Microsoft admits it: Vista is a turkey

For at least a year I have been reading articles about fantastic new features that were dropped out of the developing Microsoft Vista because the project was mismanaged and out of control. Well, now it is official: Microsoft Vista sucks, according to the New York Times and quoted Microsoft executives:

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others.

We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.

Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed the certification decision.)

Anyone who bought a PC that Microsoft labeled “Windows Vista Capable” without also declaring “Premium Capable” is now a party in the suit. The judge also unsealed a cache of 200 e-mail messages and internal reports, covering Microsoft’s discussions of how best to market Vista, beginning in 2005 and extending beyond its introduction in January 2007. The documents incidentally include those accounts of frustrated Vista users in Microsoft’s executive suites.

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4 thoughts on “Microsoft admits it: Vista is a turkey”

  1. One of the problems with Vista is that Microsoft always developed for the next generation of machines. I had an Intel 8080 system. I had a pc/xt with DOS, it was easily 10 times faster. I had a 386/33, it was 33 times faster. I had a Pentium II, it was 27 times faster. I had an Athlon, it was 7 times faster. And about when Vista came out, my next machine was 3.5 times faster, though now with 4 cores. Computers had hit the John von Neumann memory wall. So Vista was written for computers that haven’t yet been built. The current generation is about 3 times faster than my ten year old machine, though with more cores, let me look it up. Gasp. 16 cores and 32 threads. So 3 times faster, but 24 times the throughput? Maybe only 5x the throughput. And i still have a modern supercomputer, i mean GPU. I’ll start breathing again in a moment. And Windows has never really run well with multi-core system. Even Windows 10. I’d call Vista a dog, but that would be demeaning to dogs. I like dogs. And dogs can be fast.

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