Why, Exactly, Does Everyone "Hate" Vista?

As I have with every version of Windows since Windows 386, I followed Windows Vista from its early days to its release, writing books, teaching classes, and consulting about the OS that is essentially NT Workstation 6.0. In fact, I think I've picked apart Vista with a more fine-toothed comb than I have on many of its predecessors. And after all my experience with Vista, I must confess complete and total befuddlement at all of the anti-Vista rhetoric that seems to permeate the media like the smell of old cigarettes permeates the Las Vegas hotel room in which I'm writing this. (It's fall conference season, and it seems that every computer conference has decided to descend on Sin City this year.)

If you believe the various pundits, Vista is massively buggy; not being used by anyone; completely lacking in drivers to support virtually any past, present, or future hardware; and is so hated that Vista buyers are giving up and re-installing Windows XP on their systems in droves. This opprobrium would lead an outside observer to conclude that Bill Gates must be mere moments from committing seppuku. Personally, I don't care whether anyone moves to Vista or not. As I've observed many times, the pace of change in PC software was once so great that major changes and improvements in software came every year or so. And in, say, 1985 most PC experts would have scoffed at the possibility of using the same version of any piece of software for six years. That rate of change has slowed so much, however, that many people now use and get a lot of utility out of an eight-and-a-half-year-old piece of software--Windows 2000, and I still run across folks still running copies of its twelve-year-old predecessor, Windows NT Server 4.0. Given that, the idea that people wouldn't feel it necessary to abandon XP (which turns six this month) seems quite reasonable. Heck, if cars weren't subject to mechanical wear, I might drive my Honda Insight for the rest of my life, assuming that the dealer proves successful in un-doing the damage that a rather large stag mule deer did to it a couple of weeks ago. I don't pine for "upgrades" to my car because cars don't see a lot of innovation any more, and as software's innovation rate approaches that of cars, then we may well see 25-year-long life spans for PC software one day, provided that Microsoft stops using the threat of withholding product support as a cattle prod to make buyers upgrade.

Software buyers have always been a bit gun-shy not only of new OSs but of service packs and even patches to those OSs. For as long as I can remember, the same sequence of events occurs every time that Microsoft offers Service Pack X for one of its OSs. "Hey, I wouldn't take a chance on Service Pack X," some "experts" would say. "Nope," they'd advise, "I'd stay with Service Pack X-1." This advice sounds sage until I recall that a year ago, when Service Pack X-1 came out, those same experts counseled me to stay with Service Pack X-2, the "reliable" one. I think Dana Carvey's character "Garth" in the movie Wayne's World explained the situation best for some of those experts, when paraphrased: "We're techies. We fear change." So my journalistic brethren and sistren will always be able to find somebody, lots of somebodies, who view new versions of software with a jaundiced eye.

I guess what I'm saying is that I recall people dead set against NT 4.0, Windows 2000, 2003, and XP when they all originally came out, and there have always been people unhappy with the state of driver support for new OSs, and there have always been those who have upgraded and decided to return to their old OSs. People's reactions to Vista aren't terribly different from the reactions six years ago when XP arrived, so why are their reactions to Vista getting so much media attention?

Ah, I think I've got it. We must be experiencing one of those there's-nothing-good-to-write-about periods that we journalistas experience now and then. Yeah, that must be it. Where are those HP wiretapping incidents when we need them?

Send me your "I hate Vista" or "I love Vista" stories at help@minasi.com . I look forward to hearing from you!

End of Article

Mark, do you know the differences between all those Vista versions? Home, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate and Starter versions. And retail and OEM versions of these Vistas. Then try to explain the differences to end-users. And try to justify the price of the Vista (Ultimate is $450 whereas the XP Pro is only $150).
After that you can begin to understand what we, Vista haters, feel.

muraty October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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Mark, I'm a big fan, but.... you're way off on this one. I've used Windows since the 3.1 days, and I've always looked forward to the next version. I've always found the next version ultimately much improved over the previous version, even if the newer version required a slight adjustment.

Not so with Vista. Vista is the first iteration of Windows that had me scrambling for Google searches to complete even the most mundane tasks. I defy anyone to explain how removing the menu items from Windows Explorer improves a Windows User's experience. I double defy them to explain how providing a feature that allows you to enable the menu for ONE USE ONLY makes logical sense. Maddening, simply maddening.

I spent an hour and a half struggling to copy files from a CD to my new Vista PC. Vista would not allow me to copy the files (backed up config and data files for various apps I was preparing to port over from my XP Pro PC to my brand-new Dell Vista PC) directly to a directory I had created on the HD. It would, however, allow me to copy those same files to the Desktop, and then copy them to the directories I initially intended.

