MS VP Asks “How Can We Fix It?”

Over on ZDNet, Mary-Jo Foley has a guest on her column, a Microsoft Vice President. He asks, seemingly in earnest, ‘What can we do to fix the lingering image problem of Vista?’

After asking for the usual ‘Microsoft sucks’ comments to be left at the door, along with the bubble gum chewing and rubberband guns, he wanted to really know what the readers thought.

There is the usual smattering of complaints, the obsequious types who just have to say how much they love Vista, and just a few with no idea.

I think, at this point in time, the cause, for Microsoft, is lost. If so many things had not gone wrong, if they had responded quicker to problems, if they didn’t insist on ‘screwing the pooch’ over and over – maybe then Vista’s reputation could be salvaged.

Perhaps the most unnerving part of the whole experience for many was that such a build up had been made, and after all, so much extra time was used to ‘perfect’ the operating system. The company had delayed the release for almost two years, and with that many employees working on a project, certainly 99.95% of the bugs should have been gone.

Instead, the OS was buggy, with bad drivers, and slow.

Although Microsoft blames the hardware manufacturers for bad drivers, they had drivers for much of the troublesome hardware within the XP repository. When troubles occurred, Microsoft should have stepped in and delivered a ‘Microsoft-tweaked driver’ for that device. That would accomplish a couple of things. It would show Microsoft cared about the perception of its operating system, and cared about those who plunked down cash for its use. The problem of speed is totally their fault, if Microsoft did not know the state of the nation as far as PC horsepower was concerned, they needed to come down out of the ivory towers and check it out. (I remember being in retail sales in the era of Windows XP release, and Microsoft, at a Roadshow put on for my company, stating how ‘crisp the performance of XP was’. Well, sure on the 2GHz P4s they were using, it was great, but the average person I saw coming in my store did not have one of those, nor did they have the gigabyte of memory that those demo machines had. I also remember how the demonstrator could not look any of us in the eye when he stated flatly that XP would run great in 128MB of RAM – yeah, sure it will.)

That has always been Microsoft’s problem. The delivered product never matches up with the talking points. This is why there is always so much business for the marketing of Microsoft operating system ‘improvers’ – so much is left to get better, or simply right.

So, you ask me, sir, what can be done – only 1 thing – do much better next time, and by then Vista will be either fixed, and still saleable, or a bad memory, better left on the shelf.

-

Technorati Tags: ZDNet - Microsoft Vice President - Mary-Jo Foley - Vista - perception - operating systems - Roadshow - drivers

[tags] ZDNet, Microsoft Vice President, Mary-Jo Foley, Vista, perception, operating systems, Roadshow, drivers [/tags]