Vista Deathwatch - Is the new Microsoft OS down for the count?

[Jim Wynne]

I ran across an interesting John Dvorak column in PC Magazine this morning, wherein Dvorak addresses the 800-pound gorilla in the room:

Microsoft has extended the life of Windows XP because Vista has simply not shown any life in the market. We have to begin to ask ourselves if we are really looking at Windows Me/2007, destined to be a disdained flop. By all estimates the number of Vista installations hovers around the number of Macs in use.
How did this happen? And what’s going to happen next? Does Microsoft have a Plan B? A number of possibilities come to mind, and these things must be considered by the company itself.

You can read the full article here.

I think MS has created an interesting problem for itself, that being a quality product: Windows XP. For all of its shortcomings--especially upon initial release--XP has turned into the most stable and usable OS for the PC platform, and there are millions of satisfied customers. Last year I bought a laptop, and I deliberately bought before the release of Vista, because I simply didn't want to become a Vista beta tester as I had been when I bought a computer in 2001 when XP was new. So far as I can tell, Vista has nothing that will make things any easier or better for me, especially in view of the fact that most of the advanced features that were supposed to make Vista attractive to folks like me never made the final release, and are still nowhere to be seen.

So now MS is in the position of having a product that customers, by and large, are satisfied with, and they want to replace it with something that adds value to no one but MS. Even the computer OEMs don't want to deal with Vista at this point, because they're the ones who have to provide consumer support for it.

Whatever happened to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Or perhaps more to the point for our Cove community, "If it doesn't need improvement, leave it alone."

 

[Claes Gefvenberg]

Re: Vista Deathwatch--Is the new Microsoft OS down for the count?

I think MS has created an interesting problem for itself, that being a quality product: Windows XP. For all of its shortcomings--especially upon initial release--XP has turned into the most stable and usable OS for the PC platform, and there are millions of satisfied customers. Last year I bought a laptop, and I deliberately bought before the release of Vista, because I simply didn't want to become a Vista beta tester as I had been when I bought a computer in 2001 when XP was new.

Exactly. MS brought this on themselves, by their 3P performance last time around (and the time before that): They released an unfinished product. You, I and heaps of other customers remember the pain we felt then, and do not feel inclined to become Windows beta testers yet again.

I wonder if this means that we will see a SP3 for XP? Still, I do not think Vista is knocked out yet.

/Claes

 

[Jim Wynne]

Re: Vista Deathwatch--Is the new Microsoft OS down for the count?

Exactly. MS brought this on themselves, by their 3P performance last time around (and the time before that): They released an unfinished product. You, I and heaps of other customers remember the pain we felt then, and do not feel inclined to become Windows beta testers yet again.

I wonder if this means that we will see a SP3 for XP? Still, I do not think Vista is knocked out yet.

/Claes

There is an SP3 in the works for XP and it's scheduled for release in the first half of '08 (maybe). As I understand it though, it's just going to be a rollup of patches released since SP2, so if you've been keeping up with those it probably won't mean much to you.

 

[Claes Gefvenberg]

Re: Vista Deathwatch--Is the new Microsoft OS down for the count?

Thank's Jim. Dear me... I was only joking about that SP3

As I understand it though, it's just going to be a rollup of patches released since SP2, so if you've been keeping up with those it probably won't mean much to you.

But then again, it would seem that so is MS.

/Claes

 

[Icy Mountain]

Re: Vista Deathwatch--Is the new Microsoft OS down for the count?

As I understand it though, it's just going to be a rollup of patches released since SP2, so if you've been keeping up with those it probably won't mean much to you.

Unless you are one of those that has to perform one of those semi-scheduled OS re-installs. Admittedly, they are far less frequent with XP than with previous M$ offering. However, spending 72 hours on a dialup to upload all the patches since SP2 is ridiculous. Even with a high speed connection, you've got to load XP, then SP2, then configure your network connection first, then spend a still not insignificant amount of time downloading and rebooting. The slipstream sites can make this much more palatable but that's not an option for the average user.

 

[Jim Wynne]

Re: Vista Deathwatch--Is the new Microsoft OS down for the count?

Unless you are one of those that has to perform one of those semi-scheduled OS re-installs. Admittedly, they are far less frequent with XP than with previous M$ offering. However, spending 72 hours on a dialup to upload all the patches since SP2 is ridiculous. Even with a high speed connection, you've got to load XP, then SP2, then configure your network connection first, then spend a still not insignificant amount of time downloading and rebooting. The slipstream sites can make this much more palatable but that's not an option for the average user.

But keeping good backups is an option. I don't know of any good reasons to reinstall XP outside of hardware failures and maybe malware issues. In both cases, a good backup obviates reinstalling from scratch. I keep a clone of my system drives for both of my computers which I update once every few weeks or so, so if either HD bites the dust, I can just pull the bad one, replace it with the clone, and off I go.

 

[James Gutherson]

Dvorak has always had his own barrow to push and much of that is sensationalist cr*p to drive views to his site(see his other piece "the Google Phone is doomed", it's still only a description of a platform at this stage).

"by all accounts..." is hardly great journalism, so in that vein 'there are plenty of reports showing that Vista is a sales success, add to that the number of business and individuals that are have said that they are waiting till SP1 to move to Vista"

I'm no M$ fan but I'm just sick of this sort of rubbish. Modern personal computers and the software that runs them are more complex and complicated than anything that man has yet created and if we want to have them at all this is the situation we are in. The are billions of hardware and software combinations in the world and if we had to wait for a full testing regime on every combination then we would still be working with typewriters and sliderules. Apple who were once seen as immune because of their limited harware permutations recenttly found out that more users means more variance means more problems so their latest release bluescreened with a common piece of third party software.

