OSX on your PC, which wont really grab you any fame as its fairly easy to do. Then again, this may make you look even more dumb to your peers… as many would giggle at the fact that some dorky n00b spent useless hours of his life to install OSX on a PC to begin with.
So be smart… use Linux
Beavermatic said this on January 2nd, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I totally agree with you, Vista is going to be M*crosoft’s self-destruction. Because not everyone is going to invest $2000 in a Vista-capable system just to type up some letters in W*rd OpenOffice.org while listening to music in the background (as I do). And I’m not going to do that either.
As a very enthousiastic Debian GNU/Linux user, and heavily biased against Microsoft indeed, just like you, I can say that even Windows XP hogs a lot of resources, making my Pentium IV act like a Pentium II when I forget to defragment and do things like that. All this while KDE neatly opens every application I ask him to open, in less than a tenth of a second. So I already imagine myself on the same box running Vista, dozing off as if I was running the thing on my 486.
Anyway, you should have a skim through that piece of text which explains the biggest issues of the DRM support in V*sta, I bet you’ll be frightened. My point of view is simple: I want my computer to do as I tell him to do, I don’t want some maniac in Redmond control my computer located in Europe.
M*cr*s*ft is building its own coffin. All the specs that Vista demand are just too much, even for the computers sold now. In fact, they are giving people more and more reasons to switch to Linux (or Apple). And everything will finish in a big Blue Screen of Death.
Marx0r said this on January 13th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
pessimistic view.Obviously Linux is great but windows have greater share of desktop market. People want good user interface and vast range of applications to run on pc. I am quiet sure that windows applications are more in number than linux applications.
now ms is extending it’s support of windows xp until 2009 so upto that time vista will make it’s market.I don’t think MS is idiot.These guys are very clever to pull users money from their pocket and how to market their product.
shivraj said this on January 27th, 2007 at 1:30 am
While I’d agree that Vista with all its new “features” could be a major nail to M$’s coffin, I don’t think Vista will close the coffin yet.
People will moan about hardware requirements and all the DRM and content protection issues, but they’ll eventually put up with it. Companies will take a little longer to swallow the toad, but my guess is that only few of them will turn to alternative products like OS X or Linux.
That said, most companies with a narrower scope of PC usage (Office-Apps, email, Web-Browsing) will probably be better positioned to get away from M$ than the average Joe who wants to play the latest games and thus will need Vista since there are no plans for a DX10 downport to XP so far.
M$ will try to get the consumer market. Consumers don’t have a lobby, and after some initial quarreling Vista will be accepted.
Once that has happened, Companies will have follow in order to produce Vista-compatible software to profit from the mass market.
I would like to believe that Vista is going to kill M$, but I’ve seen to much crap being successfully pushed down consumers’ throats.
ZAS said this on January 28th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
I’ve been trying to keep up with the times with Windows Vista. I’ve downloaded the Evaluation copy when it was available online for free and installed it onto a Pentium 4 2.0GHz computer with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. The machine would BREEZE when it would run Windows XP, and it was crippling the machine after I installed Windows Vista RC1 on it. I tried to play a DVD on it and it would be lagging – I couldn’t believe it ! I could be doing 20 things in Windows XP and the DVD would still play fine. I find that Microsoft had really screwed up Windows Vista because of the hardware that it requires (a killer graphics card, a really modern processor, and 1GB of RAM, which really only applies to computers made within the past year or so) and makes almost every other computer, which is mostly all of the Windows XP computers starting around 6 years ago – all useless now. I think they’re decent machines, and that everyone will have to purchase new ones just to run Windows Vista with. I have an iMac with OS X on it, and it’s gorgeous. I love how the Mac handles it’s applications on that computer, which is running at 500MHz. The interface is a tad better than Vista’s and doesn’t require as many resources. I’ve gotta give it to Apple on that. I’m going to be sticking to my Windows XP machine until I can no longer run on this, for which I think I’ll have to buy new, which will run with Windows Vista. In a way I think Microsoft is killing their global market as the people in Africa are very poor and are mainly operating on Pentium 2 machines, ones that only can run Windows 98 and Windows 2000. That kills the market for a lot of those countries (remember the $100 laptop ? one laptop per child ?) for where a fast computer would be hard to come across. I’ve been a Windows fan for quite awhile now, and I’m thinking about looking into Linux (I’ve honestly never tried it) and love how Apple had done their work with OS X. I agree with what the writer of this article had written about with how the new activation rules make it seem like that I’m a criminal. I’ve heard today in my Computer Repair class that the chip manufacturers are assigning numbers to the chips that are made in a computer. Windows Vista will only allow itself to install on a certain computer once, and after that one time, it will catch you and have you buy another copy of it. For example, if your hard drive went bad, you buy another, and you aren’t able to install Windows Vista on that computer again because the chip in the motherboard doesn’t match up with the hard drive, knowing that it’s a different hardware profile, and will have you buy another copy. No one is going to pay $400.00 for Windows Vista Ultimate. I’d give it around a month before it gets cracked. If there’s a will, there’s a way. And I think that Microsoft is setting themselves up in a death trap with Vista on everything that I had mentioned. I hope that Windows Vista will fail, where nobody would buy it, because of those reasons. I am in full support of this blog entry and am against Vista for what it stands for.
izcool said this on February 1st, 2007 at 2:21 am
I think Vista will fail because most Americans seem to be middle class to poor (thanks to the rich of course). So it will either be “pirated” (I don’t believe in fairy tale’s copyright), or more likely XP will continue to be copied. Also, many people know that Litestep and DesktopX can make XP into something that is apparently much better then Vista. And litestep is free right?
Vista is pointless. Microsoft would have done better to make themes for desktopx and litestep and sell them, WHILE working on holographic technology and brain-to- -computer-interfaces.
rapidfire said this on February 11th, 2007 at 4:26 pm