Microsoft admits Vista failure

[sarcasm]

Why? You didn't see that ME was a test (beta) for XP?

What made you think that they wouldn't pull it off with Vista as well when they have just announced Vienna?

Is it clear to you now that Vista is a test for Vienna?

* hides from boss and puts on tin foil hat *

[/sarcasm]

saddens me to see this in a way...DX-10 down the drain

It was actually an interesting little writeup (even if it's not much more than a rant). Many people are frustrated with MS because MS insists on controlling the industry. If MS backed off a little and acknowleged OSS (and industry standards) then they would not be in this situation. It's shameful that they have such serious driver issues with vista.

Apple and Linux are both making some really great progress lately. Hopefully they'll gain much more marketshare because the industry should realize that one omnipresent corporation that controls the progress of technology is not a good thing. Hopefully game developers will start using OpenGL again and port their games to OSX and Linux.

I am a little sad to hear this also. I really liked everything about Vista besie DRM and the driver issues.

At this point though that sounds like a huge rant.

it is just a huge rant. driver issues are no fault of microsoft, theyre the device manufacturers that have had plenty of time to make drivers. i have to deal with drivers problems too (especially nvidia's peice of crap drivers), but i absolutely love vista over XP, its a vast improvement in my opinion and I use it all the time

as far as offering the XP Starter in their starter pack instead of Vista Starter, it makes sense to me. the people that are going to be paying that little are students, and probably wont have computers good enough to run Vista Starter. even tho it is incredibly stripped down, the codebase is still going to be built to rely on newer hardware. vista I think has a miniimum of 800Mhz processor, whereas XP had a minimum of like 233Mhz.

I agree, I think nvidia needs to step it up here and come out with some GO drivers. Also, I beleive thatr you may even have a slower CPU with XP. I had it running on my old 233 PII and I may have had it on a PI(133) I used as a fax machine....

It's MS' fault for requiring them to all be digitally signed. No manufacturer can afford to rewrite drivers for products that are many years old. It's a complete lack of foresight on MS' part. They should have some kind of driver wrapper so people could use XP drivers and encourage open drivers to be developed. Are Omega drivers even possible anymore?

This was done out of arrogance.

With my most recent laptop, containing a geforce go card, Vista drivers took me 9 seconds to find and download, and 14 seconds to install. I went back to XP Pro on a partition for domain support, and I still haven't found all the drivers for said laptop. Drivers have nothing to do with Microsoft.

Point number 2: the enquirer is NOT a credible source. Ever. They are speculation, guess-work, assumptions, rumors, and that sort of bit. Every so often they hear a rumor that turns out to be true, but they never do the research to figure it out.

Point number 3: you have to upgrade sometime. Vista is way more secure than XP, and in my point of view if you respect a company and it is something you will use a lot; freaking pay for it. I don't care if Bill Gates is the richest man alive, being a software pirate is not really an acceptable practice like it sort of was 10 years ago. (that's a side-topic) Anyway, #3's point is Who cares if MS is working on Windows Vienna? What are they supposed to do? You'd be way more upset if they released news like this: "Microsoft invents perfect operating system, lays off 90% of workforce". Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows SBS 2003, Windows XP (04-05), Windows Vista (07). Notice a pattern? If you are too scared to upgrade to Vista because Vienna will be out in two years....... Guess what? When Vienna comes out they'll have started work on Windows Voluptuous Edition or whatever it'll be called. XP still is a great OS; most people don't need to upgrade. But does it deserve to be called Me2? I don't think so. It has more positive aspects than negative ones, and the support WILL come.

Apple and Linux are indeed taking great strides toward actually mattering, but right now they're still like... Ross Perot and the green party. They exist, you can't get rid of them, but they don't control anything. If you want to see a REAL backpedal, look at how Mac started using Intel chips, ATI graphics cards, and offer Windows on some of their systems! If that's not a backpedal, then niether is Windows Vista/XP issues. I would love it if I never had to give Microsoft another dollar and could run Linux, but the point so far has never been fixed that Linux is: Hard to use if you've never done it, somewhat hard to learn, and once you get it you have to abandon half of your software and re-learn all new stuff for that software as well.

