Microsoft Exec Says, "You'll Miss Vista" 273
Oracle Goddess writes "'Years from now, when you've moved on to Windows 7, you'll look back at Windows Vista fondly. You'll remember its fabulous attributes, not its flaws.' That's the opinion of Steve Guggenheimer, vice president of the OEM division at Microsoft. 'I think people will look back on Vista after the Windows 7 release and realize that there were actually a bunch of good things there,' Guggenheimer said in a recent interview. 'So it'll actually be interesting to see in two years what the perception is of Vista.' A dissenting opinion comes from Bob Nitrio, president of system builder Ranvest Associates, doesn't believe organizations that skipped Vista will ever regret their decision. 'I don't think for a second that people are suddenly going to love Windows 7 so much that they will experience deep pangs of regret for not having adopted Vista,' said Nitrio. If I had to bet, I'd go with Bob's take on it." My first thought was, Steve meant Windows 7 is designed to be virtually unusable as payback for all the complaints about Vista, but I might be biased.
Title misleading, er, totally wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
This proves how incompetent the /. story moderators are. The actual quote says nothing about MISSING Vista. It only says you'll appreciate it. The idea is this: Vista has an overall bad user experience, so all new features of Vista are generally lumped into the "bad" category. With an operating system that corrects those flaws, yet keeps what are supposedly nice innovations, you'll eliminating "guilt by association", and people can appreciate them for what they are.
The only improvement I've found in Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
Having used Vista for awhile, there's only 1 improvement I can actually think of: the sound mixer/volume control thing in Vista will let you mute or control volumes of individual applications.
Not the most earth-shaking thing in the world (most apps have a mechanism built in to do volume control or mute the sound, but not all, so it is nice; and some apps bury sound control in layers of menu that make it a pain to quickly mute them).
Also, I see no reason why that couldn't have been done in XP, other than MS wanted to have something to tout as an improvement in Vista.
Re:Alas, poor Vista (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's a Delusional Thing To Say (Score:3, Interesting)
I couldn't say it better myself. Going XP to Vista feels like 98 to ME. ME was absolutely AWFUL. It took Windows 2000 and finally XP before M$ finally got it right (w2k was good but didn't play the games XP could).
I have a feeling Windows 7 won't be there either, I think it'll be Windows 2000 all over again, a big improvement but not XP. But I really think this might be Microsoft's last chance, I think if anyone could topple M$ it'd be Google's Chrome OS [blogspot.com]. I know you guys are all linux lovers, but I've tried redhat and ubuntu and it's just not there, not enough to switch. If anyone could convince me to switch it'd be Google. Reviews of Android software have been positive [gizmodo.com], some calling it the open source iPhone [pcadvisor.co.uk] so that shows Google knows what they're doing.
I'll have to get Windows 7 for the laptop because it already has Vista but I'll dual boot into Chrome OS when it's released.
Re:Business schemes of an effective monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
A profitable business scheme for Microsoft is calling an update to a product
by an entirely new name.
like Apple.
Another profitable scheme is charging the full price for an upgrade,
as though it is a totally new product.
like Apple
My understanding is that releasing versions of products that aren't
finished is also profitable for Microsoft, because then most customers buy new
versions immediately. Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows ME, and DOS 3.0 are
three examples I think of immediately.
You missed Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, and Windows 3.0. 3.11 was the first usable version of Windows IMO, and the most people would have skipped 95 if it wasn't a huge improvement (and was). I used DR-DOS and GEM mostly, so I didn't really follow the MS-DOS until 3.11 when it was hard to avoid. NT was always pretty solid, even 3.1 and 3.51. Windows 7 rc1 seems very solid, so I expect the release to be, as well.
Apple has pissed me off too much hardware-wise to upgrade, especially in graphics cards, so I can't compare them anymore, but usually their OS is rock-solid. I can't even run my computer as a hackintosh because my nearly year old graphics card is better than the one you get in their $3000+ machine. I will not buy a machine that can't be upgraded that isn't called a laptop or notebook, and that means a sticker shock $2499 starting. If I ever buy another Apple, it will be a laptop.
There were numerous bad Linux releases, especially in the early years (for instance, Softlanding sucked unless you had very specific hardware - thankfully the Slackware fixed most of the problems), too, so it isn't just Microsoft, but most of the trusted Linux vendors are pretty solid. I still hear of a slip-up here or there causing problems on mostly cutting edge distributions (like GenToo).