Microsoft: Vista Stunk, but we PROMISE not to do it again with Win7

Another rather tedious muse knocking Microsoft. It's not like other organisations don't get it wrong. We've got Vista on several PCs and we don't have people climbing the walls demanding we down grade them to XP. And we have ABSOLUTELY nobody asking to run Linux or Apple OSes. And neither do we anticipate anyone scrambling to place a request for a machine running Chrome.

Updated by evansdg1 on Sep 17, 2009 2:37 PM

Jamie, have you noticed all the toads that have suddenly appeared? All croaking the same thing? And with Win7's opening day slightly more than a month away?

That happened the last time with Visaster. And it happened again when the Press started pounding keyboards on all the problems people were having with the initial release of Visaster.

I would be looking for Moses except there's nothing biblical going on, its just the shrills of the flying monkey brigades of Redmond.

Posted by Xwindowsjunkie on Sep 17, 2009 7:17 PM

XWJ - Yes, I had noticed, and got pretty much the same feeling that you seem to have gotten. All I can say is that there are a LOT of business in this world who wish that their consumers were as forgiving as Microsoft's obviously are - and in particular who wish that they had customers who were willing to PAY THEM for their mistakes, the way Microsoft customers are clamoring to pay for Vista with Lipstick!

jw

Posted by J.A. Watson on Sep 17, 2009 7:25 PM

Well, I'm pleased to say that these comparisons are ones I shall never have to make. Between them, wine and dosemu handle all the legacy stuff I still need to work with. What's even nicer is that if you put their dot directories on a usb stck you can take them, complete with all their 'installations', to any machine :)

Posted by Tezzer on Sep 17, 2009 11:23 PM

I have looked at the OS-on-an-USB-stick. I made a severely stripped down WinXP Embedded image that worked quite well in less than 27 MB. No networking, no gui, no user names etc. so I know that Windows does NOT have to be 2 GB monstrously huge. Even with networking it can still be less than 300 MB.

I'm going to start with Ubuntu's USB startup image and go from there. I expect that Linux will be considerably smaller.

Back to toad sightings. I've seen a lot of them on web sites here in the US. So it has GOT to be a deliberate campaign. Kind of like the Donald Segretti dirty tricks campaign during the Nixon-Watergate events. What's really unfortunate is that others get wrapped into it like listening to the rabble-rousers that start riots and slink away before the cops show up.

(I expect croaking protests from the toads any second. Ha!)

Updated by Xwindowsjunkie on Sep 18, 2009 12:32 PM

I have to ask, how many of you have used Windows 7 for an extended peroid of time? It has been my OS at home since the open beta was released and into RC. My machine runs as well if not better than it did with my old XP build, it certainly out performs vista in every shape way and form.

I am not a MS Fanboy and have had to live through supporting 95, 98 and ME long past MS's own support services. I have seen all the mistakes the company has made on the OS front since 3.11, even with this history I am genuinely enjoying using Windows7.....which surprises the hell out of me.

I would say, until you have used it for 3+ months as your ONLY OS on a machine you use consistently it is simply reactionary to form any kind of judgement on any platform whether it was MacOS, Linux, Windows or any other OS. A lot of the time when I read boards, blogs and commentaries people will put down anything that comes out of Redmund simply because it has come out of Redmund. Even the worst company in the worst can be capable of making something good, I would rather treat each product separately and on it's own merits/failings than judge it because of past history or who makes it.

Look at Skoda, they made the worst looking cars in the world for years, now the Octavia is one of the most common vehicles I see; especially in the Taxi firms.

In conclusion, try Windows7 yourself before making a judgement, give it a fair try for a few months with out pre-judgements clouding your vision; you may be surprised. If after that you stil don't like it, then at least you have been willing to give it a chance.

Posted by Gaderath on Sep 18, 2009 9:54 AM

@Gaderath - Thanks for reading and commenting. What you describe is exactly what I did with Vistaster. You might find it interesting to check my earlier blog entries, I wrote pretty extensively about my experiences with it at that time.

