An interesting post on MaximumPC sheds some light on the reasons why the Microsoft Vista rollout process was flawed. It includes some benchmarks testing between XP, Vista and Vista SP1, plus some feedback from Microsoft staff giving an insight into how the problems arose and what’s being done.
Of course, it basically boils down to an underdone release, made too early with inadequate co-operation between Microsoft and driver manufacturers. The article lists 7 major areas where the release really failed:
Instability
At launch, Vista was much less stable than XP, and the problems weren’t limited to high-end hardware - users with low-end & standard setups also reported instability. Considering that improved stability was one of the biggest promises Microsoft made for Vista, users were understandably upset.
Incompatibility
If a desktop application didn’t follow Vista’s rules for behavior, Vista wouldn’t let it run. The program would fail to load, crash on use, or eat the user’s data, depending on the development infraction. This even affected such mainsrteam programs as Acrobat Reader, iTunes, Trillian, and dozens of others.
Hardware incompatibilities could be just as challenging, and Vista also shipped without support from major VPN manufacturers, including Cisco.
The sheer number and range of compatibility problems meant that every user would be affected in some way.
Performance
New OS releases can suffer from performance issues – but Vista showed dramatic degradation in performance on release. This poor performance affected even the most common of tasks.
User Account Control
Vista brought improvements in the overall security of Windows, but one of the mechanisms that helps enable that security comes at a high cost – it’s incredibly annoying.
User Account Control, or UAC. Even if you don’t know what it’s called, if you’ve used Vista, you’ve used UAC. It prompts you whenever an app tries to write to an area of your hard disk or registry that Windows finds suspicious. This seems like a good thing but UAC prompts every time the installer does something suspicious. A problem compounded by the fact that each prompt looks and behaves differently, even though they’re all asking for basically the same thing.
To make matters worse, none of the UAC prompts tell users what the application is trying to do. When you click that Allow button, you still don’t know what it is you’re agreeing to.
Activation
Activation was introduced with Windows XP, and Vista activation includes the Windows Genuine Advantage software, which periodically checks in with Microsoft to ensure that the copy of Windows you’ve already activated remains genuine. WGA isn’t foolproof though, and it can be easily confused by something like a BIOS reset.
Version Overload
In the good old days, there were two distinct versions of Windows: one for home users and one for corporate users. For home, you bought Windows 98; IT departments bought Windows NT. With Windows XP, this trend continued, despite the fact that both the home and enterprise versions used the same core.
With Vista, Microsoft added three more versions of Windows, removing crucial features from the low-end release and forcing power users who want access to both work-related and enthusiast features to shell out for the $400 Ultimate edition. The upgrade path from XP was also inflexible and expensive.
‘One More Thing’
To put it bluntly – Vista didn’t come with any ‘killer’ apps or new features.
The full article can be read here