I again ask - how does that make any sense? What security enhancement does that provide if it allows me to simply copy files to the HD, but makes me do it in 2 steps rather than one in order to get them to their ultimate destination?

At that point, I then realized the multitude of articles and reviews I had read about Vista's ills were more than Open Source and Mac iFan rantings, and were indeed based on valid points.

Lastly, my dual core Dell w/ Vista proved no faster than my creaky Dell P4 running XP Pro. How can that be??? Faster bus speeds, faster chips, a clean OS. ???

That all was LAST October, and the Vista PC sits abandoned since. The Vista PC now collects dust, waiting for the weekend I can figure out how to wipe out Vista and install XP Pro on it, and thus bring it back into the world of the productive.

Ubuntu... hmm.

ejhonda October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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I am a DOS 1.0 to Windows Vista user and agree 100% with ejhonda. The GUI just isn't intuitive and what takes 1 or 2 steps in XP, now take 4-6 steps. Probably the worst is Office 2007. I hate that with a passion and after 90 days, am ready to uninstall and put Office 2003 back on. The "Ribbon" menus give too much information and again the icons are not intuitive enough. There should be a study on how the human reacts and adjusts to computer interface changes. After looking at an icon for 6 years, was it necessary to change the icon for "show desktop"???

bcase7 October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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I run Win95 on a Qemu Virtual PC running on Vista. It is faster than Vista and that is all that it takes to hate the new OS.

sandrot October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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The reason Vista is so expensive is MS had to justify the cost of Software Assurance that businesses have been paying since they deployed XP. 6 years X SA cost (1/3 of the purchase price of XP) = Inflated price of Vista.

jkohut@agfinance.com October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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I hated VIsta until I built a fast machine to run it. Now it's great! Dual-core 3.4 GHz Acer desktop, then added 2GB RAM and converted the single disk to a SATA2 RAID 0 stripe set by adding a cheapie controller and another disk. The memory and disk upgrades cost $200, but that's very little over the 5-6 year lifespan of the machine. Also, I don't run any anti-virus software to slow it down. With UAC, Defender, and normal prudence, I just don't see any need. (I am a Windows IT Pro since '92)

KingOfPain October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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I personally have mixed feelings about Vista. On my laptop (Lenovo T60) it runs pretty good, it does not crash. however here are some annoyances I have experienced...
1-Copying files is extremely slow, apperantly Microsoft fixed it with a patch, still isn't fast, you go to copy and it stalls for 20-30 seconds until it starts the copy process. WHY?

2-It's a resourse hog, the minimum amount of ram to run Vista effeciantly should be 1.5GB, I have 2GB and on idle it's at 1GB acording to task manager

3-on my laptop if I connect an external display (LCD) it runs very fast. run on the laptop display and the HD will swap forever rendering it very slow.

4-From a corporate perspective, we run applications on Windows XP platforms perfectly, enter Vista, now some of these APs have to be rewritten and web applicaitons also have to be rewritten.

5-Direct 3D is crippled on Vista and proven by many hardware/software reviewers, so if you run applications that depends on Direct 3D/heavy graphics and video. It's not he OS for you.

At any rate, it's still the beginning, I am waiting on SP1 to see if there is an improvement.

ezakaria October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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It sucks as is....However, I will defer my comments until I have installed Vista SP 2!!! ;}

herschelt October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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Mark:

It must be all that Vegas smoke. Hating and loving an OS sounds like more like a soap opera than a technical commentary. Vista is just another piece of Microsoft software, meaning proprietary but not truly original, bloated, expensive, and late to market . But the gap between expectations and reality truly is larger with Vista that with previous versions of Windows. I expected better performance and driver support (particularly for 64 bit), easier deployment, a better interface and improved functionality. I have not seen any of these. So I neither love nor hate Vista, although I understand the feelings it has engendered. I simply will not use until there is a better reason to do so.

Cheers

M.

mflopez October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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I wholeheartedly agree with you Mark. Vista does have its quirks (& some bugs), but I must admit that I am loving this new operating system. I remember when Windows XP was just as derided as Vista is now - when everyone seemed to agree that Windows 2000 was the "best O/S" that Redmond ever made. Most people aren't inclined to adjust the GUI to reflect the hardware they run it on, and most hardware vendors made the mistake of claiming Vista readiness, when it simply wasn't (with the default settings of eye-candy aero). I applaud the difficult decision Microsoft made with regards to security (UAC for one) that seems to annoy people - I feel that it is about time that they are forcing users and vendors to re-consider the ramifications of running as administrator. As a network administrator, I look forward to the day that vendors respect the standard "user" group for running their applications (without having some heinous registry permissions to set or NTFS for the install path – are you listening Intuit?).

stevensean October 31, 2007 (Article Rating:

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