Comments on: Vista Didn’t Fail Because of Security

By: PHB

PHB — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:07:46 +0000

I have run Vista from the start on my Voodoo Omen. Never had any problems at all. The machine runs like a bat out of hell with a 30″ display.
There are a couple of points that are lame. nVidia’s device driver is certainly lame. The video cards have a total of 1.5Gb of RAM and they take a 1.5Gb hole out of the 4Gb of memory. Totally unnecessary, totally lame. And nVidia’s RAID support is utterly lame as well. But that is not Microsoft.
The main thing that is lame though is the stupid price Microsoft is asking for an upgrade. I have already paid the premium price for Vista Ultimate. I should pay no more to upgrade Vista Ultimate to W7 ultimate than it costs to upgrade Vista Home to W7 home. There is no way I would pay $300 for the upgrade and I spend several thousand dollars a year on software (I have full copies of Adobe Photoshop Premiere and Photoshop and a copy of Solidworks). If I won’t pay those prices then I doubt many others will.
A lot of resistance to Vista in the enterprise came from lazy sysadmins who saw the blather on Slashdot and saw an opportunity to avoid the work involved in an upgrade. And most of the blather on slashdot was Linux fanboys speaking of stuff they don’t know anything of.

By: Joseph Webster

Joseph Webster — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:41:32 +0000

What really killed Vista was that in the enterprise space the path from XP to Vista was hardly straightforward or cheap. Most if not all patch management platforms, NAC and enterprise SSO that were designed to work with 2K and XP choked on Vista (at least in the beginning). Vista correctly plugged some holes that, unfortunately, were enabling features for many of these systems (e.g.remote registry and MSRPC remote control). So for many enterprises, the addition of Vista into their networks would have broken their endpoint management systems. So Vista really wasn’t an option. I suspect that hurt Vista sales a whole lot more than memes about suckage on 4chan.

By: David Brodbeck

David Brodbeck — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:03:43 +0000

I really think most of the bad rap on Vista came from the lack of third-party driver support. Most people don’t upgrade an old machine to a new OS, but tech columnists do. And when a tech columnist upgrades from XP to Vista and his/her printer stops working, you get a bad review. I don’t know if this was the third-party OEMs being lazy, or if Microsoft didn’t give them enough support, but it was a real problem. (I think they’re courting the same kind of issue with Windows 7’s lack of an upgrade path from XP. It may avoid a lot of potential installer issues, but it’s going to get mentioned in every review.)
Of course, it could be Microsoft’s strategy is to release one crummy OS that everyone will hate, followed by an OK one that then seems awesome by comparison. This would explain both Windows ME and Vista. ;)

By: Dan Weber

Dan Weber — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:56:02 +0000

I only used Vista recently when I purchased a new laptop. It seems totally fine. (I’ve never ever upgraded an OS. I upgrade when the computer dies and I replace it.)
I did make sure to get lots of RAM and dual-core, but in 2009 you can get that for about $600, even in laptop form.
Is this the same Vista as from before or has it been improved? UAC doesn’t bug me that much — the only thing I didn’t like was when I couldn’t do an “ipconfig /renew” from the command line, and it didn’t recognize “sudo”. :>
I’m also not a hard-core gamer.

By: Blake

Blake — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:13:48 +0000

Years ago, I was in a CISO-only forum in Redmond and we got an early preview of Vista. The Borg were very jazzed about it and asked us what we thought. We all looked at each other for a minute then one brave soul said, “Look, I’m sure this is wonderful and it looks really good, but nothing in here is going to help my company sell more [widgets]. So, you know, we’ll upgrade when you put a gun to our head and pull the trigger.”