Like you, I have been using, working with and supporting Windows more or less since the beginning. My personal experience with Vistaster, combined with the things surrounding it which became public because of various trials and lawsuits, were simply the last straw for me. I can give you a 100% iron-clad guarantee that I will never use Windows 7, under any circumstances, either as my ONLY OS, or as a second, third or fourth OS around here, for 3+ months, weeks or days. I assume that I will eventually end up with one or more copies of it because I will, as usual, be FORCED to pay the Microsoft TAX when I buy a new computer, which will come preloaded with Win7 that I don't want, need or use. I will likely treat that in the same way that I treat pre-loaded Vistaster now, I will ignore it, and either simply wipe it out and reload with whatever operating system I want, or I will reduce the size of its partition to a minimum and leave it dormant on the off chance that I end up lending or selling the system to someone who needs to use it.

It is not only the bad software coming from Redmond that I object to, it is the bad faith on top of the bad software. I've had more than enough, and I simply will not tolerate it any more. I defy anyone to name another situation where a company can sell you a pile of garbage, then turn around and CHARGE you again for the replacement product they have developed, while saying long and loud to anyone who will listen, "This is the product that Vista SHOULD have been, this time we got it right".

By the way, you might want to consider your examples a bit better. Skoda did indeed build terrible cars for a long time, but they didn't get better until Volkswagen took them over, and showed them how to do it properly. That is a far cry from what Microsoft has done and is doing.

Thanks again for reading and commenting, and I sincerely wish you well with Windows 7, I hope that it works out well for you.

jw

Posted by J.A. Watson on Sep 18, 2009 11:38 AM

I feel like I'm repeating what I said in an earlier discussion. No, strike that, I AM repeating...

What tends to get lost in this OS flaming war is that the OS is irrelevant to most people, because they run apps, not OSes. They run IE or Firefox. they run Photoshop or Gimp. They run Windows Messenger or Pidgin. They run Doom or Civilization.

If they have a choice (which in most businesses, they don't), then they'll run the OS that best supports what they want to run.

I have a strong leaning towards open source software - I like the philosophy and principles - and will use it wherever possible. But I also have to work with others, and I use some apps that simply don't have working analogues on other OSes.

So I run Windows 90 percent of the time because it supports all the apps I want to run, not because I'm too dumb to know the difference, or because I don't care about the quality of the OS - I do, deeply. There are always trade-offs: this is one of them.

PS: Win7 is much better than Vista (which I never did run). If you don't have to run it and you don't want to give money to MS, then don't. But note that not everyone is in a position to make that decision...

Updated by manek on Sep 18, 2009 4:57 PM

@J.A. Watson

I agree with the stance on Micrsoft as a company and their practices etc. However, a lot of people across the Internet are bashing Windows 7 the product based on their view of Microsoft the company. MS's business practices have always been, shall we say, less than exemplary (to avoid any legal entanglements). We could even say history is repearting itself with Vista/Win7 and WinME/WinXP; when you consider that WinXP was infact a re-imagining of the ideal behind WinME (a home OS with the stability of NT/2000).

Your blog is obviously a reaction to MS's stance and business practice with regards to the whole Vista fiasco (I have Ultimate in my desk draw which is not even used) and the admission that Windows7 is what Vista should've been.

With that in mind, in any other industry either a re-issue would be made or a massively reduced cost re-grade to the better more stable product. I actually agree with you whole heartedly in the belief that Microsoft should not be able to get away with such shoddy practices, but the grim reality is that too much of the working world relies on Microsoft Windows. Until that reliance can be broken we will see no real changes.
Also, because Vista and Windows 7 are marketed as two different products (which they are in sense) no legal action can be taken against them (that I am aware of, Desktop support not a lawyer).

So our choices are:
1. Stick with MS product knowing we will get done over like this, but swallowing that as the cost of maintaining compatibility with the rest of the business world.
2. Embrace open source solutions (as there are no real retail competitors for MS's dominance) which have their own drawbacks even if their advocates do not wish to acknowledge them. The biggest for business, of course, is compatibility in with other firms.

