eWeek.com: Has Microsoft Disavowed Vista?

[ewmayer]

In another thread, I commented:

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Apparently there's been enough complaints about Vista [especially from the business community ... I notice my company won't touch the stuff - OTOH roughly half our build servers have been happily running 64-bit linux for quite some time] that even the ram-it-down-their-throats tactics normally employed by MSFT have had to be modified, by way of an "official downgrade" option. [Ever heard of such a ridiculous thing in any other industry before, from a company of similar size? I haven't].

The lack-of-enterprise-level-adoption angle apparently is indeed the crux of the matter:
eWeek.com: Has Microsoft Disavowed Vista?

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
2008-01-28

It seems that Microsoft is already giving up on Vista and is setting up business users to switch from XP to Windows 7.

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.

What else can explain why Microsoft is now leaking news about Windows 7, the next version of Windows? Oh, officially Vista SP 1 is still the big upcoming news, although I think most businesses are actually more interested in XP SP 3. The simple truth is that no matter how Microsoft and its partners like CDW spin it, Vista is not being picked up by corporate users. Even Bill Gates' vaunted 100 million Vista users number should be taken with a large—very large—grain of salt.

Most of the information is dripping out of the blog, Shipping Seven. But, it's more than just Shipping Seven, which may, or may not, be real. Microsoft is hard at work, harder than one would expect, with Vista just over a year old, in getting its next desktop operating system ready for action.

As Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry recently told eWEEK's Peter Galli, "I don't think Vista is as bad as Microsoft has convinced people it is." What should Microsoft do then? Cherry recommended that Microsoft "discuss the next version of the operating system, currently referred to as Windows 7, and what it will do."

Could Vista have missed its shot? Yes, yes, I know, how can I say this when there are tens of millions of copies of it out there? Easily. It's one thing to drop copies of Vista Home Basic and Premium on Best Buy customers who don't know any better. It's another thing entirely to get CIOs and IT managers to spend—or should I say waste?—billions on Vista.

For now, whether Microsoft likes it or not, XP, and not Vista, is the Windows those businesses will continue to use. And the companies that want to move on to a truly better operating system? They'll be moving to Linux or Mac OS.

Edit: Funny - and IMO spot-on - take on the proposed MSFT/YHOO merger from one of the columnists at the Seeking Alpha financial blog:

SeekingAlpha.com | Microsoft Finally Convinces: The Future Belongs to Google

...for the first time, I'm willing to say the future belongs to Google. I believe Microsoft will destroy the chance Yahoo had, because the best thing Yahoo had going for it was the potential to integrate all it had built over the years into an internet-based desktop that anybody could download for free.

Microsoft could kill that project. Doing so would be stupid, though, because it would leave only Google working on it and leave Microsoft as vulnerable as it is right now. There would be little point in acquiring Yahoo.

More likely, Microsoft will make the Yahoo desktop into the online version of Windows Vista. That will do nothing to give people what they've wanted all along, which is an alternative to Microsoft's iron grip on computing. The Micrahoo Vista Internet Desktop will be a colossal thud, encumbered by Microsoft's infamous complexity and mired in all the monopolistic hooks and dependencies called "features" in everything from Redmond.

...

This is great news for Google. It's only rival is in danger of disappearing into the un-innovative maw of Microsoft, the same company that made Hotmail an also-ran in online mail, and cemented MSN's position as such a distant alternative to Google and Yahoo that nobody even mentions it except to make fun of Microsoft.

[potonono]

Vista news always reminds me of the release of Windows M.E.. I happened to buy my wife a laptop at the time and it came with M.E... what a joke 'updated' OS.

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by potonono

Vista news always reminds me of the release of Windows M.E.. I happened to buy my wife a laptop at the time and it came with M.E... what a joke 'updated' OS.

The funny thing is, when ME was released, 2000 had already been out for a while--Microsoft should have just embraced 2000 for both home and business, maybe coming out with a "Windows 2000 Home Edition" instead of ME. Windows 9x/ME's networking issues alone should have been enough to scrap the line for good, especially when broadband and home networking were beginning to reach prime time. (Just try to set up wireless networking on Windows 98! Though I've never had any experience with ME in this matter, I have had quite a lot of headaches trying to get wireless networking configured in Windows 98SE--and it doesn't even work at all in 98 first edition! )

[ewmayer]

Piece in today's NY Times backs up the numerous claims by critics that Vista as initially released last spring was effectively beta-quality software at best:

Digital Domain | They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.

By RANDALL STROSS
Published: March 9, 2008

ONE year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to “upgrade”?

Microsoft says high prices have been the deterrent. Last month, the company trimmed prices on retail packages of Vista, trying to entice consumers to overcome their reluctance. In the United States, an XP user can now buy Vista Home Premium for $129.95, instead of $159.95.

