The Vista OS has not been good for Microsoft. Pushed out quickly into the supply chain, new Vista users found a very different GUI, old reliable programs that would no longer run, digital music they had purchased would no longer play due to DRM issues, and a new version of Office that required a fair amount of effort to find old familiar tasks.
Then there was the brutal ad campaign from Apple, including the one with my old High School classmate, Mary Chris Wall.
Microsoft has been working hard on a replacement OS, called Windows 7. The Windows 7 team learned from the mistakes of Vista, and trimmed a lot of useless code, making it much more efficent. In addition, they have worked to expand their driver coverage, which was severly lacking when Vista was released.
Now the rumor is that Microsoft will stop selling Vista once Windows 7 is released. It seems that Microsoft would like to forget about Vista, and hide in the same hole that they dropped the Windows Millennium OS in.
Filed under: Microsoft, Operating Systems, Windows7 | Tagged: Microsoft, Operating System, Vista, Windows 7 |
Urbin Technology 
A good thing, I believe.
I work in the IT department of a large corportation, not in the computer industry. And I don’t believe Vista’s running on any supported box in the company.
Vista was a major change. The lack of driver support when it came out was bad enough, but then there were the changes in UI and the minimum hardware requirements meant that IT departments would have to scrap a lot of currently working equipment if they switched to Vista.
The UI changes meant a big financial hit in retraining costs and help desk costs on a Vista roll out. I don’t recall hearing word on about Microsoft addressing those problems with any organization.
The 2007 Office suite just added to the problem. Incompatible file types and a very different UI. Lots of lost productivity while users learn a new interface.
None of this endeared Vista to any IT professional.
Plus the fact that it was a buggy piece of crap. Only when SP1 for Vista was released did start to show any sort of reliablity.
The DRM issues didn’t help matters either.
Vista was clearly released too soon. The DRM bloat showed that Microsoft clearly wasn’t listening to its customer base either.