I guess that is the price we pay for allowing one firm to gain a monopoly.

P.S. Yes the Skoda reference was a bad one, but it was more intended the show the stigma attached to a brand rather than who turned it around for them.

Updated by Gaderath on Sep 21, 2009 10:05 AM

Two very interesting comments, thanks to both of you. Before I respond to a couple of the points you have both made, let me say that I know perfectly well that I am being extreme in my reaction to the Vista/Win7 debacle, but my attitude in the whole situation is much more heavily influenced by fatigue and disgust in dealing with and watching Microsoft conduct their "business" than it is by the actual technical merits of the operating systems. I suspect that if I were to give Windows 7 a "fair chance", as I did Windows Vista, I would find that it works adequately and I could use it. However, I am fortunate to be in a position where I no longer have to give it a fair chance, I can simply say "enough is enough, I will no longer support an abusive monopolist", and vote with my feet. As I have said, to some extent I can not vote with my wallet, because in most cases when I want to buy a new computer I am FORCED to buy it with Windows pre-installed, so I am effectively forced to support the very monopolist that I despise so much. Bummer.

@manek - I had read your similar previous comments, and I agree with them completely. However, I think the "OS doesn't matter" syndrome can be both positive and negative. The largest effect by far is negative, exactly as you say, people don't care about the operating system so they simply take whatever is offered to them which allows them to run the applications they want, or if they are at least sophisticated enough to understand the difference and try to make a choice, they choose the one which is generally perceived as running "the most" applications - Windows. Another negative effect is that at the consumer level there is little or now perception of difference, advantage or disadvantage, which means there is little or no incentive for distributors to offer alternatives; conversely, there is obviously an additional cost in training and support, so many or most distributors will chose the "safe and easy" option of offering only Windows. The one thing I have personally seen on the positive side is that IF you can actually get someone to try a Linux system, they are very frequently (in my case almost always) satisfied with it - for exactly the reason you said, what they really want is the applications, and if the applications work for them, they don't care what is underneath. I don't think that is 100% true, because I have seen a number of times when they started off that way, but then were extremely pleased to later discover that their Linux system already had excellent programs for photo management, office applications, PDF file creation/viewing, and on and on, all sorts of things that would have to be added to Windows, often at additional cost. So if Linux can just get a foot in the door, that operating system apathy can in fact be an advantage.

@Gaderath - I appreciate the fact that you can see what my position is about; I certainly understand your reasoning for continuing to use Windows 7. But I think you hit the nail right on the head when you said "Until that reliance can be broken we will see no real changes". Exactly. But how will that happen? The U.S. and European governments have shown that they can't do it. Microsoft simply builds a few hundred million (or billion) dollars into their budget to cover "fines", makes sure they have plenty of lawyers on staff, and continues doing things however they please. In my opinion, the only way it will be broken is when people stand up and say they won't accept it any more. So, I make my insignificant stance.

You both mention one more thing that I find very interesting - continuing to use Windows because you have to maintain compatibility. Is that really true? Compatibility with what? If I look at XP and Vista, I don't see much compatibility at the user level there; it looks to me like moving a user from XP to Linux would be pretty much the same sized jump. At the administration level I think the "compatibility" is even less, isn't it? At the hardware level, one of the major, MAJOR irritants I had with Vista was that my scanner, various of my wireless networking adapters, and a label printer all had no drivers for Vista, and never will, so if I had stayed with Vista my only option was to throw them away and buy new ones. Is that compatibility? I don't think so, but no matter how loud anyone yelled about it, the answer was always the same - that's the way it is, so shut up and deal with it. Finally, at the application level, look at Microsoft Office - is Office 2007 "compatible" with 2003 and previous versions? Not only is the default file format different, requiring either the 2007 user to remember to save in 2003 format, or the 2003 user to download and install compatibility filters, but even worse, the user interface is dramatically different! I have had much less trouble switching users from MS Office 2003 to OpenOffice than I have switching them to MS Office 2007.

