Brief: Microsoft guru predicts Vista half as buggy
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Microsoft may have pushed a too-aggressive XP transition schedule because of how long it took to release Vista, an analyst suggests.
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You rarely hear about a new OS causing people to panic. But IT consultant Scott Pam says that's exactly what his small-business clients are doing when they install Windows Vista on new PCs and run smack into compatibility or usability roadblocks.                                                    Pam's clients are not alone: Since InfoWorld launched its petition drive on Jan. 14 to ask Microsoft to continue selling new XP licenses indefinitely alongside its Vista licenses, more than 75,000 people have signed on. And hundreds of people have commented ? many with ferocious, sometimes unprintable passion. "Right now I have a laptop with crap Vista and I'm going to downgrade to XP because Vista sucks," reads one such comment.Where does all the vitriol come from?[ Get the big picture on  Windows XP's impending demise, from user reactions to licensing implications ? and sign InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition ]IT managers and analysts suggest a range of reasons, some based on irrational fears and others based on rational reactions to disruptive changes.Emotional effects "When we first deployed Vista, people told us it sucks, that it's not as good as XP," recalled Sumeeth Evans, IT director at Collegiate Housing Services, an 80-person college facilities management firm. A month later, he surveyed the staff to see if their views had changed, and they had: "They said it was very good, that they were getting used to it. We asked what was different, and they said they originally didn't like Vista because it was a change. That's human nature."Microsoft's overzealous schedule in replacing XP with Vista has exacerbated resistance to change, said Michael Silver, a research vice president at Gartner. The company had originally planned to discontinue XP sales on Dec. 31, 2007, just 11 months after Vista was made available to consumers and 14 months after it was made available to enterprises. The date for new license sales to end is now June 30.In practice, XP's consumer availability ended for many users even sooner ? just six months after Vista's release ? since storefront retailers  Best Buy and Circuit City and most computer manufacturers' Web sites stopped selling XP-equipped computers in July 2007. Typically, Microsoft has given customers two years to make such a transition, Silver noted.Burton Group executive strategist Ken Anderson suggested that the strong emotional identification with XP represented a fundamental shift in how people, including IT staff, now think of operating systems. They have become a familiar extension of what we do and how we work, thus not something  want to change often. "When technology becomes part of you, you don't want people to mess with it," he said.Anderson likened the reaction to XP's impending demise to what happened in the 1980s when Coca-Cola replaced its classic Coke formula with New Coke, causing massive protests by customers who had no reason to change what they drank. The protests forced the company to bring back what we now call Coke Classic. "XP has come to the point of being Coke Classic," he said, with Vista playing the role of New Coke.The further the better The Englewood (N.J.) Hospital Medical Center switched to Vista shortly after its enterprise release, since it had been in Microsoft's early adopter program. Most users ? mainly nurses and other medical staff ? didn't really notice the upgrade and had few complaints, noted Gary Wilhelm, the business and systems financial manager (a combination of CTO and CFO) at the 2,500-employee facility. That's because they don't really use the OS, but instead work directly in familiar applications that load when they sign in using their ID.Capacitor manufacturer Kemet saw a similar ho-hum reaction from most of its staff, says Jeff Padgett, the global infrastructure manager. And for the same reason: Users have little direct interaction with the OS. But the staff did push back on Office 2007, whose ribbon interface is a departure from the previous versions. They rebelled to the degree that Padgett has delayed Office 2007 deployment and may not install it at all.Back at the Englewood hospital, Wilhelm did hear anti-Vista grumbling from people in the administration department, who work more closely with the OS itself for file management and so on. And at Kemet, another group of hands-on users complained about the switch to Vista, noted Padgett: "The people who suffered the most were engineers and IT people."The phenomenon of hands-on users being the most resistant explains why so many small-business users and consultants have reacted so strongly against Vista, noted Gartner's Silver.Conversely, those enamored of the latest technology tend to be Vista enthusiasts, said David Fritzke, IT director at the YMCA Milwaukee, which has been adding Vista to its workforce as it buys new computers. "Some users bought Vista for home and then wanted it more quickly at work than we had initially planned to deploy it," he said. Fritzke also found that younger users adapted to Vista more easily.In search of ROI Users' personal reactions, positive or negative, ultimately impact the bottom line and help drive the business decision of whether to roll out Vista across an organization.It's all about basic cost-benefit analysis, says Gartner's Silver. In most businesses, Vista offers few compelling advantages for users while introducing challenges. The cost of change is too high for the perceived benefit. For example, users often complain about Vista's constant nagging about possible system threats, about applications that no longer run, or about files that appear to be "lost" because they've been moved to new places by the OS, Silver said."It's really hard to convince someone to go to a product that's not quite as stable or as capable as what they're already using," Silver noted ? and so they get frustrated and angry. While IT managers and analysts appreciate some under-the-hood changes in Vista, these improvements don't have an immediate, obvious benefit for users. "Vista's benefits are not about the users," concurred Collegiate Housing Services' Evans.Upgrades from Microsoft's past have also colored expectations, Silver said. Users tend to remember the straightforward transition from Windows 2000 to XP, even though technically it was a "minor" upgrade, he said. (Silver also noted that until XP Service Pack 2, XP had its own share of compatibility and security flaws that annoyed users, something that most forgot with SP2's release.)And while the path from Windows 95 and 98 to Windows XP was rockier, the benefits were clear enough at each stage for most customers to make the upgrade investment gladly, Silver said.Some users have decided to skip Vista altogether and instead wait for Windows 7, whose release date has been reported as anywhere between 2009 and 2011 "Why shoot yourself in the foot twice? Windows 7 will be out next year; I'll wait till then," said one InfoWorld reader. If Windows 7 arrives sooner rather than later ? or if a miraculous Vista service pack addresses all the major objections in one swoop ? then the uproar over upgrading to Vista will quickly fade into the hazy past of other Windows upgrade snafus.
