Microsoft admits Vista failure

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What issues has xp got ?

Craptastic performance when dealing with multiple programs at once is one that came clear near my last uses with it on my own rig. Networking could be a plain (relative to Ubuntu and now Vista anyway). Security is at least better in Vista, though still far from good. It audio subsystem was not the greatest either. There are a large number of issues, its not like XP (or any OS for that matter) is perfect.
 
Well I guess everyone is entitled to like whatever they want but I think its quite amusing that some people would complain about Vista's compatability while at the same time saying how great Linux is.

For me, Vista is great. Everything baring one old game has worked perfectly with it. Its faster, more functional, and much nicer to use from an aesthetic point of view (which does matter to many people).

As for being a memory hog, I have 2GB of RAM, which is fairly standard now, at least at the high end, and I havn't been limited so far. If a situation arises were I am then I will buy more, its not exactly expensive.

Im not saying Vista's right for everyone. Low end PC's with 512MB or less should stick with XP. As should businesses were compatiability is critical, but I see no reason for gamers or power users like the people who visit this site not to upgrade.
 
I think its quite amusing that some people would complain about Vista's compatability while at the same time saying how great Linux is.

Why is it amusing or even relevant? I'm not sure what Linux has to do with Microsoft's inability to provide back-compatibility with one of its own operating systems. Microsoft has built an empire on back-compatibility, so back-incompatibility would seem to me to be a bigger issue for Microsoft than a couple on unwashed hair-eaters whittering about Linux.

Im not saying Vista's right for everyone.
You sound like a Linux aristosnob saying that. Why isn't Vista for everyone? If Vista isn't for everyone then maybe it shares the same failings as Linux? Not ready for prime-time?

As should businesses were compatibility is critical, but I see no reason for gamers or power users like the people who visit this site not to upgrade.
Gamers and "power users" will sustain Microsoft through the next two years will they? OK. Microsoft have spent more than it cost NASA to put man on the Moon to make an operating system for gamers and "power users"?
 
I thought the $3.00 OS in china was a cut down XP not vista? Is that not correct? Anyway I won't buy vista it is too expensive. MS has gotten too greedy for me.
 
Gamers and "power users" will sustain Microsoft through the next two years will they? OK. Microsoft have spent more than it cost NASA to put man on the Moon to make an operating system for gamers and "power users"?

That's a ignorant comment. Since when did any business jump into an operating system even close to release? Unless you're asking for hundreds (thousands) of man hours in pain then why would you do that? Businesses come later once the OS has proven itself elsewhere. Hell, many businesses might just end skipping entirely over Vista, especially if its not necessary or a benefit to them. A large number of businesses out there are running fine with Windows 2000 and might have programs that were custom coded for their uses. They can not upgrade to Vista unless those are replaced. You can't expect Microsoft to support every program coded for a previous Windows platform. If you spend so much time supporting the old you'll never see the advantages of the new.

At some point you must let go of the past. It seems to be a theme as of recent from Microsoft. DirectX 10 for instance has given up backwards compatibility in order to make use of new advances. Frankly if you still have old programs that you must use then stay using what you are right now, when you find it time to move on. Its just out right nonsense for everyone's favorite program to work on Vista and then blame Microsoft for the issue. The program was coded with another operating system in mind, MS tried to fix all possible compatibility issues, but you can never get everything covered.
 
That's a ignorant comment.

It's not ignorant at all. It was a question. Did MS spend all that money to create an OS purely for gamers and "power users"? Personally I don't think they did. Personally I think they spent all that money creating an operating system that they wanted to sell to business in very large numbers. As you have pointed out, business cares about back compatibility. So if MS can't deliver back compatibility to it's target audience, it's in trouble.

Since when did any business jump into an operating system even close to release? Unless you're asking for hundreds (thousands) of man hours in pain then why would you do that? Businesses come later once the OS has proven itself elsewhere. Hell, many businesses might just end skipping entirely over Vista, especially if its not necessary or a benefit to them.
Precisely.

A large number of businesses out there are running fine with Windows 2000 and might have programs that were custom coded for their uses. They can not upgrade to Vista unless those are replaced.
Indeed. So these are lost revenue opportunities for MS.

You can't expect Microsoft to support every program coded for a previous Windows platform. If you spend so much time supporting the old you'll never see the advantages of the new.
Microsoft have to perform a financial balancing act. Less back compatibility = fewer sales. More back compatibility = higher development costs. Is it yet obvious that they've struck the right balance?
 
Why is it amusing or even relevant? I'm not sure what Linux has to do with Microsoft's inability to provide back-compatibility with one of its own operating systems. Microsoft has built an empire on back-compatibility, so back-incompatibility would seem to me to be a bigger issue for Microsoft than a couple on unwashed hair-eaters whittering about Linux.

