Windows Mojave!

I have to say I find it really sad that this has been done.

'This is what you should have thought of our product!'

The fact that they're one on one style interviews is just going to make the person feel more pressurized into saying something positive. How many honest people are going to turn round and say 'that was crap.' when someone is displaying a feature? It's just politeness.

Vista flopped when it came out, for very good reason. It was poorly supported and people were having a lot of trouble with it. They say time is a great healer and many people soon forget how difficult nVidia graphics cards, in particular, made the launch - not to mention other 3rd parties who helped the product blowup in Microsoft's face through lack of will to correct.

Since then, it has become a pretty good operating system in my opinion. I purchased Vista Ultimate only the other day for my Mac and I'm pretty sure that once all is updated - I'll have few to no problems with it.

However, if Microsoft are going to release an operating system that performs badly for whatever reason, then they have to deal with the consequences that come with that. That includes press and media as well as fixing what is wrong with the software - or pressing down on the company's who need to fix what is wrong with their software - or a wild suggestion...maybe working with them.

Press and media will control people's opinions on anything but it's up to the company to turn that around with clever marketing and combat the bad things being said.

Whilst this 'experiment' shows that Vista perhaps isn't that bad after all in the eyes of people damn it, it doesn't wipe out the problems that people had and opinions formed based on that.

I think it's most important on getting it right next time around rather than bemoaning the hammering it got in the press. I think regardless of how good Vista eventually becomes, it'll be a stone that the company would like to quickly step over - in the very least in terms of how it has damaged the image of Windows. Be that justified in the end or not.
 
But it's a marketing exercise all the same. 'Clever' is a matter of opinion. I don't think it's going to do much for their image either, but it doesn't really matter now that XP has stopped shipping / is close to.

At the end of the day it's computer software, marketing software to consumers isn't glamorous or easy. If you try and tell people what it does then their eyes tend to glaze over and they go to sleep.
 
It just doesn't make sense to me. To be fair I suppose this type of marketing isn't aimed at anyone here at all.

However, it's flawed. One of the women in the interviews says that she's heard a lot of bad about it [Vista] from her husband and the press. I don't know, but maybe her husband isn't just opening an explorer window or playing a song in Windows Media Player and basing that as his whole opinion on the operating system.

The people who spent hours writing articles, testing the software and creating their damning verdict of the operating system when it launched, are people who wanted and expected more from the product that was proclaiming to be 'Wow'. They're also the people (techies) who know a lot more about the operating system than the average user, they're looking out for things that the day to day user will never experience.

This means they find more problems and more things wrong, of course, but a lot just exposed how under baked the product was as a whole.

You simply can't just say something is going to be Wow and have it come out and be like Vista was on launch - it's heavily embarrassing and the company has paid a high price for it. So long as they make that a lesson they should be fine but do it again and they're genuinely in big trouble, in my opinion.

'It's really good, the press were wrong' is the wrong vibe to be giving off. It's pretty arrogant as well. The press in the majority weren't wrong. 'We made some mistakes and we've fixed them now' is more like how it should be - but heaven forbid a huge company would be honest.

Of course people know that bad reviews are more interesting to read and get more hits on the technology websites - but Microsoft, with Vista, simply made that much too easy in my opinion.

Apple have surprised me with their openness about MobileMe's failings but it came too late for many people as well.
 
Apple still haven't fixed the DNS issues that every other major player patched up weeks ago, if there wasn't any sort of public outcry about Mobile Me then they would have ignored that as well.

I'm not saying Microsoft are perfect but Apple aren't the shining beacon of openness and honesty that some people paint them as.

I think if Microsoft had aimed for "its a nice improvement over XP" and taken a few less years about it then we wouldn't be in this position, so they probably did promise a bit much. Hopefully now the new driver model is around we won't see issues caused by lazy hardware manufacturers in the next release.
 
It just doesn't make sense to me. To be fair I suppose this type of marketing isn't aimed at anyone here at all.

However, it's flawed. One of the women in the interviews says that she's heard a lot of bad about it [Vista] from her husband and the press. I don't know, but maybe her husband isn't just opening an explorer window or playing a song in Windows Media Player and basing that as his whole opinion on the operating system.

As she said herself, maybe its the user that's the problem not the OS.

The people who spent hours writing articles, testing the software and creating their damning verdict of the operating system when it launched, are people who wanted and expected more from the product that was proclaiming to be 'Wow'. They're also the people (techies) who know a lot more about the operating system than the average user, they're looking out for things that the day to day user will never experience.

This means they find more problems and more things wrong, of course, but a lot just exposed how under baked the product was as a whole.

There's a lot intelligent people on here, who know a lot more about the OS than me, like NathanE for example and he's posted in great detail before about the advantages of Vista over XP. Sure's there's problems and things that could be done better, but that's what Windows 7 will be. No one is ever going to make the perfect OS.

