Is Windows finished?

In my inbox last week, I got a newsletter that splashed the demise of Windows. And while that may be a pleasing thought to some, it just isn’t practical. For instance, my friends at Oracle are always moaning that they’re forced to use Windows systems instead of Linux, but even they agree that Linux just isn’t ready for everyday business use.

The argument in the newsletter was simply that Vista is so slow and bloated that it’s causing problems that will cause users to switch platforms and that MS is just skating by on their reputation and not giving their customers what they want. And while part of that is true, I don’t think anybody is going to be throwing Windows away for Linux or Mac anytime soon. I found a beautiful rebuttal to this on TechRepublic written by Jason Hiner.

However, to put in my own 2-cents I have to say that I’m incredibly disappointed with Vista. It’s got some good ideas, but they’re usually executed so poorly that they’re almost not that worth it. The OS itself is so incredibly slow it’s hard to do the simplest of tasks sometimes. I’ve got it loaded on a very beefy tower under my desk and it still just crawls along. There hasn’t been a Windows release this bad in many years (does anyone remember Windows ME?).

I have a hard time believing that the Vista team uses this platform every day themselves because if they did, it would be fixed by now. They would put together an SP that would fix all of this. Now, maybe it can’t be fixed. Maybe it’ll take a major re-write to get to the bottom of what’s wrong. I don’t know. I haven’t talked to the Vista team about it. All I know is that as an end user (and an experienced one at that) I’m very disappointed with the way Vista has turned out.

I wrote a long time ago how devs should have their bonuses based off of the quality of code they write. If that were the way MS did things, they wouldn’t have released this code yet.

I live mostly in the SQL world and I know the SQL Server team has a policy that it won’t go out until it’s ready. I don’t see that same philosophy in the Windows team. If this OS went through any kind of QA, any kind of testing whatsoever, then there’s no way it could have passed. It’s simply impossible for Vista to have performed really well in these cycles and then crashed when it hit the wild. So there are only 2 things to assume here. Either Vista wasn’t thoroughly tested, or it was and MS just didn’t care about the effect it would have on people and released it anyway. Because I’m not nearly as productive as I was on XP. But there are a couple features that I’ve come to rely on no matter how slow they are. Being on Vista is like having a really bad job that pays really really well. You absolutely hate coming in every morning, but you can’t find anything else for the same money.

This is the exact thing that MS has had to fight for years now. They’ve gotten this reputation for releasing garbage and then just patching the hell out of it. When the SQL Server team started changing their philosophies I thought it was an MS-wide edict, but apparently it isn’t. And MS is going to have to work really hard to earn back its reputation after this Vista fiasco. I’m just wondering how many times they have to be beaten up in the media to start taking some pride in their work.

I make my living with MS products, and I’m a huge MS supporter. I defend Windows, SQL Server, IIS, and everything else MS does against everyone who bashes them. But even I’m getting tired of making upgrades only to be in a worse position than I was before.

So which is it MS? Did you not test, or did you just not care?

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