Interesting post over on Ars Technica – Microsoft does a blind test with Windows XP users, telling them that they are testing a new OS. It is really just Vista. And the overwhelming majority are impressed.
As I have said frequently before – Vista’s problems are (for the most part) not technical – they are marketing and perception. It reminds me of a term from (I think) Tom Peters in Thriving on Chaos – “relative percieved product quality”. It is not the true qualty that drives consumers, it is all about perception.
FredSpace 
mmmmm Kool Aid 🙂
I will say what I have said all along about Vista – I have no more problems with it than with any other OS with which I have had to put up over the years (including Mac OS back when I used it – around version 7). And Vista has been far more of a marketing failure than a technical one.
LikeLike
Fred my friend, I like Microsoft too but you have drank the Kool Aid if you think Vista works well.
I know of entire organizations that failed to roll out Vista after testing it. The first release, as is well known was terrible and the service packs have corrected things but Lindsay tried it for a year and just last week installed XP. She just lost too much time fiddling with the bloody thing.
As for the Mojave project, if I controlled the hardware, software, the environment and lead people through any Linux distro, I bet all of those 120 people would love it too. You can’t rig the game and say people like me now.
LikeLike
Again – I have never had any serious issues with Vista. Most problems I HAVE had have been due to third party hardware and software vendors who have little respect for their users (Apple, Adobe) who cannot be bothered updating software when a new OS comes out.
On the other hand, i hwould see few compelling reasons to upgrade from XP to Vista. I would not see any reason to downgrade from Vista to XP either (unless I was short on memory).
Vista does not suck, but it is not a very interesting upgrade, either.
LikeLike
I personally have not had any issues (per se) with vista except some of my old hardware does not work. I have a external TV tuner which works like a charm with XP but Vista somehow fails to recognize it (it detects it alright). I can’t even run the software in compatibility mode.
Frankly, I am not sold on vista just yet as to why I should abandon my perfectly fine XP world.
LikeLike
It is interesting – I hear a lot of people talk about wierd issues like this. I myself have never seen them. I am not doubting you at all – maybe I have just been lucky!
I have been running Vista since before it went beta. Since it has been released, I have been running it on half a dozen or more computers at home and at work, ranging from a 1.5 GHz centrino-based tablet with 1 gb or ram, through low-end dells, to desktops and laptops with the most current processors and 4 gb of RAM. The only serious complaints I have ever had are with drivers for my older stuff (especially for the tablet), and memory – if you do not have 2 gb of RAM, Vista will not make you happy. I actually find it more stabel than XP – I have far fewer crashes and blue screens than I have had in the past.
(and as the IT people who have had to support me in the past will atest – I am a serial killer of computers and other hardware)
LikeLike
Well..
I’d find it hard to say that the sudden, magical dissapearence of files in my home folder, the sudden read-only status of entire directories (not changeable even in admin mode with a prompt), or the fact that simple copy-paste functionality doesn’t work has much to do with perception – it is all defects that are there, and have hit a lot of people (including me).
I was quite happy using XP, and I was looking forward to using Vista, but after a year of Vista, it was so horrible and unreliable it drove me into the arms of Apple, something I wouldn’t even have given a second thought just a year ago.
Microsoft can spin and market their problems all they want, but the fact remains that Vista is an unreliable resource hog. They would be better served by spending their time and money rolling out the next service pack (if it is even possible to fix it that way).
LikeLike