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A white paper published this morning by hardware analysis firm iSuppli, based on its studies of Microsoft Windows Vista running on multiple grades of computer hardware, has concluded that the software publisher's stated minimum requirements for the system may not be nearly enough.
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Expected to be fastest-moving operating system ever, analyst says.
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Microsoft has launched the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment public beta.
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(InfoWorld) - Early feedback from testers already usingÂ Windows Vista Release Candidate 1Â (RC1)Â is that the OS is more stable than expected, which bodes well for Microsoft's plan to have Vista out according to its current schedule. Microsoft has said since March it willÂ release Windows VistaÂ to business customers in November, and consumers in January 2007. Though many have suspected the release will slip further, testers now say there's a good chance the company will meet its goal if the condition of RC1 is any indication. "Overall I think Vista is looking very good at this point....I think all the worries of Vista slipping went out the window," said Brandon LeBlanc, a writer for LonghornBlogs, via e-mail on Tuesday. LeBlanc said that Microsoft has made performance and stabilization tweaks that testers requested after Beta 2, and the latest test version of the OS -- which could be the final one before Vista is released to manufacturing -- is solid enough for regular use. LonghornBlogs can be found here: http://www.longhornblogs.com/ "RC1 is quite usable for everyday work, as I am currently doing myself," he said. LeBlanc said Vista is so far along in RC1, he does not think another release candidate will be required before final changes are made and the OS is sent off for manufacturing. The previous major client release of Windows, Windows XP, had two release candidates before it shipped to manufacturers. To no one's surprise, however, there are still bugs to be ironed out before Vista will be ready for its final release. LeBlanc said the OS needs some work in terms of its user interface (UI), for example. The test version "does lack some of the UI polish we were expecting at this point," he said. In Vista, Microsoft has completely revamped Windows' user interface with a new 3D interface called Aero. Another Vista tester, Andrew Brust, chief of new technology for New York consulting firm Twentysix New York, said the latest test release of Vista feels more "grown up," even on hardware that is not necessarily optimized for the OS. "Besides the fact that it's just a really nice OS, it feels very sprightly even on hardware that wasn't designed for it," he said. Even trivial applications such as Solitaire and Minesweeper games have a next-generation look and feel in Windows Vista RC1, Brust said. "It's a trivial example, but it shows a certain attention to detail [on the part of Microsoft]," he said. Harrison Hoffman, another Vista beta tester and one of the writers of theÂ LiveSide blog, agreed that the latest test version of the OS could be used as a person's main desktop OS, even though it definitely needs some fit and finish before final release. "Although, it might not be quite ready for prime time, if you really wanted to, you could use this build as your primary operating system, but be prepared for a few applications and devices to not work correctly," he said via e-mail on Tuesday. "The OS does not hang, lag or crash as consistently as it used to. The performance has been greatly improved." However, both LeBlanc and Hoffman noted that Windows Vista is still lacking driver support, a particularly sore subject because Vista has been billed as an OS in which devices will work as soon as you connect them without any further hassle, Hoffman said. "The philosophy of Vista has been to have things 'just work' when you connect them and right now, some things just do not," he said. "Obviously this issue is going to get better with time and as hardware manufacturers work closer with Microsoft to remedy these problems." LeBlanc sized up the hardware driver situation in Windows Vista RC1 this way: "Some work, some donât," he said. "Heck, Microsoft doesnât even have Vista drivers for some of their own hardware, including their new LifeCams." Twentysix New York's Brust called driver compatibility Microsoft's "biggest impediment" to getting Vista out in time. "Driver compatibility will be key for them," he said.
