Windows Vista, One Bad Year Later

Chosun Ilbo ^ | 01/11/08

[TigerLikesRooster]

Windows Vista, One Bad Year Later

A year since the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft is cringing at the poor sales of the new operating system. It was initially touted as a landmark new development to reinvigorate the IT industry, prompting expectations of wide-ranging “Vista effects.” Instead, Apple’s new operating system, which now also works on PCs, is stealing the thunder. Microsoft has hurriedly responded by developing a new version of the old XP.

◆ Windows Vista flops

According to market researcher Net Applications, Apple is enjoying the largest-ever share in the global operating system market with Leopard, the newest version. Since its release in December last year, Apple OS including Leopard have gained a market share of 7.31 percent, a record high. During the same period, Windows OS products including Vista saw a drop in their market share ? although their aggregate market share still stands at 91.79 percent. But Leopard is enjoying critical and consumer acclaim, which Vista has signally failed to win.

Major media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have showered compliments on the Apple OS, which they say is easy and fast. Consumer opinions about Vista have not yielded to Microsoft’s efforts. Tech product reviewer CNET’s UK division picked Vista as one of top 10 “terrible technology products” for 2007.

◆ Microsoft in Agony

Vista cost US$6 billion and a workforce of 8,000 to develop before making its debut in January 2007. It shows a handful of good improvements, especially better security features. But the bundling of too many functions into the OS takes up a considerable portion of the computer memory and causes unexpected hitches like a slowdown in processing speed. The IT giant faced a stream of consumer requests to change the operating system of their computers back from Vista to XP. In Korea, Microsoft failed to win a single corporate customer.

Kim Hyun-jung, an analyst with Tongyang Investment and Securities, said the Vista effect did not happen, and memory chip makers are “suffering from their miscalculation.” Memory producers aggressively increased investment in developing facilities in expectations of Vista effects, but they have yet to see a profit from the investment.

A Microsoft spokesman said XP was only in genuine demand one year after its release. His company, he said, has follow-up plans to boost sales of Vista like the release of a service pack in the first half of the year. But he declined to reveal exact sales figures of Vista in Korea. Despite Microsoft’s efforts, many IT insiders worry because there is insufficient supply of programs that run on Vista. One IT industry guru said the operating system market situation shows that “even the mythical Microsoft monopoly could break down if it fails to meet the demand of consumers.”

[battletank]

“I love the Mac, Beautiful hardware, seamless operating system, Instant start up’s, support and training is almost unbelievable.
I will never go back.”

I’m with you and for the exact same reasons. I was always skiddish of Macs until I heard that you could partition the harddrive to run Windows. There was a sense of security in knowing I could have that security blanket if I needed it. I haven’t done that and I won’t be doing that. My MacBook is THE best.

[abb]

Microsoft ought to be ashamed of itself for putting such a shoddy OS out on the market and trying to force folks to upgrade to it via their draconian licensing agreements and control of the business software market.

You would have thought they would have learned after they inflicted Millennium Edition on customers, but I guess not. Whoever put ME out for use should be locked up in the penitentiary.

[nevergore]

I ordered a coiuple of Gateway Tablets this past May from Gateway....

They came standard with Vista.....

Since I was ordering directly from the factory, your system is customizable; I told them NOT to load Vista but XP.

First they told me that they couldn’t because of their agreement with Microsoft. I told them I really didn’t care. Then they told me it would cost me $220 more....I said “Thanks, I’ll shop elsewhere”. Then they came back and stated it was approved.... What a hassle.

BTW, the Gateway Tablets have been great.....

[C210N]

could not be converted to XP (Does anyone know if this is a fact?).

I found a great deal Black Friday for a Dell 531. It was designed for Vista and only came in the vista flavors (home, pro, whatever). I took the standard home vista. It sucked.

So, I went thru the process of putting on XP on it anyway, and now have an Excellent machine. Here are the caveats:

Installing XP itself went generally okay, but left me without most drivers, like USB, network, sound card, video, etc, etc. The system still worked, albeit with no network, low screen res, USB 1.1, etc.

Forgeddabout gathering the drivers from DELL; they must have aggreements w/ MS that the machine is vista-only.