The bottom line is, I'm starting to think the "compatibility" issue is a red herring, in real life terms the compatibility hurdles are not significantly larger in going from Windows to Linux than they are in going from XP to Vista or Windows 7. I'm not entirely convinced of this yet, but if it is not true I would really like to see some concrete examples proving that, and I can't think of any.

It looks to me like all we are left with are "real" cases where there are not equivalent programs available on Linux. While this is certainly true, and I have seen and experienced it myself, how many such cases are there, and more importantly how many people, what percentage of the potential market, does it affect? I can name two off the top of my head; sitting here on my desk I have a Brother P-Touch label printer, and I have not been able to find a driver for it on Linux, and a number of my friends are golf professionals, and they use a video swing analysis program which is only available on Windows.

I would argue that this is actually a corollary to the "users don't care about the OS" situation above. People have seen stories in the press, or heard from friends, about lack of applications or lack of compatibility on Linux, and they use that as part of the reason to just buy Windows. But the vast majority of them, if you could just ask them exactly what they want/need/do, would not have a single thing that can not be done at least as well if not better on Linux.

This is, of course, all just my personal opinion, and anyone who has evidence to the contrary is welcome to post it here. For my part, I will continue to make my personal stand, futile though it may be.

Thanks again for reading and commenting.

jw 18/9/2009

Updated by J.A. Watson on Sep 21, 2009 10:03 AM

But its not futile everything that has being discussed above we have all witnessed at some point or another in our own experiences, I don't think open source software has that many hurdles left to jump to be honest, given the the fact that it is on the march in so many different front's of the market.

Obviously ms has the advantage of a big inherited user base so 3rd party applications should be in abundance but they screwed that up with vista by taking the user's for granted, and very quickly had to start development on something that offered a answer for the XP users which significantly outnumbers the vista base, and that comes in the form of virtual machine but even that is not a complete solution.

I think that the open source community can take advantage of what ms has done to itself and crack the home user market, but to do it they haft to pull together a bit more by means of sharing some repository's and some formats.

One thing that I have past puzzled over was the history of open source and how it came to be adopted by a business orientated background and not a home one, but since reading from another article I have learned that its fundamentally constructed by people already working in such backgrounds as a personnel ventured interest.

Which is not such a bad thing because this without doubt played an important role in the developments core architectures used by the open source affiliates, this surely was the hardest work to be done which means now the only thing left to do is getting it to the home user obviously once that is achieved the 3rd party software will flow like water.

My last concern is with the rise open source on other formats we will without doubt see an increase for application stores an such, now my concern hear is I wouldn't like to see open or freeware software being locked away in subscriber application stores, but hopefully other outlets would emerge to counter this.

Thats what I would like to see more choice because as it stands what is presented to us at this point in time, upon closer inspection is not as broad as we would have liked it to be.

Updated by CA on Sep 21, 2009 10:02 AM

A lot of people would probably save an absolute fortute if they could adopt Linux in place on Windows. However, there are a few barriers in the way to accomplishing that in the two spheres of residential and business markets

Residential
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A lot of home users still struggle to use a PC in its most basic functions, moving to Linux would complicate this further as there are just too many differences for the lay-man to take in. I know how hard it was with people moving from win9x to winXP and from winxp to vista. Even just the cosmetic changes were a massive hurdle for some users to get over. For a lot of people Windows 7 looks just like Vista so the "shock" found on upgrade is minimal.

This next one is a very personal one, I am a gamer by hobby. There just simply is not the support within the games industry to move to Linux. So few games have a Linux client it is just not worth the move, some would argue run it under WINE. I would counter that with, I don't want to have to jump through hoops just to play a game to relax.

Business
-------------
Corporate users are probably even worse that home users with change. A PC is just a tool to complete a task. The cost involved with re-training staff, even in small company (sub-200 staff), is a massive investement in time, effort and lost productivty. Add to that the fact that a lot of users can barely use what they have now without contacting I.T. ever 3 seconds when a simple message box appears on screen and you have a nightmare that is not work contemplating.

