Travel Technology - Heckling Vista/Office Launch Delays

Is it just me or do I find a lot of the media articles which antagonize Microsoft for delaying launches Vista and Office 2007 to be short-sighted and ill-informed?

Especially with XP as reasonably usable, stable, and secure as it is, why would anyone rush Microsoft into launching something that Microsoft itself feels is just not ready?

Do these people really want to install a rush-job OS on their computers?

Guess it's OK if all they do is use Word and post blogs on the internet all day.

Is this a computer dork thing, or just computer people who are taking out their frustration on not being able to get a job at MS?

I think that it is just a reaction to the fact that this product was supposed to ship a while ago and MSFT did the standard cutting of features and still slipped the date out a bunch.

I think the folks who are most upset would be the hardware vendors who don't get a new OS for the holiday season and have to sell systems with XP on them.

A lot of the heckling is coming not from the delay side, but the "feature" side. The group that is saying Vista provides no added value to 99% of consumers makes lots of noise too. Then everybody else chimes in, for whatever reason. Delays. DRM. Feature cuts. Six different versions of the same product. Still not "secure." And whatever else.

It's not like corporate rollouts of Vista will really start until like late 2008. But the same group that will eventually make those rollouts will probably want to get their hands on the product for home/testing/development environments to find their way around first.

Microsoft has never really been particularly good with deadlines. I doubt it's due to conscientious software release practices.

I read somewhere that a senior executive at MS was presented with an XP laptop with enough Malware/Adware that even he couldn't get rid of it all and they decided to beef things up in the next OS release. Must be a bit embarrasing that.....

I've been running Vista RC2 for about 3 weeks now....not that impressed.
Its visually very pretty, no doubt about that.

My hope for vista is that many of XPs idiosyncrasies are fixed. I only use windows systems at work these days (with the exception of my 2 2003 domain controllers at home) and when I do use XP I cringe. Its just riddled with little things that I cannot stand. My dad cannot understand why his laptop thinks its found his corporate wifi network while we're in the philly airport (1,000 miles away). I dont understand why USB support is so flaky...at best.... or why hibernate just stopped working on my of my laptops recently. I'm not ranting, and I'm not new to the game (card carrying MCSE unfortunately)... I'm just saying that MS NEEDS Vista to fix some core code problems.

So far RC2 has been very stable for me. I'm dual booting on the system in question and actually quite prefer the vista environment to the XP side. So it seems some of the code has been tightened up a bit.

But heres the kicker and the bottom line, OS X looked better and worked better 4 or 5 years ago (and still does)...yeah I'm an OS X pusher, its well known around these parts. But still... Vista is just playing catchup...at least from what I can tell so far.

What I'm waiting for is some real good thick technical books that really dig under the hood. I'm curious what I'm missing from just casually exploring.

"Especially with XP as reasonably usable, stable, and secure as it is, why would anyone rush Microsoft into launching something that Microsoft itself feels is just not ready?"

The better question is who really cares. People use windows because it runs their apps. Adding in a CPU/GPU intensive interface isn't going to help or change this. It will just slow your system down. XP is reasonably stable because it is based on 2k. All of the work that was done on it gave two real benefits. Anti-aliased fonts and faster boot times. They added in the crappy luna gui at the end to make people think it was different from 2k which it wasn't.

What’s the general consensus with Vista vs XP ???

I’m thinking of changing my laptop, but have been told that from Jan ’07 or even as early as mid Dec ’06 PC’s will be shipping with Vista, (but reading this thread, I see that may not now be the case).

Now this makes me somewhat nervous, as XP is really the first windows version that I’ve actually got on with & find stable……being a MAC man at heart, myself & previous Windows had a tumultuous relationship at best.

So I’m really wondering if the XP devil I know, is better than the Vista devil I don’t know & perhaps I should get my laptop pre Vista. I really don’t want to be a guinea pig, de-bugging Vista for MS.

Of course we should not forget the inevitable discounts that might pop up on XP machines in the coming few months.

Any thoughts ………???

What’s the general consensus with Vista vs XP ???

I’m thinking of changing my laptop, but have been told that from Jan ’07 or even as early as mid Dec ’06 PC’s will be shipping with Vista, (but reading this thread, I see that may not now be the case).

Now this makes me somewhat nervous, as XP is really the first windows version that I’ve actually got on with & find stable……being a MAC man at heart, myself & previous Windows had a tumultuous relationship at best.

So I’m really wondering if the XP devil I know, is better than the Vista devil I don’t know & perhaps I should get my laptop pre Vista. I really don’t want to be a guinea pig, de-bugging Vista for MS.

Of course we should not forget the inevitable discounts that might pop up on XP machines in the coming few months.

Any thoughts ………???

If you're not used to being an early adopter for operating systems, Vista is not the place to start. It's not about cost.

The local Future Shop stores here are advertising free Windows Vista upgrades for those that are purchasing systems currently bundled with Windows XP MCE. Something about sending media to you by mail, it looks like.

Don't be a lab rat, wait until they release at least SP1 for Vista before migrating across. It just takes one malfunctioning program to mess up an OS and I had that unfortunate experience with XP.

FWIW, there has been an ongoing disussion here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=353768&page=1&pp=15

Mark

Vista's 3 years late. Whatever it is (and I think it's an ok operating system), it's not a rush job. The reason people make fun of Vista delays is that it's not particularly impressive technically, and it's taken a really long time. MS is the best financed software development shop in the world, and has some of the world's best programmers working for them. Vista's dev timeline is an embarrassment, and ought to result in the firing of lots of managers.

If only they would listen to the techies that seek a total rewrite and implementation of the Win32 specification. Or heck, to write a new kernel and push more .NET, using the current virtualization technology for backwards compatibility. Instead we get piecemeal improvement and more pretty eyecandy with little substantial technological improvement. Except maybe an even more onerous activation scheme.

Microsoft could learn a real lesson if it decided to analyze the market... and realize that operating systems are commodities now. I mean, MacOS is lightyears ahead on user workflow, and Linux provides competitive performance (if not ease of use) at zero.