An alternative theory, however, is that Vista’s reputation precedes it. XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers, to work well with Vista.

Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an “upgrade”?

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others.

We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.

Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed the certification decision.)

Anyone who bought a PC that Microsoft labeled “Windows Vista Capable” without also declaring “Premium Capable” is now a party in the suit. The judge also unsealed a cache of 200 e-mail messages and internal reports, covering Microsoft’s discussions of how best to market Vista, beginning in 2005 and extending beyond its introduction in January 2007. The documents incidentally include those accounts of frustrated Vista users in Microsoft’s executive suites.

Today, Microsoft boasts that there are twice as many drivers available for Vista as there were at its introduction, but performance and graphics problems remain. (When I tried last week to contact Mr. Shirley and the others about their most recent experiences with Vista, David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman, said that no one named in the e-mail messages could be made available for comment because of the continuing lawsuit.)

The messages were released in a jumble, but when rearranged into chronological order, they show a tragedy in three acts.

Act 1: In 2005, Microsoft plans to say that only PCs that are properly equipped to handle the heavy graphics demands of Vista are “Vista Ready.”

Act 2: In early 2006, Microsoft decides to drop the graphics-related hardware requirement in order to avoid hurting Windows XP sales on low-end machines while Vista is readied. (A customer could reasonably conclude that Microsoft is saying, Buy Now, Upgrade Later.) A semantic adjustment is made: Instead of saying that a PC is “Vista Ready,” which might convey the idea that, well, it is ready to run Vista, a PC will be described as “Vista Capable,” which supposedly signals that no promises are made about which version of Vista will actually work.

The decision to drop the original hardware requirements is accompanied by considerable internal protest. The minimum hardware configuration was set so low that “even a piece of junk will qualify,” Anantha Kancherla, a Microsoft program manager, said in an internal e-mail message among those recently unsealed, adding, “It will be a complete tragedy if we allowed it.”

Act 3: In 2007, Vista is released in multiple versions, including “Home Basic,” which lacks Vista’s distinctive graphics. This placed Microsoft’s partners in an embarrassing position. Dell, which gave Microsoft a postmortem report that was also included among court documents, dryly remarked: “Customers did not understand what ‘Capable’ meant and expected more than could/would be delivered.”

All was foretold. In February 2006, after Microsoft abandoned its plan to reserve the Vista Capable label for only the more powerful PCs, its own staff tried to avert the coming deluge of customer complaints about underpowered machines. “It would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer now,” said Robin Leonard, a Microsoft sales manager, in an e-mail message sent to her superiors, “than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem.”

Now that Microsoft faces a certified class action, a judge may be the one who oversees the fix. In the meantime, where does Microsoft go to buy back its lost credibility?

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Regarding the last line of the article, some of the more-cynical among us might be tempted to ask: “What credibility?”

[petrw1]

Reminds me of a tongue-in-cheek poster I saw at work a few years ago announcing the newest version of Windows.

They were supposedly bringing together all the leanings and best features of:
- Windows CE
- Windows ME
- Windown NT
and calling it "Windows CEMENT"

At the bottom of the poster was the catch-phrase:
"Windows CEMENT: Hard as a rock and dumb as a brick"

[Xyzzy]

Vista works fine here, except Cygwin refuses to install or run properly. Unfortunately, Cygwin is a must-have app.

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Vista works fine here, except Cygwin refuses to install or run properly. Unfortunately, Cygwin is a must-have app.

If you've got a spare license for Windows XP around (if your Vista computer originally had XP, you can probably use the old XP license), you might want to get Virtual PC 2007 (it's free) and install XP in a virtual machine. Or you could check out VirtualBox, which is also free, and I've found to be quite nice. Anyway, though not ideal, a virtual machine of some sort would probably solve the Cygwin problem.

But then, for that matter, if you're using a VM just for Cygwin, which essentially does Linux/Unix emulation anyway, you may as well just install a Linux/Unix distro in the VM.

[Xyzzy]

We run Debian in a VM session as our main OS, but sometimes it is nice to have Cygwin available.

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

We run Debian in a VM session as our main OS, but sometimes it is nice to have Cygwin available.

Ah, I see. Well, in that case, I guess the XP VM would probably fit the bill.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Vista works fine here, except Cygwin refuses to install or run properly. Unfortunately, Cygwin is a must-have app.

Strange. I installed Cygwin on my wife's Vista machine without any problem. It works just fine for interactive use.

The caveat is that I've not yet managed to get Cygwin programs to fire up automagically at system boot. To be fair, I've not tried particularly hard.

What are the failure symptoms on your machine?

Paul

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by petrw1

Reminds me of a tongue-in-cheek poster I saw at work a few years ago announcing the newest version of Windows.

and calling it "Windows CEMENT"

like this.