[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I knew vista was in big trouble when it was reported that microsoft was having fierce internal debates over whether users should be allowed to silence the startup sound.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

That was the least of it.

I'm sorry, but if they had all tose major problems and that was how they chose to spend their time, that was not the least of it.

My point was that they fiddled while vista burned.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Part of the problem was timing. Vista required fairly powerful hardware to run as desired. But the hardware required was essentially that which the next generation of PCs would have. The current generation in many cases wasn't really up to it. Among other things, some machines Vista was offered on would not pass MS's own Windows certification tests.

But MS wanted to End-of-Life WinXP and get a new revenue stream from a new version of Windows. So they created a new level below the old Windows Certified which OEMs bundling Vista could slap on the packaging of such systems. Former MS SVP Steve Allchin, who ran the Windows development efforts, was very unhappy with this. He felt the customer would have a poor experience, and MS would get yet another black eye in the marketplace, and was dead right on both counts. Steve Ballmer's response was that he had nothing to do with the decision.

And as it was, MS couldn't end-of-life XP because of a generation of things like netbooks that couldn't run Vista. (I have one running XP Home and dual-booting Lubuntu. No way it would run Vista...)

Had MS been willing to delay Vista's release till the general run of machines being sold was powerful enough, a fair number of issues could have been avoided.
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Dennis