 

[Jim Wynne]

Dvorak has always had his own barrow to push and much of that is sensationalist cr*p to drive views to his site(see his other piece "the Google Phone is doomed", it's still only a description of a platform at this stage).

"by all accounts..." is hardly great journalism, so in that vein 'there are plenty of reports showing that Vista is a sales success, add to that the number of business and individuals that are have said that they are waiting till SP1 to move to Vista"

I'm no M$ fan but I'm just sick of this sort of rubbish. Modern personal computers and the software that runs them are more complex and complicated than anything that man has yet created and if we want to have them at all this is the situation we are in. The are billions of hardware and software combinations in the world and if we had to wait for a full testing regime on every combination then we would still be working with typewriters and sliderules. Apple who were once seen as immune because of their limited harware permutations recenttly found out that more users means more variance means more problems so their latest release bluescreened with a common piece of third party software.

I agree with you as far as Dvorak is concerned, but in this case I think he's making sense. Nothing you seem to be sick of has anything to do with the idea that (A) MS has a stable product in XP; (B) Microsoft failed to deliver Vista as promised and (C) their marketing plan for it makes no sense.

 

[James Gutherson]

My apologies Jim. My intent was not to attack you, it is the approach of Dvorak et al. that I was annoyed with.

I agree that 'A) MS has a stable product in XP; (B) Microsoft failed to deliver Vista as promised and (C) their marketing plan for it makes no sense.' (but you did not raise any of these points other than A) in your post, either).

MS has not delivered anything like the marketing of Windows 95 ("Start me up") despite the introduction of some excellent product (XBOX for example), and I agree that they are struggling to come up with a competitive argument for Vista - besides it being an little more than an incremental upgrade to XP from the user point of view - but Vista will not DIE as DVORAK said - it will be seen an small improvement in the series (like Win 97) that will eventually bubble to the top due to attrition.
However this is the situation across ALL OS's at the moment - it is a mature space and there are NO big revolutions about to happen (MS's table multi touch and Apple's iphone/touch are possibilites at the moment for something). The current focus for all manufactures is to make small improvements to better performance and compatability and throw in a bit of candy to attract a few complusive upgraders. Other than that most users on the PC will move to Vista, or a variation, through buying new machines, and the same on the Mac with OSX.

As for MS failing to deliver on Vista as promised - yes that was bad - but the problem they have is that they are MS an are held to different standards. They have to publish target dates for their projects because the customer demand it (and the bad decision of naming releases around years (95, 97, 2000). It was meant to highlight to customers that they don't have the latest version, but what happened in effect was that it showed up just how long there have between updates and the need to put out "something" (anything) to tick that number over. Notice how they dropped that with XP - and I predict Office 2007 will be the last with that naming convention). Apple managed not to get caught in that trap but never publishing timetables until the very last, and by using internal project names with external releases rather than dates (notice also they managed to charge $129 for each of the 5 incremental releases since OSX - while the MS service packs were free).

The other thing the delay in Vista and the dropping of features shows is that this stuff is freakin' hard. Revamping the main Windows operating system is the biggest software project on the planet, and possibly biggest project overall, with thousands of developers, billions of lines of code, millions of stakeholders and billions of pototential operating environments. Sometimes you need to change the scope to meet tagets that are determined to be more important economically.

I've wasted to much time here

 

[Icy Mountain]

Re: Vista Deathwatch--Is the new Microsoft OS down for the count?

But keeping good backups is an option. I don't know of any good reasons to reinstall XP outside of hardware failures and maybe malware issues. In both cases, a good backup obviates reinstalling from scratch.

I'm not talking about a corruption issue that can be resolved by installing a backup. The issue I am referring to here is not obviated by backups, since your backups are contaminated with the same thing: bloat. Beginning with '95, the number of drivers, DLLs, etc., tend to pile up until even things you thought you had completely uninstalled come back to bite you. Reverting to a backup (or using the rollback feature in XP) only puts you back to a working configuration. It does nothing to resolve the conflict with the latest software/hardware that you are trying to install and use. You and I may have good backup practices but, all too often, the people that call me to straighten out their issues have either no backup or one that is a year old. They have no idea what they've changed or installed since the last time their PC worked right (or at all).

For example, I have a PC that went online January 2004 with XP pre-installed. Thankfully, I have not done an OS reinstall on this machine in 4 years, a new record! I have added a second hard drive and then replaced it with a larger one, replaced/updated the video card twice, added another 1G of memory, replaced/upgraded the DVD reader, DVD writer, and power supply in addition to software replacements, updates, and upgrades to numerous to mention. At some point, the sheer number of permutations becomes unmanageable and a "clean" install is required. It simply takes less time to "start from scratch" than continue to manually resolve the conflicts. I'll be performing this operation in April when my Norton subscription expires. I'm done with Norton and it is far faster to simply start over than to try to uninstall it. Added bonus: the enormous number of registry entries, incompletely uninstalled software, update lists, drivers, etc. that will simply cease to exist.

Additional bonus:
My PC did not come with an install disc. There is a FAT32 partition on the original HDD that contains a recovery mirror. Any reversion to the original load installs a bunch of 4 year old bloatware that I never wanted or needed. Complete uninstall is spotty at best and takes time. My new install will start with XP only, from an SP2 slipstream disc, made from an original XP install disc. From that point, only the software I need will be installed. I've done this a dozen times for others and the increase in boot up, program response and disc access times is noticeable as is the decrease in conflicts when installing new hardware and software updates and upgrades.

I'm not saying I don't like XP. I am saying that the fact that M$ has released Vista should not release them from an obligation to continue to support and extremely stable and widely used OS. I want my SP3.