Windows Vista Thoughts

I’m not the only one completely disillusioned with the state of Microsoft Windows:

E. Douglas Jensen: It’s nice that you are so concerned about the user interface of Vista and OS X. But IMHO, that’s icing on the cake — and the cake is rotten inside. Despite Cutler’s experience as an OS designer and implementer, the architecture of NT and its descendents is very poor — compared, for example, to that of most Unix’s for the past few decades. There is no acceptable excuse for letting application writers put anything into the OS directories; that has been the cause of many of MS Windows’ fragility and instability problems. The OS’s my teams have done had a partition for the OS code, a partition for OS R/W data, a partition for OS read-only data, and however many other partitions the applications wanted to use. There are trade-offs involved in that but the stability is worth. You are a user not an OS designer, so you are naturally focused on user-visible things. Someday why don’t you consider getting together a group of experienced OS designers and implementers from industry and academia, to help you perceive these issues and trade-offs; you would enjoy it (but be forewarned that OS kernel level programming can make your head hurt). I know quite a number of folks at MS who know all of this, but it hasn’t enabled them to do anything to fix the fundamental problems.

Bob Lewis: I’ve been thinking about Microsoft and it’s propensity to rush to release, and “damn the bugs; we’ll fix ‘em later” mentality. It seems to me that if MS concentrated on building a killer OS, and stopped trying to cram a lot of crap into it (Word, Outlook, IE, etc, etc, ad infinitum), they would have a better product and could sell it for a reasonable price. I use Win2k Pro, and was astounded at the disk space I freed up when I uninstalled all the excess baggage. Let’s face it, all the average user wants is an OS that’s reliably stable, will run the apps he uses, and give the results he’s looking for. Let Microsoft market the dross separately. I’m no “geek” and need help often when I run into trouble, but it seems to me that marketing the OS separately would garner a lot more trust in the brand, solve a lot of the runtime problems, and save a lot of grief on the part of the common end user.

François Laverdure, B.Sc.: What more will Vista do than this machine already does? I think about the fact that I had been waiting for Vista months before I just threw my hands in the air and bought my new computer. Not because I liked XP, but because my older machine was getting… old. I look at what’s been coming out on Linux; the latest version of the K-Desktop is just gorgeous and very skinnable (I particularly like the Keramic theme with BeOS colors - very sweet). The XGL-based desktop with all OpenGL features really kicks butt. It doesn’t fragment the drive nearly as much as NTFS. Has very few viruses. Not prone to spyware at all. And quickly getting very easy to use. And one only has to look at the latest versions of OS X - the screen shots are worth a million words.

Anthony Kinyon: Vista… what the hell happened, Microsoft? Vista was sort of presented to the public (and the IT industry, enthusiasts, etc.) as this wonderful, amazing new OS. Flashy new interface, stylish, uber performance, new file system, several new cool apps, all these new amazing abilities. It would be sort of like going from DOS and Windows 3.1x to Windows 95 again, or at least from NT 4 to 2000 again. Something big, something drastic. Something special. Instead, it’s turned out mostly to be a dud. Yes, there are some improvements in certain areas. The UI improvements are kind of cool, other than the fact that they are mismatched and non-consistent throughout the entire OS. But you can’t DO anything new that you couldn’t do before? So how can you justify the cost? I mean, what are you paying for, new drivers? Better ALT + TAB? I just feel that MS is not delivering enough new, special, worthwhile things anymore.

Anthony Kinyon continues: I, for one, found Windows 95 to be SOOOO fun / cool at the time because it was ALL NEW. Lots of new options to play with, things to explore and learn and find… and it was smarter than Windows 3.x was. On the other hand, I then, and still, miss DOS. But in a GUI world, 95 was a big step up from 3.x. Right-click anyone? That feature did not exist in Windows 3.x - at least in a normal config without special software. Context menus… it reminds me of a play on a certain phrase. “It’s the features, stupid.” Or “It’s the OS, stupid.” I mean… in 5 years you can’t come up with some all new ideas? Only ‘improve’ on existing items and some new graphics. We can do better than that. I know Windows has the disadvantage of having to run correctly on so many different configs and so much hardware (which is cool that it can do) but they could still have come up with better than they are delivering. I shudder to imagine what will come *after* Vista on the consumer desktop from MS. Linux used to be way behind Windows at compatibility, UI, etc. but it’s sure catching up. (I realize the UI of Linux is usually either a shell or KDE / GNOME, etc. but they are so associated with Linux I sort of speak of them all as the same here).

Sheryl Canter: I totally agree with you about the Mac. I’m a diehard PC user. I start with DOS in 1980, and went onto work as a Contributing Editor to PC Magazine for 15 years. (I’m not with PC Magazine anymore. I left when Michael Miller left.) I never even considered switching to a Mac… until a few weeks ago when I bought my first Mac after a nerdy guy I met at J&R wowed me with a demo. When I first booted it up I thought it wasn’t that different or great. It just had a bunch of multimedia apps that I didn’t really need, and it annoyed me that you can only resize windows from the lower right corner. But then I bought a couple of books on using the Mac well, and now I’m completely enchanted.

Sheryl Canter continues: Forget iLife - have you taken a look at Spotlight? Windows can take 20 minutes to search my hard disk. Spotlight does it instantly, as you type. You can search far more flexibly using just the graphical UI, but if you’re willing to do some scripting your search criteria can be ANYTHING (this but not that, etc.). On top of all that, you can save your searches as smart folders that dynamically update (for example, all documents modified in the last week). And that’s just one example of the coolness hidden inside a Mac running OS X. The Mac manages to brilliantly combine ease of use with serious power. I didn’t think it was possible. The power is hidden so as not to confuse, so if you’re a PC user booting a Mac for the first time, you might think it’s no big thing. Don’t write it off so fast - buy a book.

• Ten Things I Love About Windows Vista
• The Vista Bashing Bandwagon
• The Windows Vista Challenge
• Rubbing XGL in Windows Vista’s Wounds

[tags]windows,microsoft,software,os,operating system,opengl,windows vista,system tweaks[/tags]