Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is finally conceding that the company needs to shake up its Windows Vista efforts. The Wall Street Journal reports that Windows’ top marketing exec is leaving the company. So, what does Microsoft need to do to address Vista’s shortcomings? Here are 20 quick thoughts from The VAR Guy.
The VAR Guy has been offering Microsoft consistent advice on Vista for more than a year. These 10 practical steps could get Vista on track. And these 10 examples show why Vista missed the mark in the first place.
Microsoft has spent the past year issuing multiple press releases praising Vista’s momentum. And while the company continues to generate impressive profits, just about everybody outside of Redmond knows Vista missed the mark. Apparently, Microsoft is starting to realize that, too.
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Wow VAR Guy, you really do drink the Microsoft Kool Aid, don’t you!
I read your 10 reasons and all I can say is all you will accomlish is putting a lot of lipstick on that pig called Vista.
There isn’t a single reason to install Vista over XP other than to water the Microsoft pastures.
As for promoting all this ‘connectivity’, Unix and Linux is the reighning king of connectivity because of the open, published and polished protocols. All Microsoft can say is, “Hey we can connect to ourselves, most of the time!”
As for the special effects presented by Vista - Linux and Mac got them beat.
So, if you really want to do your clients a favour, stop stuffing Vista down their throats - it’s not good for them and it makes you guys look like shills.
Bar
CD Baric: Instead of jumping to conclusions you should read The VAR Guy’s complete volume of work covering Vista. Did you know he only blogs from Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux? Did you know he’s on record stating that Vista is a waste of time? Not sure how you concluded that The VAR Guy drinks Microsoft Kool Aid on Vista. In reality, he stopped swallowing Microsoft’s claims long ago.
The main problem with Vista is that it’s all smoke and mirrors and no substance.
The majority of the real, useful features promised for Vista either didn’t happen, or are half-a$$ed implemented.
For example, where’s the advanced, journaling file-system with a database engine at it’s core?
It seems like all Vista really delivered is a bad rip off of the Aqua UI eye-candy features. And worst of all, Microsoft never even considered if the Mac OS X UI was worth ripping off in the first place. The fact is that while the Mac/Vista UI’s look pretty and seem to have a lot of wonderful features, in real world, every day use, the both get in the way of real productivity. For example, the Vista and Mac OS X file managers are both terrible, awful, horrible things that should be flushed and replaced completely. When I move from a file manager like Konqueror to either Vista or OS X, I feel like I’ve suddenly had one eye, ear, and hand removed, and the rest of me placed in molasses. It’s so much slower, and inconvenient to do anything under the OS X or Vista file managers that I find myself wanting to hit things when I’m forced to use either of them. This file manager functionality (or lack of) carries throughout the rest of the interface design of both OS X and Vista.
Simple, useful functions that used to be in XP, are gone, or horribly mangled in Vista for no apparent reason other than change for the sake of change and eye candification. Look at the stupid new Start menu.
Quick, in Vista, using the UI, what’s your current IP address?
How many clicks and windows to get there?
On my SuSE/KDE desktop it’s no clicks, hover over the network manager icon in the taskbar.
In XP it’s two clicks (Right click the network icon in the task bar, click status, then click support on the window that pops up. Even if you make a shortcut in Vista, the network status window is a huge, oversize, overly complex mess.
There are hundreds of other such examples of reduced UI functionality that I can’t imagine just what Microsoft was thinking. Here’s one, bring up the Vista file manager now, using only the up tree button, go to the root directory of that drive? What’s that you say, where’s the up button?
Another choice of directly copying something that sucked in OS X. The stupid back button is NOT equivalent to an up button, nor as useful. Again, a little thing taken by itself, but put together with thousands of other similar bad design decisions it adds up to a terrible user interface experience, and an impediment to usability.
Throw in the well documented high hardware requirements, poor hardware and application compatibility and you have a real deserving successor to Windows ME, in Vista.
I’ll stick to XP where I’m forced to use Windows, and SuSE/KDE where I’m not.
Tachyon