Scott Fulton, in an article on Betanews, talks about the amount of problems experienced by professionals at the recent WinHEC in Los Angeles. WinHEC, by the way, stands for Windows Hardware Engineering Conference – the place that hardware meets Windows, if you will.

This is the last place that problems should be encountered, as the problems are supposed to be over, with the triumphs of engineering and software shown off, in all their glory.

The title of the small piece - ‘Microsoft: 1 in 10 Vista printer driver installations fail’. This is speaking of those done on the premises, for the benefit of the press, to allow them to extol the virtues of the operating system, and respective vendors of hardware.

Further, the piece goes on to declare the abnormally high rate at which other hardware pieces fail to install properly. Modems, sound cards, storage devices, and even video cards all take their turn at rebuffing Vistas best efforts at playing nice. All of these items mentioned have rejection rates of over 4%, in a time when Microsoft admits that anything over 3% is unacceptable.

Perhaps this is why the haste is seen in developing ‘7’. After all the flowery language used about Vista, Microsoft seems to be acknowledging the fact that Vista is still not ready for prime time. (If these figures are obtained by professionals, how much higher can the figures be for Vista in the wild?)

Vista doesn’t simply work. Microsoft has done a good job of fixing much of the difficulty that was there on day 1 of general release, but this operating system is still not reliable to a degree that allows ‘ease of use’.

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