Has Microsoft Disavowed Vista?

[sdowney717]

Author suggests Vista business is a failure.
And moving onto a linux system is better.

http://www.eweek.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=45979&Itemid=28&limit=&limitstart=&mosmsg=Thanks%20For%20Your%20Vote

"Technically, Vista is pure misery. It eats system resources like an elephant does peanuts, Windows applications break and its so-called improved security is a joke. I know it. You know it. Even Microsoft's most devoted yes-men know it--although they won't admit it--and perhaps Microsoft knows it as well."

[forrestcupp]

It's a biased crock.

Gutsy has only been out for 3.5 months and they are already testing Hardy and getting ready for it's release in April. Has Canonical already given up on Gutsy. Maybe they know Gutsy was a failure, but they're not willing to admit it.

Windows 7 isn't going to be released until the beginning of 2010. That's a 3 year period between releases. People were mad last time when they had to wait 5 years between releases. Now people are flaming MS because they are only waiting 3 years, so Vista must have been a flop.

If MS is putting out a new OS that has been completely reworked from the ground up, including the kernel, I hope they're already working hard on it.

[Lostincyberspace]

I think Vista was a ploy for Microsoft just like ME they put out a crap piece of software and then come out with a decent version that seems great.

[NJC]

I think Vista was a ploy for Microsoft just like ME they put out a crap piece of software and then come out with a decent version that seems great.

Software by quality contrast! I like it .. although their shareholders wouldn't think it's a great idea so probably untrue. MS had to get Vista out - 1/2 baked or not. And yes, businesses ARE skipping it. I just asked our IT dept (company size >400) and he said they are skipping Vista and rolling out XP and Office 2003 on new machines.

[LightB]

To the person who is eagerly expecting "Windows 7" in 2010.

Oh boy, some people never learn. (http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html)

[r4ik]

When the time comes i will certainly have a look at W7 you have to taste something before you say you like it or not :)

[forrestcupp]

To the person who is eagerly expecting "Windows 7" in 2010.

Oh boy, some people never learn. (http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html)

I'm not sure what your point is, but I'm not "eagerly awaiting" it. My point was just that it is scheduled to be released in 2010 and 3 years is a reasonable amount of time between releases. It's not like they are forsaking Vista; that is a viable release cycle for a new version.

[LightB]

And my point is that it would be a good idea to read that page.

"Windows 7" talk from MS is a tactic of peddling vaporware they have been doing for decades. They have never delivered with these annoucements in both the product itself and release date, and it's reasonable to assume they will never deliver. It's definitely desirable to them for people to forget or disregard history though.

[Midwest-Linux]

As far as Windows goes, the only ones I still need is Windows XP or Windows 2000. I have no plans to upgrade to Vista or even Windows 7. I think the DRM will likely be in Windows 7 also.., at some point one must just say no to DRM and WGA, and of course overbloated, overpriced, software.

Its at the point that I can get on the internet, do email, do streaming audio and video (with some form of Linux) without paying anymore "tribute money" to the fine people in Redmond.

So has Microsoft disavowed Vista? I believe a fair portion of the IT world has disavowed Vista. People are still installing XP over their new Vista machines, computer shops are still installing XP over Vista machines. The local computer refurb shop a few miles away sells more XP machines than any other type. I asked the owner when I was there. MS talks of the WOW in Vista..., but I ask is WHY did they release Vista?

If Microsoft extends the sales of Windows XP again ,that is a telling sign.

[forrestcupp]

And my point is that it would be a good idea to read that page.

"Windows 7" talk from MS is a tactic of peddling vaporware they have been doing for decades. They have never delivered with these annoucements in both the product itself and release date, and it's reasonable to assume they will never deliver. It's definitely desirable to them for people to forget or disregard history though.

You're talking about things you don't even know about. The Windows 7 Milestone 1 alpha build has already been released to OEMs for testing. Not only that, it has already been leaked (http://bink.nu/news/neowin-net-forum-member-posts-first-review-of-windows-7-milestone-1-build-6-1-6519-1.aspx). There is at least one video of it running on YouTube, and so far it looks pretty cool.