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Microsoft plans to release patches for five Windows flaws next week, the software giant announced Thursday. The company posted the information on its TechNet site as part of a new program that gives the general
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While it may seem that the launch of Vista is off to a hyped start with this week's launch, there's a reason for that: As of December, 60% of consumers had not even heard of the new OS, according to Forrester Research.
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Previously satisfied users say the newest release of the software is causing a variety of problems, including an issue where the software won't load at startup. Microsoft says it is looking into at least one issue, but said overall the number of problems
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A report penned by one of Microsoft's top security experts argues that Windows Vista had fewer known security flaws in its first year of release than other major industry operating systems. On the blogs, skeptics abound.
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(InfoWorld) - Forget the "7" code name, which was already out there, or the 2010 release date, which was also neither new nor -- based on Microsoft's lately abysmal record with hitting major release dates -- exactly set in stone. The most concrete news to come out of Microsoft's well-executed leak of a few sparse details about the next version of Windows is that it will continue to come in both 32- and 64-bit editions. That will cause many Windows users, primarily businesses, to sigh with relief. PC vendors and large software makers, who see more-powerful 64-bit PCs as key to driving demand for both hardware and software in an increasingly Web-centric world, are likely to have a very different reaction. Bits of the solution The number of bits determines how large the chunks of data a component of the PC can process, which determines how much data it can handle and ultimately howÂ  fast it can perform. For instance, '80s-era PCs with hybrid 8/16-bit architectures were limited to a maximum of 64KB of RAM. In contrast, a modern PC running a 32-bit version of Windows XP can utilize up to 4GB of RAM. Meanwhile, 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista can support up to 128GB of physical RAM and 16TB of almost-as-fast virtual memory. Combined, the two techniques can offer steep performance boosts for software ported from 32-bit to 64-bit. And they enable software such as database-driven or multimedia applicationsÂ  that were formerly infeasible on 32-bit PCs. Since 2004, 64-bit processors for desktop PCs have been available from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. Microsoft followed, releasing 64-bit versions of XP and Windows Server 2003 in the middle of the following year. But while 64-bit server adoption roars along, the process has been much slower on the desktop side. 32-bit software and drivers can be buggy or demonstrate scant performance improvement in 64-bit environments. Those problems can arise even if users are simply moving from 32- to 64-bit editions of the same version of Windows, such as XP. When under-the-hood changes don't result in better performance, customers will be happy tweaking what they already have. For instance, during Microsoft's quarterly financial forecast last week, the company lowered its year-ahead forecast for Vista shipments vs. XP, from 85 percent/15 percent to 78 percent/22 percent. From 16 to 32, a smooth move The last time around, Microsoft was gentle in moving users from 16-bit to 32-bit, taking a decade to complete the transition. Starting with 1990's Windows 3.0 and finishing with 2000's Windows ME, Microsoft released five versions of Windows supporting both 16-bit and 32-bit. In comparison, Windows 7 will be only the third Windows version, after 64-bit XP's arrival in 2005, to sport dual 32/64-bit compatibility. Apple has a similar hybrid strategy. Its upcoming Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a. "Leopard," is a true 64-bit environment that will ostensibly also offer full compatibility with 32-bit applications on, for instance, older PowerPC-based Mac hardware. Companies, especially those running esoteric or in-house-written applications, will be the happiest to hear that Windows 7 will still support 32-bit software, since it will allow them to avoid expensive rewrites if they decide to upgrade. It will also be welcomed by Microsoft salespeople, systems integrators, and value-added resellers, who will have more options to offer cost-conscious customers. PC makers and big independent software vendors who may have hoped that Microsoft would push customers harder to 64-bit will be the least happy. 64-bit enables developers to add features and let desktop applications run much faster. Those are much-needed differentiators, now that users are taking serious looks at software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Google Office. Similarly, because SaaS applications' performance is more dependent upon the Web site's architecture and the user's broadband link, they don't require ultrapowerful PCs. That could remove the need for users to upgrade -- hurting the PC market, or so fear vendors.
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Bad reviews won't hurt Vista. Neither will the Mac. Or Linux.
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French researcher says Vista's user interface suffers from more 'friction' than Microsoft XP.
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Windows' powerful new graphics engine isn't making friends among hardcore gamers. In particular, players of first-person shooters are reporting slowdowns and crashes after loading Vista, and manufacturers say the wait for Vista-friendly games could be long.
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A Microsoft executive says that--six months after shipping Windows Vista--it has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP.
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A Microsoft Corp. security executive released data Thursday showing that, six months after shipping Windows Vista, his company has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP.