The Death of Vista
In just over two months, Microsoft will celebrate the second anniversary of the launch of Windows Vista. Not long after that, I’ll be celebrating the 2-year anniversary of gumming up my laptop with a copy of Vista Home Premium. At the time I figured that I would eventually be installing Vista at work, so I may as well get used to it. My laptop was an ideal test subject since it was only a secondary computer and had a sticker on it proclaiming it’s Vista readiness.
After upgrading, I discovered that 512MB was nowhere near enough memory to run Vista. I upgraded to 2GB, which more-or-less fixed the sluggishness. However, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the display driver to stop crashing sporadically, or the track pad to track the cursor reliably. In the almost two years since installing Vista on my laptop, I’ve come to the conclusion that I will not install Vista on any of the machines at work if I can avoid it. I can’t see spending the time, money or resources to upgrade when there’s virtually no benefit to doing so. And it seems I’m not alone.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are once again extending the life of Windows XP, which was set to retire last summer, originally. The outcry from consumers forced MS to rethink the plan. They had slated the end of January for XP’s retirement, but have now pushed it back to May 30 for system builders and July 31st for large OEMs like Dell and HP. According to Computerworld,
Earlier this year, Microsoft had loosened the XP rules to allow makers of low-cost notebooks, and later budget-priced desktops, to sell machines with Windows XP Home until June 30, 2010.
Microsoft has scheduled Vista’s successor, Windows 7, to be released on the third anniversary of Vista’s release, which would put it at the beginning of 2010. Since XP will be available on business machines until at least the summer of 2009, I expect that most (if not all) corporate PC buyers will do what they can to postpone any purchases until Windows 7 is available. Also, I’m sure that major OEMs will offer some sort of trade-up coupons to get people to buy Vista machines with the promise of a copy of Windows 7 to arrive later. Otherwise, the second half of ’09 looks to be rather bleak for PC manufacturers.
It’s only right that Vista should be relegated to the technology trash heap before its time. Vista is a mediocre vision poorly executed. As Microsoft cut feature after feature in order to hit the release date (most notably WinFS, the allegedly revolutionary new file system,) Vista became little more than an overly-complicated muddying of XP. While I’m glad that Microsoft is acknowledging (if only unofficially) its error and pushing toward Windows 7, I think it would only be right for them to provide a free upgrade to everyone who was unfortunate enough to upgrade to Vista, or who bought a machine with it pre-installed. It’s their mess, they should clean it up.
All I know is that Microsoft had better deliver on Windows 7, because if it’s as kludgy as Vista, people will start moving to Macs in droves. And nobody wants that. 