This means they find more problems and more things wrong, of course, but a lot just exposed how under baked the product was as a whole.

What does "but a lot just exposed how under baked the product was as a whole". I can only guess you think it was released too soon of there's not enough features?

You simply can't just say something is going to be Wow and have it come out and be like Vista was on launch - it's heavily embarrassing and the company has paid a high price for it. So long as they make that a lesson they should be fine but do it again and they're genuinely in big trouble, in my opinion.

'It's really good, the press were wrong' is the wrong vibe to be giving off. It's pretty arrogant as well. The press in the majority weren't wrong. 'We made some mistakes and we've fixed them now' is more like how it should be - but heaven forbid a huge company would be honest.

Haven't they been saying that all along? Every OS has teething problems at lauch, just like Tiger and Leopard.

Of course people know that bad reviews are more interesting to read and get more hits on the technology websites - but Microsoft, with Vista, simply made that much too easy in my opinion.

Apple have surprised me with their openness about MobileMe's failings but it came too late for many people as well.

When you start losing peoples work and emails, I think you need to be open about it.
 
First of all, don't take my last sentence as some sort of shining light towards Apple. It's irrelevant to what I was saying and shouldn't be seen as Apple being saviors or innovators of communication to it's userbase - they are anything but.

I've been on the receiving end of their lack of problem fixing as well with their wireless which still hasn't been corrected since a patch broke it.

She said the user was the problem, yes. But as I said, what are the odds she did anything more than flick through Explorer in the time she was there? Maybe it was alt-tab that got her excited. If my cousin does nothing but play tracks in Windows Media Player and I do work with Photoshop (for example) which keeps crashing without explanation, does that make me a bad user?

I agree with your point on people who know the operating system extremely well. There are some very knowledgeable heads knocking about but the end user won't care if so much is done in the back end when it's not performing correctly. They won't care if Vista has better security features if all they're seeing is an extremely annoying and poorly implemented pop-up box, every time they want to do something at least half important.

As you said, there is no such thing as the perfect operating system and there never will be - but Vista wasn't even close to being good when it launched. As I say, people forget and time makes things seem not as bad.

By under baked, I mean it felt like it had been rushed out for the sake of being on the shelf. The 3rd party support didn't help matters, as it makes the OS feel broken when applications crash but even things such as the UAC pop-ups I mentioned before.

The additional hardware requirements to get it to run smoothly, specifically RAM. Even though it 'uses RAM differently than XP', that didn't console me when I was reaching in my pocket to pay for 2 more gigs of RAM to get it to run smoothly - at 4gb it felt much better. It wasn't a massive expense but 2gb wasn't a 'small amount' back then.

Although I wouldn't know where to start by looking at it, a very learned coder told me that the coding used in Vista was far from optimized - which would explain the leap in requirements for good performance and not just to run it. Optimization takes time that Microsoft perhaps didn't have?

I wasn't around for Tiger's launch but I was for Leopard and had it installed on launch day. It too, was resource hungry, but as much as XP to Vista was on similar spec-ed machines - in my opinion. People had problems but not to the extremes that they did with Vista, in my experience.

I don't think the launch of Vista and Leopard can be compared anyway - purely on the basis that Windows deals with a far wider array of hardware and subsequently had far more problems. The user base of both platforms will also mean that problems on the Windows side seemed to occur infinitely more. I do believe this was the case though.

I wasn't aware of loss of e-mails from Apple's MobileMe service - I thought it was just downtime. That is unacceptable.

My point there however was that the company's should be more open as a whole. A lot of people who had suggested things to be included in Vista had been left out in the cold and it's something I read that Microsoft are looking to correct in the future with 7.
 
Vista worked for me from day 1, including so called problematic devices (Audigy being one)

Never had any problems, and most the problems people have are hardware related really. Not MS' fault manufacturers are rubbish at supporting their devices, your hardware is failing (one thing I notice Vista will pick up bad RAM etc far quicker than XP) etc. The fact is a XP install after time seems to degrade, whilst I have noticed any degradation in my Vista machines (which is every PC apart from the Macbook, the Tiger->Leopard has had more issues than XP->Vista for me, and I still can't take Mac OSX as a serious OS, but that's another Pandora's Box :D )

Then you have the others who jump on the anti-Vista bandwagon because it's cool, people blaming MS for everything from DRM to this and that etc, but if Apple do something fine like overcharging their customers etc then that is perfectly acceptable, as long as the bloggers are happy!
 
The way UAC popups blank the desktop out (not a smooth fade at all) and sometimes lauch on the taskbar rather than on top of everything else qualify as "poorly implemented" in my book.
 
It's poorly implemented in the way it disrupts workflow, concentration and productivity.

the command should exit with an error silently if not executing as root (through a terminal, or the right click context menu).

The argument about gaming performance did make me laugh though, the guy benchmarking 2 systems, different specs, drivers, age of install, processes running (or not counting them at all!)

Numpty!
 
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