Posts tagged Rant
I Entrust My Data to… Microsoft?
Sep 24th
I used to love my iPhone, because it kept me all up-to-date and synced. See – on my mac, Address Book and iCal were fully matched up to my calendar. But then I realized that I really don’t need to sync very often, at first because syncing pre-version 2.1 was painful, but later because it’s just not needed. MobileMe syncs over the air, but I’m not paying $99/yr for that service, especially not after the well covered problems with it, and the fact that I don’t see myself migrating from Gmail anytime soon. IMAP, however, was handling my work mail. When iPhone firmware 2.1 came out, I began immediately using ActiveSync, which easily crawls through port 443 (or 80, I think, if you have no cert) on the firewall. I set it up to handle my email and calendar. Then I realized, now that my calendar was handled by ActiveSync and Exchange, iTunes wasn’t syncing it anymore. And by the way, it was seconds behind live data. And I had to sync my phone even less.
Fast forward a few weeks and I finally decided to sync my contacts. I backed up, then wiped my phone contacts and synced them with Exchange. My contacts all arrived in good shape with their pictures. But now iTunes doesn’t sync Contacts with my iPhone. So the backend is now complex, but only on the Apple side.
On the phone, email, contacts, and calendar are pushed to the phone, often times before they even show up in Outlook itself. I sync my calendar from Outlook to Google and I pull my Google calendar down to iCal, only when I open iCal, since I’m subscribed via an ical file on Google’s servers. I set up Address Book to sync with my Exchange server via the OWA interface that Address Book supports by default, but it only syncs every hour, and only when the Mac is running. So it seemlessly syncs with Windows/Exchange, for free. But it takes several programs to get to the Mac, and then, only once an hour.
I sync less and less these days, but if the iPhone included the ability to sync via Bluetooth or wifi – both of which should be fairly trivial to implement – I’d sync much more regularly and trust my Mac to be the master copy. Instead, due to Apple itself, I rely on Exchange.
All of this makes me wonder if one day in the not too distant future, I’ll be using a phone running Android. After all, if all of my core data is synced elsewhere anyway, why would I want a phone that has no voice dial, can’t do picture messaging, can’t view flash, can’t do copy and paste, doesn’t allow for any wifi syncing, permits apps seemingly at will with no guidelines, gets more closed every month, has shitty battery life, and drops calls randomly? Just because it has a pretty apple on it?
American Idol: Worst Season Ever
May 7th
Must the judges continue to lick David Archuleta’s balls after every single song this “Aw shucks!” nerd delivers? His silky smooth voice hasn’t found its niche, except perhaps as a second rate Michael Buble/Josh Groban. Archie never met a run he didn’t like, I can’t remember the last time I heard the dude sing a melody. Is he so “cute” and non-sexually threatening that no one dares critique his completely boring adult contemporary ballads lest he not become a marketing machine to pander to 14 year old girls? Yuck.
The reason I think this season stinks is because through the entire season, I have only had one “gave me chills” performance: David Cook’s take on Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello.” Everything else pales in comparison.
Usually, there are songs that make me shut up and songs that can give me pause as I think “this is awesome.” There were several great moments – I loved Carly’s “Crazy On You,” and I really dug Jason Castro’s “Hallelujah.” Many will rally for some of Chikeze’s performance during Beatles week, but for me, I can count the “Wow, cool!” moments on one hand, and the “gave me chills” moments number just one. And while Syesha gets better and Cook solidifies his fan base, tweenage girls everyone should prepare to be let down by AI7 Idol winner David Archuletta’s utterly dismal first album.
The Problem(s) With American Idol
Apr 29th
EW.com is running a piece on possible changes to American Idol. American Idol is – as we speak – jumping the shark. Everyone is trying to predict why. I’m going to give you all the reasons right now.
## 1 ##
First and foremost, as Howard Stern said in his broadcast yesterday, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Idol used to be one hour for the contest, 30 minutes for results. This season, it was 2 hours for the performances, 1 hour for results. The results shows are way too long, way too cheesy, the divisions are contrived, the call-taking is stupid, the banter is obnoxious and worthless, and the results are purposely not revealed until the last 2 minutes. In the beginning of the season, it aired thrice a week in 2 hour specials, requiring a SIX hour commitment. And most of the funny “bad” auditions are now from actors trying to be bad to get on TV, making it mostly worthless. Recently, the performance shows have slowly scaled back in time, but should just be performances. Which leads me to…
## 2##
The guest judges are mostly worthless. It used to be they were actual judges. Now they are “coaches.” But those bits are worthless to me, because I’m judging the singing, not the singer, and the producers are making the contestants into people, thereby making the show a popularity contest. That means the winner is not the best singer (as evidenced by Carly’s recent ouster), but rather, the one who inspires the most phone calls. And since it’s mostly younger people calling and texting, the winner is really just whomever 14 year old girls like, explaining the continued success of the entirely mediocre, completely clumsy “Close-eye” Archuletta, a semi-decent singer who continues to receive over-lauded praise for completely average performances, frequent lip-licking, and lots of awkward laughing. Time to return the general themes like “the 1990s” or “country” or even “anything at all written in this decade.” But instead, we get “Mariah Carey.” Yuck. You do not need a special coach every week. In fact, I’d like to see a singer sing something like they might release. I don’t see most guys singing Mariah Carey songs on their albums. Certainly Andrew Lloyd Webber was a fun coach, but what does being able to – or not being able to – sing his music have to do with being a deserving Idol?
## 3 ##
The judges are completely worthless, even Simon. The judges ought to offer CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. Unfortunately, this is what we typically get:
Randy: “It was only a-iiight fah me, dawg. It was only a-iiight. It was pitchy in the front, but you kinda worked it out in the middle, I don’t know if it was your best performance.”
Paula: “Blah blah blah, I’m @#% crazy and make no sense. You look pretty. Blah blah blah.”
Simon: “Dreadful.”
Entirely worthless. I can’t remember the last time I heard something like “you need to focus on annuciating better” or “you should try listening to the words of the song a little closer to get a better connection.” How about “You project really well. I’d like to hear some power in your higher notes though”? The judges should be wholesale replaced. They all are completely and totally tired, boring, and empty. They do no good. Their only job, it appears, is to pimp the producers’ predestined candidate.
## 4 ##
Stop allowing unlimited votes. Period. Limit it to 10 votes per number. Or 1 vote per household. Or 2 texts per phone. Something, anything, to prevent speed dialing tween girls from monopolizing the vote. I know, I know, they are your target, since they are the only ones dumb enough to buy your pre-packaged, vanilla, over styled, dumbed down package you’ll eventually call the Idol, but you condescend to us and we lose interest. We all know when someone has been chosen by the producers to fail and when someone has been blessed by Mr. Lythgoe to succeed.
## 5 ##
Last but not least, get rid of your silly “mosh-pit.” The screaming and over-abundance of teenagers just reminds me, and a large part of your audience, that we are not your target, and we should really be moving on to a new channel IINS.
Slashdot: Slowing Rotting from the Inside Out
Apr 28th
Sometime ago, say, 1999, Slashdot was the king of the online tech world. In fact, from a “hits” standpoint, they may still be, if not second to Digg. Slashdot has always been the first big blog-style tech site, long before the word “blog” meant anything to anyone, and somehow, Rob Malda and crew are still relevant in the scene.
Not too long ago, Slashdot started overhauling their incredibly horrendous HTML and rewriting in mostly compliant HTML. The goal of the rewrite, amongst many other things, such as incredible bandwidth savings, was to support stylesheets and graceful degrade. When all was ready, Slashdot held a contest to solicit new stylesheets and received tons of submissions, some really cool and others really ugly, and chose a very nice, very reserved, very modern-but-conservative one as their new default style.
Let’s back up a bit: Slashdot is written in Perl – ack! – and is built upon an open source system called, simply enough, “Slash.” Slash code is horrendously out-of-date and the last download is pathetically old. In fact, the only way to get Slash in any recent form is via CVS access. Slash requires mod_perl and tons of Apache and perl customization. Since Slash is tried-and-true, it’s not really “new” code. And it shows in many ways.
Not too long ago, the Slash folks started realizing that new technologies and new sites were introducing amazing interactive features. Perhaps they realized when a chunk of their userbase got fed up and left for sites like Digg, Techcrunch, Mixx, or some other aggregation type site. Nonetheless, the Slash team started hacking in features that emulated many of the Web 2.0 sites. First it was tagging. “Taggging” has been in beta for some time now. It allows users to arbitrarily tag a story with keywords. The FAQ says that once enough people use a tag, it shows up as a suggestion for others. But I always see weird tags suggested. Either way, it’s pointless, because I don’t know what good tagging does for me.
Then came the “firehose.” The Firehouse is essentially Slashdot’s answer to Digg. The diea is this: users submit stories, links, bookmarks, journal entries, etc, and other users vote on the stories. As the stories get “warmer,” or redder, the entries because available to the editors to convert into real news items. Neat, huh? The idea is cool, except the interface is nowhere near as dynamic or alive as Digg’s, and the content doesn’t rotate as fast. And the load time hurts. So I never use it.
In the last 6 months to a year, Slashdot began rolling out “D2,” their new dynamic discussion system. It is a replacement for the static comment system of days past. The problem is multi-fold, however. Firstly, the layout is a screaming nightmare. There is so much whitespace and what is there is totally overwhelming. Big garish buttons take the place of links or real buttons. Dynamically fetched text takes many seconds to load, even generic insertions like a comment form takes 5 seconds plus to appear. Slashdot has become flat out slow. And D2, which should have remedied a lot of that, has not lived up to its promise.
All the places where things got dynamic on the site feels like a new paradigm being smashed into old code. I wonder if Slashdot might be better off rewriting the entire engine as version 3.0. I know that sounds scary, but when OSNews was starting to feel the pain, we ditched the entire front end and rewrote it – every single line of PHP and HTML and CSS and JS. A combination of creative time-based caching, caching on request, and sleek, optimized queries resulted in a snappy and very responsive front end with smooth ajax integration, a super fast loading page (minus the ads, subscribe today!), and a zero lag experience. The differences between the v3 backend and v4? None. If you exclude new features we built in (news tags, extended user preferences, and conversations), the backend is exactly the same.
Slashdot’s database likely won’t have to be dumped or modified at all to rewrite all of their Perl and Javascript/Ajax. But it might result in a faster, smoother, nicer looking front end. It’s time to reel in the speed issues – the entire site takes forever to load (a 200K front page plus externals doesn’t help). It’s time to fix the ajaxian display weirdness. It’s time to get your JS working well in Opera. Fix those and then perhaps we can deal with the elitist userbase.
The Pain of Vista
Feb 21st
Yesterday, I began building my new work laptop. It’s a Dell XPS M1530, a nice 15″ widescreen screamer with a dual core Centrino, 2GB RAM, a 256MB video card, embedded Bluetooth, 802.11n, and, for the first time in my company, Windows Vista.
It’s typical for me to buy/install new software for testing on my own machine. I can generally test most software and evaluate it pretty tough, so it seemed with the XP consumer drop-dead date fast approaching, I ought to have better than cursory familiarity with Vista. It’s also a good time to ensure that all of our critical tools run on what will, unfortunately, likely be a platform our IT guys run shortly. So I embarked on the Vista adventure.
The verdict? Well, let’s start at the beginning? You know how every review of Vista… like ever… has complained about UAC? Well, imagine that level of annoying times 10 and you can begin to understand UAC. The most pointless utility ever not only bugs you for virtually everything – including deleting shortcuts from the desktop – but also moves all over the screen so it’s impossible to predict where it will show up next. Also, sometimes it sits in the taskbar, perplexingly pausing application installs until you notice the subtle orange blinking and “activate” it. Also, UAC doesn’t require a password or anything, just a click. And best of all, it’s stupid. If I delete something that requires admin access, and then repeat the action, it sometimes asks for the permission twice in 10 seconds. UAC is the worst thought out decision a team that brilliant has ever produced, and it took me about 5 hours of use to de-activate it entirely.
Most applications, surprisingly, installed just fine. Even older tools I prefer – some from 2004 – work without any problem. However, many recent tools, mostly those from Microsoft itself, don’t. You cannot install the Windows 2000/2003 admin pack – essential tools for Windows network admins – onto Vista without a stream of commands not publically advertised by Microsoft. I built myself a big batch file to run it, and I will share that file on this site later. Eventually, I did get it to run. Turns out that it’s a “security risk” because it involves certain DLLs running at elevated privileges… or something. I don’t know. But it should be embarrassing for Microsoft that Windows Vista users can’t administer Windows networks. Embarrassing… or pathetic.
Every single window in Vista fades in and out. It’s a neat effect to be certain, but it’s overused. Sometimes dizzying.
You can’t use Windows Update anymore – you have to use a app built into the control panel.
The Start Menu is a disaster. Drilling into subfolders takes a good 2-3 seconds. And they are impossible to view as a whole. While it’s pretty, it makes me long for XP’s Luna Start Menu, which is odd, since I found that to be such an abomination that I always de-activated it immediately. It’s a nightmare.
The Control Panel is much more logically organized, except I used to know where everything was, and now I have no clue where to find it without scanning the whole damned thing.
Same goes for many folder options, locations on the hard drive (it’s now C:\Users, and profiles are in C:\Users\%username%\AppData), and some other configurations, which have mysteriously moved.
I changed the path of C:\Users\%username%\Documents to re-map to my H: drive on the network – as it’s ALWAYS been – and the .NET framework wouldn’t install. I had to un-map the drives to get it to work.
But the cherry on top – by far – was my adventure to get the Citrix admin tools installed. I kept getting an IMMEDIATE error on launch; I tried many versions of Citrix, same error every time. Eventually, I traced it back to the Windows Installer service, which wouldn’t run. At all – it wouldn’t start. I kept getting the same error: Windows installer service cant start Error 193:0xc1. I googled it and looked at all the results – Google it yourself. Here, I’ll even give you the link: “Windows installer service error 193:0xc1″. You’ll notice a lot of feedback, but lots of unanswered questions. I dug and dug and eventually started poking into the DCOM service, thinking this was the problem, since the Installer service depends on DCOM. But DCOM ran just fine. So I dug further. I tried everything I could: I rebooted, I tried everything as the local administrator, I removed all of my temp files, I unregistered some files. Eventually, I found an article on Microsoft’s K-Base that discussed some problems, but you’ll notice it only covers the ancient “Windows Installer Service 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0.” XP runs version 3, Vista runs version 4. Could these be relevant?
When I got to the registry search, the key it mentioned wasn’t there, but having been through the registry several times today, I decided to do a search for “msiserver” – which is the Microsoft Installer Service. I found the new key, and one of the sub-keys is called “ImagePath.” This key is present in almost all services and gives the location of the files it launches. In the case, the file was “C:\Windows\system32\msiexec /I /v” (those switches might be wrong). So, on a whim, I wondered if many the permissions on that file were wrong. I poked into the system32 directory and found msiexec, but it was a 0 KB file. Blank. Weird, huh? Then I realized that there was ALSO a “msiexec.exe” file. In short, the path was referring to the exe without an extension, and somehow, there was a blank file without an extension by the same name! Wha??
Simply renaming msiexec to msiexec.old and trying to restart the service did it. So that’s one possible fix for Error 193 – make sure the ImagePath references the proper path.
Anyway, re-building and migrating a laptop ought to take about 3-5 hours, depending on the volume of data to transfer, and setting up Vista took me the better part of 2 days. Will I recommend it for other users in our company? No way. Will I recommend it to other IT professionals? No way. Will I recommend it to anyone at all? Sorry, Microsoft, but no way. Vista is everything you’ve read. Pretty, but dumb.