Edit:
The YouTube video was a fake. But Milestone 1 has been released.

[LukeCarrier]

Yeah,

Windows ME was an absolute **** of an operating system. To be frank, I believe Vista was just loads of old crappy code that was fatally flawed from the day it was written, with a load of spyware and keyloggers mixed in with a little sprinkling of pure junk.

Windows XP was, dare I say it, a massive step forward for Microsoft. It had a clean, no-frills interface, but was pretty damn reliable and a very good development environment. Vista has completely erased whatever good XP did for Microsoft. I'm using Vista Ultimate x64 right now, because I;m forced into proprietary formats once again (Office 2007).

I'm not bashing Windows or Microsoft, just pointing some of their many mistakes, from a software developer and system administrator's point of view.

Luke

[jrusso2]

I think Microsoft made a lot of mistakes with Vista and it has a very large foot print and hardware requirement.

However at this point I think its gotten to kick Vista point where its being criticized for being even worse then it really is.

Vista is certainly usable if you have a new dual core computer and at least 2 gigs of memory and a good Video card.

The problem comes in when you try to run your old software are peripherals.

If you don't have a lot of those that you want to run you can do ok with Vista and the annoying UAC can be turned off.

[jorgevan007]

Windows 7 looks a lot like Vista. More of the same old, same old I am afraid. I am not saying Vista 7 will be bad necessarily...but who wants to wait 3 years for a version of Vista on steroids??
That gives the Open source community 3-4 years to make improvements on compiz, the linux kernel, and other features that are already superior to Mirosoft's conterparts!!

Jorgevan007

[LightB]

Right, I don't know what I'm talking about.

The YouTube video was a fake. But Milestone 1 has been released.

LMFAO

Actually, I just tried Windows 8 alpha 5.2198420. I really did. Honest, and this comment has nothing to do whatsoever with some kind of scam related to a company's history of fraud. This time it's not vaporware! Don't lose faith in these sort of promises just yet, give MS another 10-20 years at least, come on.

[pjkoczan]

Vista is certainly usable if you have a new dual core computer and at least 2 gigs of memory and a good Video card.

But why should this be the de facto minimum required? Why shouldn't I be able to use semi-old (something like a 2GHz P4) hardware with Vista? Suppose I want to build a low power computer, memory and video cards are among the biggest power eaters. Why shouldn't this be an option for me?

A computer should be far more than "usable" if I have that much memory, a multi-core processor, and a good video card. It should *fly*...I should half expect it to be done with commands before I finish typing them, fix all my syntax errors on the fly, and become self-aware with that much computing power.

I manage several rather busy servers with 512 MB of RAM and 2 GHz Pentium 4s. Here's the kicker, the CPUs are *IDLE* for a fair portion of the time. The notion that something hugely more powerful than that is expected for a desktop workstation is patently ridiculous.

[ubuntu-freak]

Windows 2000 was the first one I really liked. I liked the fact it wasn't at all gimmicky, and was stable. Coming from Windows 98, it was strange using 2000 and not having weird and random crashes. Also, the games I cared about ran well on it.

I still don't understand why Windows seems to be vunerable by design - designed to be attacked. Are they too proud to take some inspiration from Linux?

