Many of you may know me from my Mac Parody. This has given the erroneous impression to some that I loathe Apple and (by some bizarre opposition calculus) love Microsoft.
I think that I have made my position clear that I hate Operating Systems in general. It should therefore be - by extension - no surprise that I have a bone to pick with Vista.
This is true.
Yet with Vista, it is not a mere bone but rather and entire Harryhausen-ian horde of skeletal warriors...that I pick.
(ahem)
Let me start over.
I became acquainted with Vista Home Edition with my new laptop. I knew that my Acer Aspire 3680 came with Vista pre-installed but I figured that I would give it a shot. Well, what they say about its performance drag and peripheral incompatibilities is true. Having lived through both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, I can tell you that Vista's birthing woes are objectively worse than one would expect from any new operating system - and this includes OSX which was a complete reboot of the Apple product line.
Now Vista at its core has many things going for it. It is at least as stable as Windows XP which is to say as stable as any home computing device gets these days (sorry Apple). It is very easy on the eyes. It is also fairly intuitive. However, in order to truly enjoy Vista, you must not only be logged on as administrator (something Microsoft now inexplicably discourages) but you must be at least a little familiar with administrative rights, servers and networks as Vista operates in this sort of world. What this means to the average user is that Vista will do things - strange things - at inconvenient and often disastrous times. From my point of view even the fact that Vista does things when I'm not telling it explicitly to do things is itself a bit shady.
Add to this the fact that Vista has a comedicly large footprint, saps resources and generally acts like a blob of poor coding and you have a rather off-putting user end experience. Pardon me for placing some credibility with Microsoft when I say that they simply should have known better.
Now Microsoft wants us - and by us I mean the entire planet - to drop 2000, NT and XP and adopt Vista even though it doesn't work like a finished piece of code. Consumers have responded in the appropriate fashion by uninstalling Vista and going back to whatever worked best for them. In my case, I purchased my first copy of XP Pro and am happy to report that it is a slick and jim-dandy operating system! Still apologists are trying to create a parallel world where consumers are happy with Vista and Microsoft need not address their blunder.
The problem is this. We the consumers need to be able to decide what works and what doesn't (this means you too Steve Jobs). When something comes out like Vista that has some game-ending issues the consumer needs to be heard on the matter.
Microsoft? We'll just drop support for XP so you HAVE to buy Vista.
Well this time there is something we can do. Dell and many others offer XP (again) on most new machines. When purchasing a new PC please ask you retailer for XP (you'll thank me) and if they don't offer XP for that computer ask for a system for which that they can. If they don't have anything you can use that comes with XP please say no thank-you and tell them why. There are plenty of reputable computer vendors who will build a nice system and include a licensed version of Windows 2000 or XP at your option. In this way, we can force Microsoft to address Vista's fundamental failure and maybe try something new like a total OS reboot (it worked for Apple).
We need to be firm on this and we need to stick to our guns. If the future is Vista, we can look forward to a PC price point (due to performance requirements) closer to that of Apple. We can look forward to feeling as helpless with our home computers as we do at work on the office network. Most of all we can look forward to losing the personal of personal computing. Microsoft has written some pretty impressive GUI in the past. Based on my experience with the Xbox 360, I know that they still do. Vista wasn't a planned violation of good code execution, it was an error in judgment. All we need to do is force Microsoft to admit their mistake and go back to the drawing board. Think it can't happen?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you OS 9.