I have high hopes for Service Pack 1, but I should think it’s fair to say “too little too late.” Vista is a disaster, even moreso when compared to Leopard, whose bugs are much less serious, many of which really merely annoyances (such as stacks and menu bar complaints). But Vista is the real deal: a sympton of a company too big to make sane choices. I will definitely be posting a SP1 follow-up, to be sure. Here’s hoping for a retraction.
Remembering Why I Mostly Hate Apple Users, Even Though I Am One
Feb 11th
This week, I had to make a trip to the Apple store. My iPhone began growing some “bubbles” under the screen, so they swapped one out. I had also brought back a flaky Airport Extreme, but since I only made an appt for my iPhone, they told me I’d have to make another appointment for my Airport with the “Mac” team. Frustrated, I spoke to the store manager and got in via “standby” appointment. They didn’t have an AE in house, so I had to order one and go back this weekend. The people at the Apple store were nice, but the entire thing was a cluster. The Apple Store is always so crowded and chaotic and it’s hard to find someone to help you. Luckily, it turned out ok, and I got a new iPhone and a new Airport. I wanted to post, but then I remembered what happened in the past when I posted about Apple.
I wrote a piece for OSNews some time ago called “A Month With a Mac.” If you read it, it’s not really very negative – in fact, it’s mostly positive – but I eventually decided to stick with PC, predicting, accurately, I’d add, that I’d be a Mac user by 2005, which I was.
But after a little Google’ing today, I found this thread at MacSlash. I read it today, and almost immediately, I hate Mac extremists.
In my house, in the last 2 years, we’ve owned an iBook, a Macbook Pro, a 20″ iMac, a Macbook, an iPhone, an Airport Extreme, and three iPods. We’ve purchased iLife 08, a Leopard family pack, and several Mac apps including my favorite, Transmit. We have no operational PC’s in-house. But I swear, reading this pathetic crap makes me want to burn my Mac.
What a bunch of pricks? They think I made facts up – like the error message I received. They think that the first thing you do with a review unit is break the seal. Although I mistakenly referred to 10.1 merely as “OS X,” they don’t beleive I got the discs. It’s really pretty amazing to see a decent review get such incredible responses. Genius comments like this one (where I’m apparently gay) and this one (where I’m paid by Microsoft) and this one (I don’t care what he says, he’s absolutely 100% wrong) ought to embarrass the Mac community. But instead, they stay on their own board masturbating each other and growing insanely angry about what, in essence, is a decent review. Truly, they make me hate my Mac right now and they make me hate the elitist community.
F YOU, APPLE AND AT&T
Jan 25th
So, my wife just sent me a text message with a picture of my baby. Unfortunately, Apple and AT&T still make us use the incredibly stupid “viewmymessage.com” to see our MMS messages. They text you a URL, a username, and a password, but not a link, for reasons I can’t understand. So, as I attempt to fetch my MMS, this is what I get.
Click image for larger version
#$!@* YOU APPLE!! Add MMS to the iPhone already!!
The Fifteen Percent Rule
Jan 22nd
As a general rule, 15% of any online community is comprised of ninnies, fools, and jerks. On some sites, this percentage is much higher, and for others, it’s slightly lower. But every community has them and too often, they are impossibly loud and attention seeking.
On the whole, I find OSNews to be way above average. The noise ratio is generally low, so it’s really only the trolling – both intentional and unintentional – that gets people riled up. But the rule still applies.
Recently, I had a user incredibly angry at me because I “forced” him to use the mobile site on his mobile device. I reminded him that it’s been that way since the first day Eugenia rolled out the code, but he was having none of that. I told him that most devices won’t support the site and he said his did. Finally, he uploaded a video of his usage and saw him using… an iPhone! The best part? The iPhone is not served the mobile version. So he was going to mobile.osnews.com and them complaining that we served him the mobile version!
Then yesterday, in an admittedly heated discussion about KDE4, I was discussing how I am disappointed with the release as a 4.0 release and some got incredibly angry. They pounded upon me that the only proper thing to do is release the code and let users find the bugs. But I didn’t relent when I probably should have just ignored it, I was a bit too salty at worst, I should have just moved on and stayed above it, but alas, I didn’t, and it ended with a bang.
