Vista Disappointment
April 22nd, 2006
Paul Thurrott wrote about why Vista is a bit of a disappointment and where it fails.
People use their computers to try and complete tasks. At the moment, I can't see anything obvious in Vista that will help someone achieve those tasks more efficiently.
Windows isn't bundled with any real applications such as an office suite, etc. To upgrade your productivity, upgrading your text editor, web browser or office suite would help you achieve those tasks faster and more efficiently - not the operating system.
One feature of Vista which has had a lot of hype is glass windows. I personally don't see the point - they don't look particularly good, they don't make it any easier to use the system and there are inherent problems with glass windows - it is hard to see which window is activated, muddy text, etc.
With Luna Element, Windows XP looks kinda nice. It's not really worth investing in new hardware and system resources in creating a banal glass interface.
I think Vista will be a hard operating system to sell.
- Microsoft
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Oh it sure will. I doubt they'll give masses of copys of xp or 2k once vista is out. They drop support for their older os and in the next 7 years or so until some new windows with even better glass effects is out, there's much to happen. If they decide to support xyz only on Vista though it's really good and everyone wants to have one there're only two possible solutions: Vista will be bought/cracked or other OS are going to have a real boom. I doubt the latter. All new PCs will have Vista and you gotta buy Vista in 99/100 cases even if you don't want to.
I'd hope there'd be some real competition on the OS market. Or at least something, that makes Microsoft fear. Like Firefox did for IE. Long-dead IE was revived hastily after Firefox went too strong. IE7 is still crap and no competitor to Opera or Firefox, but at least they woke up. Hopefully IE loses even more users so that MS is forced to really develop a good alternative. Currently, IE7 is more like "ok we need to do something, so let's add some basics, give it a new icon and hope the users don't switch anymore".
This would force MS to be _ahead_ - and you can't be ahead by implementing some features that everyone plays around the first time they discover and than use it no more because it's useless (ps: luna absolutely sucked. The only positive about it was that it was cracked soon afterwards so one could have good skins that don't take up half of the screen height.)
I prefer implementing new effects onto XP, I have a better looking theme to the default XP one using Brico Pack: Vista Inspirat 1.1, comes with a dock bar at the top aswell which is nice. Also using expose style alt tab, allowing 3D view of tabs.
See below for base desktop I have and showing my alt tab.
Why use the glass effect? Because it allows users to visually see where windows and coming from and going to. A big issue in modern design terms.
As far as Vista goes, I find it difficult to summarise what I like about it - but it is a vast improvement over XP. Once full driver support is in full swing for my hardware, I’ll gladly make the move.
Nice bits:
Bad bits:
Of course you could so most of the good stuff in XP, but I like these things to be native and (theoretically) keep the computer running smooth.
I agree about needing competition though, if only Lixux and chums were actually at a point where I wouldn’t need a dual-boot system. Most Linux / Windows convertees seem to bestow the virtues of Linux with the disclaimer "Be patient and run Windows alongside it". I was patient for over half a year and ended up resenting the whole process - but that’s another story!
Paul Thurrot’s recent articles find him liking the new O/S much more after the abysmal BETA2. It is turning a corner. But then again, why bother upgrading? I’ll do it because my software is on subscription. Home users will most likely need more convicing as previous versions of Windows have proven.
Vista is so much more than the glass windows. Lots of the core system is completely rewritten and you notice it compare to XP. Thread scheduling is vastly improved with much less vated clock cycles as a result, memory management is vastly improved, a completely new graphics engine that gets rid of jagged window movemements and slow video performance, numerous security improvements such as for example randomized memory allocation. Numerous other new technologies too many to list here (dx10 for one).
Microsoft has really failed to get the message out that this is a new system under the hood, instead they focus on the glass interface and the stupid flip 3d view which of course no one needs.