Nathan

Edit: That would make an interesting slogan. "Microsoft Windows - Vunerable by Design"

[LightB]

I still don't understand why Windows seems to be vunerable by design

This ought to help (http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/security_report_windows_vs_linux/)

[karellen]

I don't know about others and I don't really care. all I can say is that I run Vista on a P4 2.4 GHz rig, with 512 mb ram and with an ide hdd. after I've stopped the unnecessary services, aero disabled it works as fast as XP. all the tweaking took 30 min. I don't know if it's the worst windows ever, or the best. and why should I care? until now it didn't crash and it runs the applications I need. no big deal, no ideology and no personal involvement. I'm just an ordinary user and I happen to dual boot, with fedora 8, which works just fine.
so, in judging something...nothing compares with the personal experience

[DrMega]

I don't know about others and I don't really care. all I can say is that I run Vista on a P4 2.4 GHz rig, with 512 mb ram and with an ide hdd. after I've stopped the unnecessary services, aero disabled it works as fast as XP. all the tweaking took 30 min. I don't know if it's the worst windows ever, or the best. and why should I care? until now it didn't crash and it runs the applications I need. no big deal, no ideology and no personal involvement. I'm just an ordinary user and I happen to dual boot, with fedora 8, which works just fine.
so, in judging something...nothing compares with the personal experience

You shouldn't need to shut down unnecessary stuff. Vista is M$'s most expensive OS to date (if I am not mistaken). If I was to buy it I would want it to impress me without me having to finish MS's job for them.

XP Home and XP Pro were good (compared to other versions of Windows), but is it any surprise Vista is being slated? Since it's release there have been many rumblings in the media about hardware and software incompatibilities, and in some cases threats of legal action from people buying a new machine described as having the latest state of the art OS to give them the most out of their new computer, only to get it home and find it runs horribly slow and won't run their software.

[DMK62]

Just my 2 cents worth...

In my opinion people should use whatever operating system that they want to use. With that you take the good and the bad that comes with that choice.

Although Win2K and ME were dramatically different products they were used to test / introduce features such as system restore, driver rollback, and new api's etc etc... a lot of them ended up on XP. I was actually looking forward to the next version of Windows after XP when it was still in the Longhorn stages of development. Several features of Longhorn never made it to Vista.

Microsoft does have a lengthy development cycle and it does impact on their products. Computers and their uses change constantly and what you think people want from the product will often not be the same when its finally released. When it comes to hardware I feel that there is no one party to blame. Hardware vendors and MS were out of synch in my opinion.

Some people think that the Ubuntu release cycle is too short but I think that in a way it resembles Debian with their Stable, Unstable and Testing releases ( although on a different time scale ). Currently if you want to live on the edge then use Hardy, live less on the edge then use Gutsy, and for real stability go with a LTS.

To back track, use whatever you want. If it meets your needs and then by all means use it.

Dale

[karellen]

You shouldn't need to shut down unnecessary stuff. Vista is M$'s most expensive OS to date (if I am not mistaken). If I was to buy it I would want it to impress me without me having to finish MS's job for them.

XP Home and XP Pro were good (compared to other versions of Windows), but is it any surprise Vista is being slated? Since it's release there have been many rumblings in the media about hardware and software incompatibilities, and in some cases threats of legal action from people buying a new machine described as having the latest state of the art OS to give them the most out of their new computer, only to get it home and find it runs horribly slow and won't run their software.

it all depends of your hardware. 1 giga of ram/decent cpu are pretty common nowadays, especially for the target audience of vista (if someone already has xp running fine for years on his rig I see no reason to change it with Vista)

[Rome.konig]

i can't say much about MS vista, from all that i read and heard, it seems to me that its problematic. I loved XP, and would like to see this MS 7. I have tried Vista a few times and don't care for it. My main point is, i would not dish out $ for Vista if it was the last OS left on earth. I would go back to sticks and stones and making cave paintings. one question i do have is about HARDY.... why release it so soon? i just upgraded to Gutsy and I'm loving Gutsy. I do have minor problems Ati graphics on Gutsy but i am content with it. Can anybody shed light on this? or should i try a different thread...



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"POWER OVERWHELMING"

[Roddles]

I gave Vista a good go - had it on my systems

(media centre - Vista ultimate edition) - brand new hardware (amd athlon dual core 2.4 Ghz, 4GB RAM, nvidia 256 MB Graphics Card, Seagate 320GB SATA2 disk and DVD.

