With Gates Gone, MS "Customer Service" Remains

Even though (as I noted last week) a certain Bill Gates no longer works at the company he co-founded, he can rest assured that the Microsoft tradition of “we’re going to do everything possible to shove our upgrades down your throat, and it’s up to you to download all the service pack updates to correct the fixes that we’ll make it damn near impossible for you to discover” lives on.

I was reminded of this by the news yesterday that, although reports of the demise of Windows XP have been, as they say, greatly exaggerated, it’s going to be harder to buy a computer with that operating system loaded, with Vista offered instead.

I’m not a tech guru by any means, and I don’t know if Vista is particularly horrible or not, but I happened to come across this review by Randall Stross in the New York Times Sunday which tells us…

Vista is the equivalent, at a minimum, of Windows version 12 — preceded by 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, NT, 95, NT 4.0, 98, 2000, ME, XP. After six years of development, the longest interval between versions in the previous 22-year history of Windows, and long enough to permit Apple to bring out three new versions of Mac OS X, Vista was introduced to consumers in January 2007.

When I.T. professionals and consumers got a look at Vista, they all had this same question for Microsoft: That’s it?

…

Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now.

…

Microsoft should not wait to begin work on the big switch; it will take many, many years to prepare. Apple had the helpful goad of desperation. Avadis Tevanian, who worked on microkernel research as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie-Mellon, then on the Next operating system, followed by nine years at Apple where he oversaw the transition to Mac OS X, recalled how the decision was made when Apple’s market share was stuck at 3 percent and the company was losing money. I asked Mr. Tevanian if he thought Microsoft could pull off a similar switch.

“Perhaps, but I don’t know if it has the intestinal fortitude,” he said, “At Apple, we had to. It was a matter of survival.”

And though I’ve read that Vista looks nicer for some people’s tastes than XP (and supports tabbed browsing? Yee Hah! – but, uh…Firefox has been doing that for awhile now already, and much better too), I also came across this…

Vista is less responsive in basic file opens than XP Pro.It's hard to find things. Some simple things in XP which were 1-2 clicks are 4-6 clicks. For example checking IP status. XP: Right click on Network Neighborhood, Properties, Right click LAN, Status. In Vista, you have to drill down through many more layers.Hiding data. People really hate Windows hiding information. We want the Details view to always be the default, not icons. Folders should always open in Explorer mode. We always want to see ALL file extensions and never hide OS files.

Yep, nothing like Microsoft “tradition,” is there?

(oh, and by the way, slick move to get rid of the pull-down menus in Word '07, guys - snark.)