Much like furrbear, I have tried Vista and found it painfully wanting. You've seen his list of problems: here's mine.
Aero. Microsoft apparently thinks OS X is as popular as it is because of the chrome and eye candy. This may be true. However, they missed the fact OS X's ease of use is because of factors that have absolutely nothing to do with eye candy. You could take today's Mail.app, drop it into a 1993–era NeXTStep box, and you'd have a mail application that was a world better than Outlook.
Simplicity and elegance matter a lot more than chrome. The XP interface was not simple or elegant. The Vista interface is not an improvement in these areas, but it has some really nice chrome plating.
(ObDisclosure: yes, I am a human–computer interface geek. This is one of my research areas here at the University of Iowa.)
Cruft. Microsoft made enough changes to Vista to break a large number of software applications — GnuPG and MinGW being the two FOSS applications which most annoyed me when Microsoft broke them.
Microsoft says this was done to improve security. I can accept that, no problem, but it doesn't change the fact Microsoft did some massive breakage of existing applications. And yet, I have applications from 1991 which still run fine on Vista.
I have to grant Microsoft this: nobody in the world does backwards compatibility as well as they do. Yet, this means a large amount of cruft is being added to the system, and design criteria of the past are still lingering. Every time I have to do Windows programming in C, I cringe. The userspace is simply that bad. I have a Master's degree in computer science with a focus on software engineering and security issues, so please don't think my problem is just that I'm a novice programmer.
If Microsoft was going to break old applications anyway, I don't know why they didn't take advantage of the chance to say "okay, let's start from a blank sheet of paper here, figure out which Windows ideas are good ones, which are bad, and make a fresh start". If Vista had been a total backwards compatibility break in order to clean up the APIs and design decisions and provide a foundation for the next two decades of computing, I would be dancing in the streets.
(Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is not a nearly 40-year-old operating system. UNIX is a nearly 40-year-old set of operating system design guidelines. The Linux kernel is about fifteen years old at this point and routinely breaks backwards compatibility along the way, which is one of the reasons why I like it so much; bad design decisions get fixed quickly.)
The marketing copy is fundamentally dishonest. Here, I respectfully disagree with furrbear. Microsoft was not aiming to create a brand new platform, they did not want a brand new platform. They wanted essentially an evolutionary step from XP, one which would compete with OS X in the looks department.
"Evolutionary step" is not the same as "small step". Evolution works so well because whatever lifeform has an evolutionary step tends to eat whatever doesn't. Vista was not, and was never designed to be, a revolutionary blank–sheet next–generation Windows.
But that's what Microsoft is telling us it is.
The amount of downright deceptive hype surrounding Vista is hard for me to stomach. If Vista is going to be hawked to us under such false pretenses, should we really have much confidence in the product? Why aren't they hawking it on its own merits?
.NET is sliding into total irrelevance. .NET 3.5 has added a lot of new assemblies to the system, assemblies which are not specified in the ECMA standard and which will not interoperate with other .NET platforms such as Mono. Yes, you heard me right: Microsoft is embracing and extending their own standard. Talk about your crummy things to do. To the extent Microsoft is pushing everything to all the new .NET 3.5 technologies (Windows Communication Framework, Windows Presentation Framework, etc.) which are not in the ECMA standard, I think it's a deeply hostile act.
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Much like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
furrbear, I have tried Vista and found it painfully wanting. You've seen his list of problems: here's mine.
Aero. Microsoft apparently thinks OS X is as popular as it is because of the chrome and eye candy. This may be true. However, they missed the fact OS X's ease of use is because of factors that have absolutely nothing to do with eye candy. You could take today's Mail.app, drop it into a 1993–era NeXTStep box, and you'd have a mail application that was a world better than Outlook.
Simplicity and elegance matter a lot more than chrome. The XP interface was not simple or elegant. The Vista interface is not an improvement in these areas, but it has some really nice chrome plating.
(ObDisclosure: yes, I am a human–computer interface geek. This is one of my research areas here at the University of Iowa.)
Cruft. Microsoft made enough changes to Vista to break a large number of software applications — GnuPG and MinGW being the two FOSS applications which most annoyed me when Microsoft broke them.
Microsoft says this was done to improve security. I can accept that, no problem, but it doesn't change the fact Microsoft did some massive breakage of existing applications. And yet, I have applications from 1991 which still run fine on Vista.
I have to grant Microsoft this: nobody in the world does backwards compatibility as well as they do. Yet, this means a large amount of cruft is being added to the system, and design criteria of the past are still lingering. Every time I have to do Windows programming in C, I cringe. The userspace is simply that bad. I have a Master's degree in computer science with a focus on software engineering and security issues, so please don't think my problem is just that I'm a novice programmer.
If Microsoft was going to break old applications anyway, I don't know why they didn't take advantage of the chance to say "okay, let's start from a blank sheet of paper here, figure out which Windows ideas are good ones, which are bad, and make a fresh start". If Vista had been a total backwards compatibility break in order to clean up the APIs and design decisions and provide a foundation for the next two decades of computing, I would be dancing in the streets.
(Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is not a nearly 40-year-old operating system. UNIX is a nearly 40-year-old set of operating system design guidelines. The Linux kernel is about fifteen years old at this point and routinely breaks backwards compatibility along the way, which is one of the reasons why I like it so much; bad design decisions get fixed quickly.)
The marketing copy is fundamentally dishonest. Here, I respectfully disagree with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
furrbear. Microsoft was not aiming to create a brand new platform, they did not want a brand new platform. They wanted essentially an evolutionary step from XP, one which would compete with OS X in the looks department.
"Evolutionary step" is not the same as "small step". Evolution works so well because whatever lifeform has an evolutionary step tends to eat whatever doesn't. Vista was not, and was never designed to be, a revolutionary blank–sheet next–generation Windows.
But that's what Microsoft is telling us it is.
The amount of downright deceptive hype surrounding Vista is hard for me to stomach. If Vista is going to be hawked to us under such false pretenses, should we really have much confidence in the product? Why aren't they hawking it on its own merits?