I also had it on my Dell XPS m1710 laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz with 120GB SATA Drive, 2GB Ram, nvidia 7950 GTX 512Mb video card and DVD.

Both these machines i think you would agree had some grunt.

On both machines, the HDD never stopped thrashing. I stopped most of the services and read through the countless threads on how to improve vista, but it was always slow and clunky.

The thing that really annoyed me on was how long you had to wait for an application to open. On a media centre, you put in a DVD, or open an AVI/MPEG/mp3 file, you want it to start playing pretty much immediately, not 15-20 seconds later while the OS sorts itself out. Same goes for opening IE7 - that seemed to take forever - and then some ...

On my media centre, the disk died. The continual thrashing of that new HDD killed it. I came out one morning and the system had blue screened, and the disk was just ticking away. It never booted again.

So i bought a new HDD and put on Ubuntu. Still going strong after 9 months.

I think Vista was a very, very expensive venture for Microsoft. Reading through the MS forums about Vista, many, many users have abandoned it and gone to Mac. So not only have they lost credability, but they are losing customers and a great rate. What is really annoying people is the lack of response from Microsoft about their pleas for help and for fixes. Microsoft just fell silent very quickly.

I used to be a 100% windows only person, most of my qualifications are based on microsoft technologies, but these days MS quals are not worth the paper they are printed on. (too easy to pass the exams - well they were last time i checked which admittedly was a while ago).

I have been using ubutnu since dapper and am very impressed with how it has evolved and become an amazing operating system.

I am on the Hardy alpha releases at the moment. It has a few glitches here and there which I am more than happy to help the developers iron out. But one things for sure - its fast and STABLE and feature rich.

I know I will not purchase a copy of Windows ever again - been burnt too much by the cost of licensing crappy software that you end up formatting over anyway because it is so bad.

I really hope Microsoft have paid attention to what their customers are saying, and their huge exodus to other operating systems.

This is not a Flame Microsoft post - in fact they have done some amazing work with sql sever and with Dot Net, but there are open source version of those pretty much everything that I need to work, so Windows is becoming less and less vital to my everyday work. This is just a post about my experiences with Vista. I don't hate Microsoft - I just do not like the way they do things, especially when we have to fork out money for products that DON'T live up to what they are advertised to do.

Thats my two cents anyway :)

PS - Ubuntu works fabulously on my dell laptop !! Very happy :)

Rod .

[karellen]

On my media centre, the disk died. The continual thrashing of that new HDD killed it. I came out one morning and the system had blue screened, and the disk was just ticking away. It never booted again.
I'm not defending Vista, but that's really hard to believe. my hdd is almost 6 years old, a classic wd caviar ide 60 gb, I've installed a miriad of linux distro, messed up him pretty bad over the years, grub, mbr, partitions and so, and it still works fine. and when I run Vista, it doesn't use my hdd all the time. I paid attention especially to this ;). as I said, I am enough tech savvy to optimize an os...
so, maybe your hdd was already broken. or the vista installation. or both. anyway, it's very uncommon

[ubuntu-freak]

This ought to help (http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/security_report_windows_vs_linux/)


Thanks for that link. Very interesting indeed.

Nathan

[Roddles]

Just telling my experience.

In have done the same with many distros and many rebuilds etc, so perhaps it was just a dud disk.

Maybe its just chance that it was a Vista install that it died on, but - the continual thrashing can not have helped.

Linux distros from what I have seen do not continually thrash your hard disk. They at least give it a breather from time to time. Vista is pretty constant with the Disk IO.

At any rate - MS lost me as a paying customer.

Cheers

Rod :)

[seanc7]

No they haven't disavowed Vista. They'll gladly take the money from anyone that's willing to pay for it.

It's just not the major rollout numbers they were expecting.

I'm not running it at home, have no intention of.

The company I work for isn't updating any of the 2000+ desktops to Vista, they're sticking with XP.

There's no plans to make our products compatible with Vista so we probably won't see a single copy of it in my company.

[LightB]

Not the numbers they were expecting?