Kevin, I disagree with just about everything you wrote.

That's great, but most people don't have super cutting edge hardware. Your machine was probably specifically designed to work with Vista.

Why didn't you just find the rescue disc that came with the machine? Every laptop I've ever bought came with drivers. Additionally, every laptop I've ever used had all the drivers online. They aren't always the newest, but at least I had something.
I strongly disagree. Putting aside the fact that microsoft includes TONS of drivers with all version of windows, MS has taken the initiative to basically audit all drivers in Vista (not sure but it may just be for the 64bit version). Effectively "anyone wishing to write drivers for Vista must have a Publisher Identity Certificate from Microsoft". This is a bandage over a broken system. By doing this they are inevitably making the 64bit Vista release useless and taking more control away from the users. Additionally, I'm assuming you need to purchase a Publisher Identity Certificate. So you are now eliminating a huge amout of people that could potentially write open source drivers for "legacy" hardware.

The OSS community learned long ago that manufacturers are terrible at keeping drivers relevant. As a result, the majority of drivers for linux, bsd, etc are developed by the community.

Enquirer is a tech tabloid, I agree. I have a problem when they deal with unsited rumors. This article, on the other hand, is just a rant. You may not agree with it, and I don't entirely agree with it, but it does bring many of Vistas frustrations to light.
Why did you even bring a piracy ran into this?
The guy was calling Vista Me2. I don't agree that the support "will come". Vista is gaining adoption because it comes preloaded on new computers. Very few copies are being bought off the shelf. MS has incredible leveraging power to strong arm oems to use their latest and greatest. Dell recently defied MS and is now providing XP as an option once again. I don't think many people have an issue with vista as an OS. People have a problem with the fact that the OS part is a small piece of the vista package. Instead of just an OS we have to buy audio/video players, games, movie editing, etc. We have to accept invasive DRM. We have to support proprietary standards. We have to use a web browser that does everything in it's power to defy standards. The list goes on.

Completely wrong. Do some research on Linux is the server market. Apache owns IIS. In fact, I'm quite certain the vast majority of sites you visit are hosted on linux machines. That is the definition of control. In the desktop market you are somewhat right, but watch Apple's marketshare this year. Linux and Apple are gaining... that means MS is loosing. When people upgrade to modern GL accelerated desktops they will be choosing between OSX, Vista and Linux. I highly doubt vista will ever gain the marketshare XP has.

That is not a backpedal. Using Intel processors has NOTHING to do with MS. It was an economical choice... Intel/AMD processors are much faster, cooler and cheaper than the IBM processors. That was why the choice was made. Apple wouldn't be able to compete in the mobile market with out adopting Intel's Core processors. By allowing an MS OS to be installed on apple hardware via bootcamp simply gives the users more choice. How can you criticize that?

You just described the frustration of vendor lock-in. I feel your pain, I was there once.

I don't want this to come off as an uber anti ms rant. I have one machine with an XP partition, but I use it maybe once a week. XP is most definitely sufficient for most users. Vista, on the other hand, is the sole reason I started using Linux. I knew what was coming and I wanted nothing to do with it. MS' goal is to control the industry, plain and simple. That has proven so far to stiffle progress. How many gamers do you think would use linux if every game supported OpenGL and had a linux installer? DirectX is pretty good, but it only works in Windows which creates a strong vendor lock-in for gamers. Just wait for the DX10 fury to hit when everyone is forced to upgrade to vista to play the latest and greatest.

-BT

They only require signed drivers for 64-bit Vista. And they don't audit them, they just sign them, which is extremely important for security. Being able to stop non-signed drivers from loading is very important to preventing malware from infecting the system.