Browsing (and participating too) various user forums, found fantastic driver sources... so loaded drivers from the various manufacturers: motherboard chip set, video card, etc.

Other users have now gathered all the required drivers and put them in single packages for download. The bottom line: Everything works now with no "yellow-flag" hardware.

[toddlintown]

“The Vista computer won’t network with my other XP computers”

I had the same problem, and then the drive on my brand new HP laptop blew out. Vista-induced? Who knows?

[TomGuy]

What people want is performance, not pretty pictures.

That is 'xactly what I said when I was forced into Windows ---- 3.0 ---- 1990.

DOS was plenty good, especially with a few GUI programs.

Actually, without all the add-on crap, Windows is just a fancy menuing system. XP still runs some old DOS programs in a DOS window.

[Big E]

Oh, man, that’s not funny. I think I’m going to downgrade the other machine... although it aggravates the hell out of me to pay another $200, or whatever it is, for something that should work the first time. oh well...

[nralife]

Dang! What an experience. At the Dell website, the machines I looked at with XP, start out about a hundred dollars more expensive than comparable ones. Glad you got yours without paying extra! I got some other goodies for free, though, since I used our company portal for a discount.

[6SJ7]

Guy "upgrades" from Vista to XP and review's the "new" operating system.

Looks like the only way out of this mess for Microsoft is to market a new, new O/S called VistaXP, which would really be XP with SP3.

[docbnj]

Felicitations, Mr. TigerLovesRooster sir!

Please do not refer to us Mac users as “snobs” who watch Betamax movies. Oh no, sir, we are all very ‘umble, sir. Ever so ‘umble. And we do not watch Betamax, but Blu-ray movies. We watch them ‘umbly in our thatched crofters’ cabins on the moor.

[nralife]

XP SP3 is due out later this year. In the summer, I think.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Hey, it is not me, but Washi.:-)

[js1138]

This is a review of XP six months after it came out. Sound familiar? You could substitute "Vista" for "XP" and be right at home for today.

I didn't upgrade my home computers from Windows 2000 to XP until SP2 came out. I suspect I'll do the same with Vista. Microsoft drag along a lot of old programs. There are still programs in common use that don't understand long file names. At some point you simply have to tell people to get some new software. At any rate, if you are dedicated to an elderly program, all you have to do is keep the old computer running.

[CIB-173RDABN]

Six billion dollars and they can not get it right.

First off, not everyone needs everything.

Design a basic OS.

Then give people the option to add the extra features they want or need.

Perhaps then the OS will not take up every bit of space in our computers and run slower then the previuos version.

I am not a "power user". I only need a basic OS. It irrates the hell out of me that it can take several minutes from the time I turn on my computer before it is ready for me to start using it (and do get me started on the several minute shut down which requires me to stand around and wait since every so often a file will not close and I have to close it manually.)

[BuffaloJack]

> What’s DRM?
DRM short for digital rights management, it a means by which Hollywood, the RIAA and anyone else who thinks your sole purpose in life is to steal their copyrighted property, can load your PC up with bloatware that slows everything down while is keeps you from enjoying what you paid good money to possess.

[Entrepreneur]

yet vista’s biggest issue wasnt the OS, it was all the 3rd party software makers and drivers (lack of to be more precise) that are currently the biggest headache. Now you can say Micro~1 was greedy and made software companies jump through hoops to develop for vista. But in reality Vista is harder to code for. dotnet even compounds the problem.

vista will either become good after sp1 like win 98. For those who remember win98 stunk to high heaven and was buggy as heck til sp1. Or will be the next ME if the vista name becomes to tainted to carry.

Casaubon, you offered the most insight. I agree totally, especially the underlined parts. The jury is out on Vista until SP1 and maybe SP2, given the investment M$'s made. If M$ really wants to make this work, they probably can. I suspect this is the reason SP1 has been delayed... they're trying to get it right.

The problem(s) with Vista relate to security and compatibility. M$ was trying to respond to criticism about it's security holes, but the solution is almost worse than the problem. Many Vista users end up frustrated or digging into the OS and shutting down many of the security features.

