I can think of a small handful of things I’d have done differently in Vista. All have workarounds and are vastly outweighed by the amount of improvements in the default setup. Are the hardware requirement higher than with XP? Sure, but no more proportionately than XP’s requirements over Win2K. Less so, actually. Nowadays, a $600 machine runs Vista just fine. Even without factoring inflation, that is a good deal less than a decent entry-level XP system when XP was at the same point after launch.

Allen, Microsoft did not ‘rejigger’ the OS for no reason. They had extremely good reason. How would you react if you regularly took blame for the bad behavior of people beyond your control? That happened to Microsoft every day with rotten third party software that grossly violated Microsoft’s recommendations for creating Windows apps. Intuit, for instance, was doing very bad things with the registry seven years after MS had published guidelines saying don’t do this and the important reasons why.

What changed? Microsoft started enforcing the law. Recommendations became real rules and Vista would no longer tolerate their violation. Consequently, Intuit finally cleaned up their act. This is why QuickBooks 2007 works on Vista but no earlier version. This is why a lot of horrible software doesn’t work and shouldn’t. One of my clients is heavily dependent on an app used for billing Medicare. This vertical app has no real competition and it shows. It’s awful in numerous ways that horizontal cannot be and expect to survive. But this is the one piece of software for which my client has no alternative and so they cannot have any Vista systems yet.

Such is life. I went through the exact same thing with XP a few years ago, and Win2K before it. Actually, there were a LOT of vertical apps that didn’t behave right on NT4/Win2K that caused no end of problems. So all of this whining over Vista is just that, whining. Instead of bitching at Microsoft, consumers need to take these third party companies to task for thinking the rules don’t apply to them.

I thought Microsoft was supposed to have some kind of monopoly power? Have they gone soft?

On the top 10 bestsellers (on June 18, 2008), XP occupies slots 2,4,6,7,9 while Vista is in slots 3,8 & 10.

Hmm… where are #1 and #5? (actually #1 and #3 when I checked).

Actually, I wonder if the rankings are meaningful. I know Linux has a small market share overall (while being big for servers and among us science types) but is a ranking that places it below Win 98 a good reflection of reality?

I think PC makers will have a good 2nd Quarter in 2008. Financial analysts will get all hot-and-bothered and start touting the stocks. Sales will fall off in the 3rd Quarter as Vista haters go on a buyers strike. Kinda-like a mini Y2K boom-bust.

Could be interesting.

But then, I am running software development tools, not Office (ick) or games.

As a consumer, I hate Vista. It takes forever to accomplish even the easiest of tasks. Is that cuz of the hardware I’m running it on? Sure, that’s part of the problem. But all I want is a cheap laptop to surf the internet with. I don’t need Vista nor fancy hardware for that.