Appalling Vista or a belated success?

As Microsoft gets ready to launch Windows 7, Karlin Lillingtonlooks back at Vista's troubled history

WINDOWS VISTA – is it the worst release to date of a Windows operating system (OS) or a case of some initial brutal criticism – some valid – becoming the entire, unfair story?

As Microsoft begins to position Vista’s successor, Windows 7, at major events such as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, the point is arguably becoming more irrelevant by the day. However, the software giant is still smarting over what it claims are unfair and outdated criticisms of Vista, released to the consumer market in January 2007 and its biggest revamp of Windows since Windows 95.

Microsoft has been frustrated enough to go to considerable lengths to try and counter what analysts say is a continued public perception that the OS is glitchy and harder to use and doesn’t work with existing applications and peripheral devices such as digital cameras and printers.

All the evidence – including internal e-mails between senior Microsoft executives following Vista’s launch – indicate that there were significant problems.

In mails released during a private court case a year ago, executives, including one involved with Windows development, complained about hardware compatibility problems – a lack of drivers to enable peripherals to run – and inability to run some key Vista features because of the low specification of some supposedly “Vista ready” PCs.

Some complaints were made directly to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Similar complaints were spread widely across internet discussion boards. Some incompatibility is to be expected with a new OS release – to a lesser degree, similar problems dogged Apple when it launched Mac OSX, its major OS overhaul – and many of these issues have long since been addressed. Vista, though, remains the OS many love to hate.

So much so, that in a trial called the Mojave Experiment (www.mojaveexperiment.com), Microsoft found users rated Vista at only 4.4 on a scale of 10. They were then shown a number of features from Vista in a presentation, but were told these were part of a new OS codenamed Mojave. Participants gave Mojave an 8.5 rating.

Microsoft also notes that, in one survey, 89 per cent of Vista users claimed satisfaction with Vista. However, many critics noted this wasn’t quite the full story – as the company has acknowledged, half of users actually only said they were “somewhat satisfied” rather than “very satisfied”.

On the other hand, editors at PC magazine said two months after Vista’s release that in an informal poll among themselves, they fell somewhere between really loving its features and thinking it was okay but not a revolutionary change.

Several Irish businesses, including the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust (with more than 10,000 Vista PCs), Aughinish Alumina and Nissan Ireland, say they are quite happy with Vista in the workplace.

Rory Donnelly, chief information officer of Nissan Ireland, says: “The gains of this move [to Windows Vista] exceed those of any previous upgrade we have done. If you want to stay where you are, then do nothing, but if you want to keep your competitive edge, increase productivity and have the infrastructure to cater for the unknown, then yes, I would definitely recommend it.”

Business adoption remains sluggish, with industry magazine eWeek predicting that only about 28 per cent of businesses will adopt Vista by 2010.

“There certainly is a challenge Microsoft has in changing perception around Vista,” says Al Gillen, a US-based analyst with tech analyst IDC. Some problems were inevitable: while Microsoft “does its best to ensure backward compatibility” so that older programs work on newer operating systems, some simply were too old to run on Vista, he notes.

Microsoft has a massive user base for Windows – more than a billion installations. Complaints from such a massive mass market were inevitable.

However, Gillen adds, Microsoft should have been far clearer and it should have co-operated more and been stricter with third party manufacturers of peripherals and applications to ensure a broad availability of compatible hardware and software. For many reasons, some Microsoft’s fault, some a problem with developers, this didn’t happen.

“Microsoft doesn’t have a great track record in getting its [third-party software] developers to move forward,” he says. Many were reluctant to commit to Vista because the initial user base would be small, meaning they’d sell few copies of the programs but have to provide expensive support.

Two years on, with plenty of Vista users, this is less of an issue.

Gillen says Microsoft also failed to respond adequately to a popular Apple “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” advertisement campaign that lambasted some of the problems users perceived with Vista.

“They allowed Apple to take those shots for a long time,” he says. More recently Microsoft launched a campaign to rebut the Mac ads but these are probably too little, too late, he says.

Microsoft itself has now tacitly admitted it is time to move on. The company is already working to build interest in Windows 7, due out in about a year.

Windows 7 “will not be a silver bullet” to resolve Vista perceptions, but it is an attempt to “build excitement and bring customers past the problems they perceive in Vista”, says Gillen.

“But it is a double-edged sword. The more Microsoft talks about Windows 7, consumers may feel it is all the more reason to continue to wait to buy a PC or a new version of Windows.”

Revisiting Vista: the good and the bad

ALTHOUGH I am primarily an Apple Mac user, I tested Vista when it first came out two years ago, then again over recent weeks. The verdict? In comparison to Windows XP, its predecessor, I like it. It has many compelling new features, particularly related to handling media files such as music, photos and video.

On the other hand, much of this was not new to an Apple user, as Macs have had these easy media- handling features now for ages.

The Vista user interface – what the user sees on the screen – is clean, sharp and colourful. For general coolness, I especially like Flip3D, which lets you view all the open applications in a stack of windows, and the transparency feature that lets you see through items.

Much of the basic format of the XP interface remains, too. On the other hand, a lot is new and takes some getting used to.

Vista isn't always very intuitive – it took me ages to find where the shut down button had gone, for example. For the more experienced computer user, there are far too many alerts as well.

This far after Vista's release, many of the initial headaches, such as lack of compatible applications and missing device drivers, have been dealt with.

However the change in overall design clearly still flummoxes many users to whom I have spoken.

To be fair, many Mac users had precisely the same complaints after Apple overhauled the MacOS with OSX. Mac users though are far fewer in number and, as a famously loyal band of customers, more inclined to be tolerant of – even excited about – big operating system changes coming from Cupertino.

All things considered, I think Vista got more stick than it probably deserved, although Microsoft messed up this important launch in many ways.

It is clearly betting on Windows 7 to make things right.

KARLIN LILLINGTON