Besides, few people are using the 64-bit version of Vista, and most of the people that are are probably ignorant about what the difference is, and shouldn't be running it in the first place (only people who need 4GB+ of memory should be running it). So the people who would be using older hardware for which manufacturers might not be willing to sign drivers are very likely going to be using the 32-bit version of Vista anyhow.

I would also hardly hold up Linux as a paragon of driver stability and reliability. The driver situation is almost as bad under Linux as it is under Vista. Because the community is arrogant enough to shun drivers from manufacturers, you end up with a ton of slow and incomplete drivers. At least under Vista, drivers will mature in short order.

Of course, I still think it is taking nVidia way too long to get stable Vista drivers out. They're a huge mess right now, crashing left and right and missing most features.

Oh, and Apache is cross-platform. Not everybody runs it on Linux, and since Linux's server market share is way lower than Apache's market share, there are evidently a lot of people running Apache on Unix, BSD, Windows, etc.

I've got a fair amount of Linux experience, having maintained one or more Linux servers for years, and having worked in QA at a company that made a linux distro, and I while I'd rather run Linux on my servers, I avoid it like the plague on the desktop. I'd rather run Vista with all the bugs and problems right now than Feisty Fawn.

Well, I'm going to step down and not turn this into an argument thread, just a couple of things at BigT:

Per the Vista/XP driver issues on my laptop: It's a Compal HGL-30. I downloaded every driver I could find from Intel's website (it's VBI, so they have a big list of them), chembook.com (Compal's US redistributor) didn't even have XP drivers, Vista only, and I ran through hundreds of search pages. Half of the drivers I got from Intel didn't even work.

Per Linux dominating the website market: That's true. But what is the alternative? Vista? No. Web hosts *ought* to at least use Windows Server if they aren't using Linux. I don't know if they do, but using Linux as a website server doest really cut into Vista's market share.

Me calling XP me2 was a mistype.

The rest of it all is meh and I don't feel needs argued any further.

Good Luck Microsoft! Maybe SP1 can get this thing going...

Thats really funny! Apple has all of the same problems as microsoft, their shit just looks and smells nicer. God help the itunes virus and the army of izombies. Linux is cool but you have to be a computer programmer or have no life (plenty of time) to get the damn thing to do everything you need without massive amounts of nonsense. Believe me I have spent far less time messing with Vista drivers than my previous linux setup.

Inquirer..Heh that is a rant in itself...

While Vista definitely has issues (Anyone remember the initial release of XP?)

XP was not considered really stable until SP2 hit the market...

Comparing Windows ME to Vista---> Serious overkill... ME was a disaster out of the box. It was right up there with MS Bob..

I can run Vista on my machine just fine. I have no issue finding standard Vista drivers or modded ones for that matter (Video drivers)..

While Beta testing is great you cannot truly test everything until you have 20 million people using the software putting it through every potential scenario with every possible hardware configuration.


...That is why Apple has a smaller following but a significant advantage. Their hardware is nowhere near as diverse as the Windows platform machines are. Of course they are going to be fewer issues & viruses. .. While I like that aspect I prefer to have a machine I can configure in any way I want.

vista needs a chance, as do the software engineers reviewing all of the data they are collecting from users as they do run into problems. Dell definitely made a smart choice going back to offering 2 OS'es.

That said I enjoy Vista & I am slowly porting over to it while maintaining my XP partition to ensure I don't find one of their bugs & get stuck dead in the water.

If Vista was more modular (meaning critical parts of the OS were separated), the foundation was security based rather than DRM based, and supported OPEN standards I'd have a significantly more positive view of it.

It's like having a really sweet looking car but you're required to only get service through one super expensive shop, have to constantly upgrade components for no sensible reason and can only trade it in for another vehicle of the same brand. I don't think most people even understand that they are deeply entrenched in this cycle when it comes to their computer.

This part of your comment reminds me more of Apple than M$

I agree and that's part of why I don't own a mac. I think that's very true for mac hardware and also true for Ms' software model.