Now that's an understatement. Don't believe the smoke tricks, folks. Very few personal users ever actually intentionally purchased any version of Windows. It typically either came with their PC or they acquired it some other way because it was "the standard". And that was when it was popular, the amount of people who actually went out to purchase a Vista package in retail stores is virtually non-existent.

As far as this old tactic of creating vaporware rumors with this mysterious "Milestone", shill work. Where are the real links to the software? It doesn't matter how many "reviewers" write up posts about them. How about I review a flying car?

[karellen]

as long as people will buy new pc's (and they will), Vista won't be disavowed. it can't be

[supertails]

Author suggests Vista business is a failure.
And moving onto a linux system is better.

http://www.eweek.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=45979&Itemid=28&limit=&limitstart=&mosmsg=Thanks%20For%20Your%20Vote

"Technically, Vista is pure misery. It eats system resources like an elephant does peanuts, Windows applications break and its so-called improved security is a joke. I know it. You know it. Even Microsoft's most devoted yes-men know it--although they won't admit it--and perhaps Microsoft knows it as well."

Of course they know it. It's all apart of their plain.

[JDorfler]

You know, every time MSFT comes out with a new OS, for about a year to two, a lot of folks say not to upgrade, it's not worth it, it's incompatible with your old software, so on and so forth.

I'm not the biggest expert in the world, but it seems right before they replace their old os with something new, the older os is "just fine".

I'm pretty sure right before "Win7" comes out, folks will be complaining that "Vista" was just fine and not to update due to all the "hardware and compatibility" problems. (Quotes for inserting problem or os of your choice.)

Am I the only one that sees this pattern?

[jcwmoore]

MS took seven years to move from xp to vista (compare that to the six month ubuntu release....) and they literally put every egg into vista, now the problem is that ALL i.t. shops (in seven years) have also placed all their eggs in the XP basket. If MS freely supports an OS for that amount of time, then NO, no one will upgrade because IT shops have spent eight years training people to use the standard, XP. why would IT shops pay to upgrade when MS will do it for free? i.e. XP sp 3....

[kool_kat_os]

Thats amazing....vista was a faliure

[cprofitt]

You shouldn't need to shut down unnecessary stuff. Vista is M$'s most expensive OS to date (if I am not mistaken). If I was to buy it I would want it to impress me without me having to finish MS's job for them.

XP Home and XP Pro were good (compared to other versions of Windows), but is it any surprise Vista is being slated? Since it's release there have been many rumblings in the media about hardware and software incompatibilities, and in some cases threats of legal action from people buying a new machine described as having the latest state of the art OS to give them the most out of their new computer, only to get it home and find it runs horribly slow and won't run their software.

So all Linux users should have equipment to support Compiz? C'mon; with MS I have to turn some stuff off... with Linux I have to tweak thins just to get multi-button mice to work properly. Both sides have +/- for the OS.

[Daveski]

As far as Windows goes, the only ones I still need is Windows XP or Windows 2000. I have no plans to upgrade to Vista or even Windows 7. I think the DRM will likely be in Windows 7 also.., at some point one must just say no to DRM and WGA, and of course overbloated, overpriced, software.

Its at the point that I can get on the internet, do email, do streaming audio and video (with some form of Linux) without paying anymore "tribute money" to the fine people in Redmond.

So has Microsoft disavowed Vista? I believe a fair portion of the IT world has disavowed Vista. People are still installing XP over their new Vista machines, computer shops are still installing XP over Vista machines. The local computer refurb shop a few miles away sells more XP machines than any other type. I asked the owner when I was there. MS talks of the WOW in Vista..., but I ask is WHY did they release Vista?

If Microsoft extends the sales of Windows XP again ,that is a telling sign.

Save XP - Windows users are all going to be forced to upgrade at some point, but I for one would like this to be as late as possible: http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/

The move to Vista will be a struggle for individuals and businesses alike. The longer we can put this off, the better Linux will be as a workable alternative.