The compatibility issue relates to legacy software. Most M$ OS' were mere window dressing (pun intended) of the basic DOS product. M$ worked on the user interface, but kept the core program in place. Ubergeeks correct me if I'm wrong, but Vista appears to have significant code changes due to the security issues (not sure how much is kernel level and how much is layered). This, in turn, requires significant tweaking from the user (and sometimes even that's not enough) or modifications from the applications producers.

Many software companies seemed to be caught off guard by Vista. A few wrote the necessary code for their products to correspond with the Vista launch, but some still offer untested, incompatible products. When their companies/products weren't prepared, they fell into the typical tech response to any problem (after blaming the user) and blamed a third party (i.e., M$).

For consumers, here's the rub. You could take your ten year old program that you love for whatever reason (personally, I have several) and run it on XP. On Vista, it won't run no matter how many OS hoops you jump through and hours you waste.

While someone, somewhere offers a new version that will run on Vista, it costs a small fortune. It's irritating to pay for something you may only use a few times a year, that involves a learning curve, and may not even perform the one function that's most important to you (and you can't know without buying it, breaking the seal, loading it, and being thereafter, unable to return it).

Personally, I bought a new Vista machine this summer. Within a month, I returned it to the supplier (multiple hardware and software problems) and got a new machine from a different manufacturer, and had the vendor load XP from an old image they had for the same machine.

Independent computer retailers (not the big boxes) often keep digital copies of everything shipped from the factory on the various computers they sell. This is a drive image or load. Buy a machine that was offered under XP and Vista and you can probably get an XP load if you push for it. And NRAlife, your Vista license does cover XP.

I like aspects of Vista and dislike other parts. I'm not sure how much of this is truly OS and how much is familiarity. In all fairness, I know a number of people who have zero problems with Vista (my wife is one and my daughter is another).

XP is a stable system. It's familiar. It doesn't crash (much). Software works on it. Personally, I'm sticking with it for the next couple years. I'll reconsider Vista after SP1 or SP2.

My personal pet peeve at the moment is anti-virus. Because the AV software was using too many computer resources, I switched to a "thinner" package. Incompatibilities caused it to use 50% of my computer's resources (found lots of complaints across the Internet about this particular package, which otherwise works-cough-well).

The next AV package was less resource intensive, but won't work well with Outlook. If I want to scan email and download it, I can't. It's one or the other.

I'm getting a fourth package today. We'll see. Right now the AV packages are worse than the viruses.

The other issue, which is really irritating is the quiet change in standards from the PCMCIA card to the ExpressCard. If you have anything that needs the PCMCIA card slot, you are outta luck. It is not compatible. So be careful when buying a new laptop if this is important to you.

[shorty_harris]

I have Mint 4.0 installed on a test machine. It’s fairly nice (I like it better than Ubuntu), although I don’t like the Gnome desktop. It installed smoothly alongside my Mepis partition. Haven’t tried any of the wireless setup stuff. I installed VirtualBox and have a virtual WinXP installation running. There’s a front-end to Wine called Wine-Doors that only sort-of works (haven’t had too much luck with Wine anyway, so it doesn’t surprise me). A couple of other applications won’t start for some reason (haven’t tried to figure out why yet); other than that, it’s pretty OK.

[steadfastconservative]

We have Leopard and we love it. Macs are so fun and easy to use. Why buy anything else?

[raybbr]

PS: DRM, anyone?

That's what Vista was all about.

[tarheelswamprat]

What people want is performance, not pretty pictures. That is what hurt it. If MS can’t optimize the performance to bring it in-line with XP, without having to have twice the memory and processor, then it is the second coming of OS/2.

Nonsense. OS/2 was a much better OS than the Windows of its time. It was faster on equivalent hardware, better at multi-tasking and far more stable than Windows ever was. What killed OS/2 was internal politics and battles over their business model between different corporate factions of IBM.

The IBM OS/2 division was never able to persuade IBM management to fully support OS/2, and management finally just killed it just as OS/2 Warp was generating excitement among consumers, was selling off the shelves in stores, and was finally poised to give Windows some real competition.

It was a classic case of corporate dinosaur mentality on the part of IBM.