Because many people, including Charlie cite backwards compatability as one of Vista's primary flaws and then encourage the take up of Linux as a response. I find that amusing.

You sound like a Linux aristosnob saying that. Why isn't Vista for everyone? If Vista isn't for everyone then maybe it shares the same failings as Linux? Not ready for prime-time?

No new OS is for big business, thats a simple fact and in no way reflects on the Vista's success. As for the 512MB market and below, can you say the same wasn't true of XP with the 128MB market and below?

Gamers and "power users" will sustain Microsoft through the next two years will they? OK. Microsoft have spent more than it cost NASA to put man on the Moon to make an operating system for gamers and "power users"?

My statement wasn't aimed at those groups exclusively, I merely highlighted them on the assumption that they would be the people reading my post. Was I wrong?

In fact virtually all new consumer PC sales are where MS will earn money from Vista over the next couple of years. Business revenue will come much later. We are still running major upgrade programs from NT to XP where I work.
 
why do people talk about DRM in Vista as if it was the brainchild and huge evil scheme of microsoft themselves? Do you people not realize some form of DRM has been infecting much of the media we buy for over the last decade? Why is it suddenly a total friggan shock that Microsoft was quite literally expected to and of course finally had to fully enforce DRMs in their new OS? It was bound to happen at some point.

DRM is going to be around as long as companies with vast sums of money will try to thwart pirating. Enjoy using operating systems or open source stuff pre Vista for the rest of your lives.
 
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Because many people, including Charlie cite backwards compatability as one of Vista's primary flaws and then encourage the take up of Linux as a response. I find that amusing.

Well fine, I'm glad he brings you sunshine and amusement. However, whilst I can see that the two could be linked I don't see that they automatically are. A business faced with an incompatible Vista and an incompatible Linux isn't automatically going to flee to Linux because it's not Microsoft. So in that respect it's silly, but it doesn't really reduce the importance to MS of problems with Vista.

On the home desktop Linux is a total non-starter. Is Vista any better? Would my mum be able to pick up a random piece of hardware and a random piece of software and have it work on her shiny new Vista PC? It'd work under XP, but not under Linux, is Vista a dead cert?

As for the 512MB market and below, can you say the same wasn't true of XP with the 128MB market and below?
Well I wasn't addressing that aspect of your comment because fundamentally I agree. As a matter of fact the latest Linux distros I've used are unusable with less than 512MB.

My statement wasn't aimed at those groups exclusively, I merely highlighted them on the assumption that they would be the people reading my post. Was I wrong?
Reading them here? No. But if you believe what you read here everybody on the planet has a shit-kicking graphics card.
 
I have read the article over and over in search of the "Microsoft's admittion of Vista's failure". Could anyone please point it out to me?
 
Frankly if you have not used it then you have no clue.
Oh really. So everything I read about vista on the internet..I can just forget that right now eh?

And I guess you've personally been to outer space to verify yourself that yes, the earth is indeed round right?

Because if you merely read it somewhere you don't have a clue is that what you're saying?


I've no idea wether a nebulous non-measurement such as "responsiveness" is true or not (and TBH I don't care because without a doubleblind test to back it up such a claim is worthless) but timedemos hardly lie.

If vista gives crappier performance than XP does - and this has indeed generally been the case in the tests I've seen - then that does 'give me a clue'. Which is that vista is a bit of a slovenly hog really.

And I don't like the DRM crap it's loaded out the wazoo with either even though I never pirate anything these days.

Peace.
 
Would my mum be able to pick up a random piece of hardware and a random piece of software and have it work on her shiny new Vista PC?

Probably not, but would she have had any more luck with XP in the first 6 months of its life?

I just don't see the point in putting Vista down in respect to XP when XP was just as bad when it was this new. And I use the term bad very loosely, as I find Vista, to in fact be very good from a compatability point of view. Although that would clearly depend on how old your apps and hardware are.
 
Probably not, but would she have had any more luck with XP in the first 6 months of its life?

Probably not.

I just don't see the point in putting Vista down in respect to XP when XP was just as bad when it was this new.

Well whether it's fair or not Vista isn't being compared to what XP was back then, it's being compared to what XP is now. Microsoft is competing against itself in that respect.
 
Oh really. So everything I read about vista on the internet..I can just forget that right now eh?

And I guess you've personally been to outer space to verify yourself that yes, the earth is indeed round right?

Because if you merely read it somewhere you don't have a clue is that what you're saying?


I've no idea wether a nebulous non-measurement such as "responsiveness" is true or not (and TBH I don't care because without a doubleblind test to back it up such a claim is worthless) but timedemos hardly lie.