----------------------------

So how does Linux (or any other OS) break down these barriers? Firstly they need to move out of the geekish fringe of I.T. Before anyone jumps on that comment, from the perspective of a non-I.T. person looking in, Linux is very much a thing for I.T. guys. That view makes it very hard to gain market share and shed that overall image.

Only by shedding the image and gaining more of the market place can Linux hope to gain a stronger foothold in the desktop OS marketplace. With that foothold it becomes easier to gain vendor support for drivers, software development, technical support teams and other projects.

I will be honest here, I do not know how another OS is going to be able to break MS's grip on the market, or at least gain public recognition without being or having:

1. Incredibly simple to use for the lay-man
2. Visually easy to use, not always the same as simply being simple.
3. Being easy to install software and hardware on without requiring any massive amount of PC knowledge.

That will would only be the first stages to gain recognition, there would have to be on-going support, easy patching and upgrade methods. All of these things Windows users take for granted right now thanks to the 20yrs MS has held the monopoly in the Desktop PC marketplace.

Do you think the Open Source OS "collective" (for lack of a better word) can come together and work towards that goal? Personally, I don't right now because Linux users/advocates (in my experience) have a very elitist community that they do not want the "unwashed masses" using their thing. Doesn't really make it a friendly environment/system to try and adopt, does it?

So there we have it, in my opinion (which I am entitled to without being flamed [though constructive discussion is welcomed]). Quite a few major barriers in the way of ANY non-MS OS challenging Windows for it's crown and marketshare.

Richard.

Updated by Gaderath on Sep 21, 2009 10:01 AM

If you limit the user interface (UI) down to where the User has few or no choices in applications, the OS becomes a moot point. You can train Users to the application interface and eliminate OS training by just showing them in the application how to open, edit and save their files.

90% of the real work done by a User during the day is done in one application. That has been studied so many times with the same result I don't even bother to question it.

The primary application that gets the most frequent use by the most office users is the email client. The second and third are word processing and spreadsheet applications. Hence the importance of MS Office or OpenOffice.

If you look in the want ads for office personnel, admin assistants etc. familiarity with MS Office is a 100% required skill. The business owners/managers do NOT want to train their employees. That is a hidden cost of ownership for the software borne by the Users. They either have to pay for the training, its paid for in schools or the User trains him/herself. Most of the time, its the public taxpayers or the User themselves that pay the tax.

Go into the US publicly funded schools, they "teach" kids to use Microsoft applications. My daughter came home years ago telling me she needed MS Powerpoint to do her homework for some of her classes. That is a hidden monopoly tax paid to Microsoft directly. I showed her how to use OpenOffice and to save in Powerpoint format. It took me 10 minutes but it would have cost me $150 or so to buy MS Office Student edition.

Did the "teacher" know that there were alternatives? Did the "teacher" have those installed on the computers in her class? Did she hand out copies of OpenOffice.org to those that didn't have the money to buy MS Office? No. No. No.

Did she at least tell those in class that they could go to a website and get a FREE copy of OpenOffice.org? Again No.

How many high school seniors go out and buy laptops now for college? In most colleges and universities its a required tool. How many laptops can you buy off the shelf or at WalMart (another monopoly) with something other than Microsoft on it?

What I find absolutely unfathomable is why businessmen, managers, business owners haven't figured out that they could save an incredible amount of money just by getting off the Microsoft bandwagon and using OpenOffice for those desktops that don't need but 2 applications, email and word processing?

Our telephone receptionist for heaven's sake has Vista Business Ultimate with MS Office 2007 Pro just so she can look at her Myspace account and web browse all day! How freaking stupid is that?

Updated by Xwindowsjunkie on Sep 21, 2009 9:59 AM

Maybe thats the problem then not enough representation of open source products in the stores simply relying on web sites for awareness is not enough, as is relying on institutions to spread the word especially if they are receiving incentives to stay away from alternatives.

Posted by CA on Sep 20, 2009 8:28 PM