“We heard the same whines when XP was first released. “98 is faster! XP sucks!”
And with 98 from 95 and 95 from 3.11.
Same story, same people.
I assure you this is not the same as going from 98 to XP. When I went to XP from 98 it was smooth and free of frustration.
Whatever your stake in Microsoft is you should understand this is not confined to a few XP diehards. This is a bad product from the user’s POV. Microsoft may think it’s a big improvement from their end. Obviously they did not take user experience seriously. The blogs I have read are 100% negative on Vista and many of them were beta testers before the product was released.
I found these when I started thinking about how to get back to XP. There are just a few, there are hundreds:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2554273&SiteID=17
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=543
http://www.news.com/The-XP-alternative-for-Vista-PCs/2100-1016_3-6209481.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO8cAwf-weo
This backlash is not just a few whiners expressing their distate for Vista.
Nope. You're just pretending to ignore the problem.
Of course there are going to be bugs and complaints in any new release. XP got tagged with complaints for verifying that it was a legal copy. 2000 got complaints because some of its dll's performed calculations differently, resulting in math errors for products like Crystal Reports (which would otherwise calculate correctly on earlier OS's).
But the complaints against Vista (e.g. not backwards compatible, buggy, slow, crash-prone, lack of driver support) hark back to the days when MicroSoft had to pull MS-DOS 4 and Windows ME.
So Vista isn't the first fumble by the MicroSoft team. To be honest, it's surprising that MicroSoft survived the first paradigm shift from stand alone PC's to the modern Internet world. Redmond deserves kudos for not going the way of Wang.
Yet.