If vista gives crappier performance than XP does - and this has indeed generally been the case in the tests I've seen - then that does 'give me a clue'. Which is that vista is a bit of a slovenly hog really.

And I don't like the DRM crap it's loaded out the wazoo with either even though I never pirate anything these days.

Peace.

Has everything about Vista been negative online? No it hasn't, in fact this very thread has several positive comments about Vista. Yet you have clearly only looked at the negative or have either completely ignored it.

Common sense generally tells us that not every aspect can be considered the same. Especially whenever certain people simply like to ignore all aspects of the story. A comparison between the curvature of Earth and the performance of Vista are not the same and not all aspects of either can be verified without first hand experience. You can actually experience the curvature of Earth without going to space. You can actually learn about certain aspects of Vista by just reading. You can not however comment on every single aspect of it without first hand experience. You can not make bold claims without some sort of real proof and personal experience.

There are a large number of reasons why performance could be slower on Vista than XP, for one it could be the fact that Vista uses a new driver model and unlike XP it has not had several years to mature and be exploited by manufacturers. You can not expect over night (or in the span on months) to occur in what took years to achieve previously, this is not magic. Microsoft can not unlock a door and burst out experience for all driver developers. Instead you however simply blame Vista for this, and sure it is Vista that has the new driver model and it is Vista which is new. But you've already judged these aspects of Vista without the same scale as you do for XP. To just inform you of the past, when XP came out it was slower out certain tasks than previous Windows OSes, but that changed over time and eventually it progressed and surpassed.

While DRM can be a problem, I have yet to personally experience this DRM hell that people like to bring up. In no way have I been annoyed by DRM while using Vista, hell I can't see any proof that its actually doing anything right now. Sure it might be there but its not some animation of a demon in the bottom right hand corner yelling at all hours of the day like people try to portray. If you want a operating system that can take advantage of new media than it is a necessary evil at this point. If you really want to cry about DRM then at least go to the right place.
 
I currently am dual booting between XP and Vista Ultimate and I have to agree with the article. Vista is terrible aside from a couple minor improvements; most of the so-called new features I have no use for whatsoever or just plain aren't new. People can claim it runs as fast or faster all they like, however from my personal experience the same PC feels like it's on steroids after I boot back into XP.

I've been following the development of Longhorn on and off since I heard about it six years ago and I can say with certainty that Vista is most certainly a fraction of what MS claimed it was going to be and what the early alpha versions of the OS were looking like.
 
It audio subsystem was not the greatest either. (or any OS for that matter) is perfect.

I thought it was vista with the bad audio no hardware accelleration except through openal which is missing a lot of features that are available with eax avanced-hd, eax 5 and a3d
 
I know a guy personally who says that copying things across a network with Vista is really aweful. He says that it takes ages to copy stuff.

Does anyone else have a similar problem?

I believe he uses the RTM version but I could be wrong.

US
 
Even XP was hard to swallow for me, but at least it brought some major improvements in several areas which made up for that. Vista does absolutealy NOTHING new or betterr besides the shinier visuals. There is simply no reason to use it at all.

As for DRM, it might not yet be a problem, but if it should live on, we'll talk in a few years.
 
Ever ytest or review I've seen of new games and hardware games run slower under vista than on XP.

I read somewhere this is (at least partly)because the DRM shit is constantyl sitting in the background scanning the hardware like 30 times per second so that new "unauthorized" peripherals aren't added that could tap invaluable intellectual property from the system and ruin our friendly neighborhood multinational entertainment conglomerates..

Peace.

Perhaps you should consider USING the product and speaking from personal experience comparing XP to Vista. :)

Undoubtedly some games seem to be slightly slower, but this is not the fault of the OS. Ati's drivers, for example, have made decent strides and games feel about as snappy under each o/s. My currently installed sampling includes Test Drive Unlimited, Far Cry, Half Life 2/Ep1 and CS:S, NFS:MW and Prey.

Can't say I have noticed a difference going between the games v/s when I was dual-booting and running the same games on XP.

Vista has substantial changes underneath the surface that only a person who has used the o/s would know and appreciate (or dislike :) )

The o/s is hardly without faults but comparing it to WinME shows pure ignorance, a la Teh Inq's article.

Per application volume control, for example, is a god-send.
 
I thought it was vista with the bad audio no hardware accelleration except through openal which is missing a lot of features that are available with eax avanced-hd, eax 5 and a3d

No hardware acceleration does not mean bad audio, it simply means no hardware acceleration. If you're mainly interested in listening to music then Vista is a setup forward in the audio department depending on your setup. Also, if a developer uses OpenAL (which they should) then hardware acceleration is still certainly possible in Vista. Sadly the audio portion of games has been neglected for awhile now.
 
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