A lot of people think that by being a part of the OSNews staff, we’re not allowed to have any opinions. They forget that we’re software users too, and that we participate in our own community.
So, anyway, in this KDE4 “ready or not” discussion, I insisted that it was naive to suggest that the average user would follow the development or news closely enough to know that the KDE team suggested that 4.0 is not ready for users, I was called “stupid” by one user and “an ejit” by another. It’s a fatal flaw for IT people to assume everyone is like them, that everyone is subscribed to 400+ RSS feeds and knows the news before it’s even cooled off. But the battle waged on. In retrospect, I really don’t think anything I said was wrong or off base, so I’m not really regretting this interchange.
While digging through the responses, I found a user misusing his mod points – a clear violation of OSNews rules – by modding down every comment that disagreed with his (not just mine) and modding up every comment that agreed. A cursory review showed that every up-mod he’s handed out in the last few days was to pro-KDE posts, while every down-mod in the last several days dared to question them. This is a cleare violation: this doesn’t help us prevent forum misuse, it just filters out differing opinions, which leads to groupthink. I was tempted to reverse all of his recent moderations straightaway, but I witheld and swallowed his downmods of even my own comments. You stay classy, K——– (name redacted).
Yes, even the best communities have a few bad apples, a few sour pusses who want only to be stroked and reinforced in their own opinions, and when there is any challenge, they lash out. They’re present in every community, real life included.
Bye bye Reddit
Jan 21st
Some time ago, I told my collegues, “Forget Digg, you need to start using Reddit.” Reddit was much more fun then, even only about a year ago. Since then, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend – massive brainwashing groupthink overtaking rational discussion and interesting links.
Reddit really let me down. These days, it’s mostly XKCD comics, snarky images, Ron Paul stories, anti-Reddiquette polls, pro-Atheism articles, a mash of comments complaining about subreddits, and most disturbingly, a real anti-Israel swing. It’s not that I’m anti-Atheism (I’m definitely not) or pro-Israel (because I’m really not), but the absolute anger the redditors have for Israel and religion is not only a little scary, it’s also unquestionable. If you do question it, and you will be modded down – silenced, if not mocked. This serves not only to stifle good conversation, it drives the opposing views away until everyone is just verbally masturbating each other.
There is a bandwagon that travels from story to story, and when I read comment after comment about how bad PHP is, but only about 5 comments have any substance, I realize I’m probably dealing with a mix that includes several 15 year olds in there. Recently, I was modded down for a technical comment about an injection attack. An idiot responder suggested I had used improperly with a smarmy quip, when in fact, I hadn’t. Unfortunately, his fellow redditors must have enjoyed his turn, since they proceeded to deal me a heavy negative score. That’s when I started realizing that Reddit has not only become boring and repetitive for me, but it’s not even close to a valid news source anymore. In fact, it’s barely even entertaining: the news moves at a snail’s pace, it’s always behind Digg, and its search facility is so busted that unless I specifically save an article, it’s a hopeless reference site. So I deleted my entire account straight away.
This is not to say that Reddit is entirely bad, because it’s not. Actually, there are several really insightful people on the site, but I rarely read their comments, either because they don’t post much or the noise ratio is so high they get drowned out. And the actual developers – kn0thing and spez, at least – are really class act guys.
But alas, their community has soured, so I am going to sub in a new site in my bookmarks, maybe techcrunch or techmeme or another site aimed at delivering steady technical news. Although I rarely use it anymore outside of RSS, even Slashdot still has good comments. For me, the Web 2.0-esque social news is getting tired faster than I imagined.
Please note that these views are mine and mine alone and not necessarily indicative of those of OSNews, LLC or the OSNews staff
The Flop That is Windows Vista
Dec 17th
Thom posted an article on OSNews.com yesterday called Vista’s Mythical Cut Features. It got me thinking; I left a few comments on the article that really hit the heart of the matter, but Thom’s responses, and those of others, questioned whether or not the things I mentioned were cut features or not.
Longhorn, years ago, was presented as delivering on three pillars. The pillars were: WinFS, a metadata based, database-like file system; Avalon, a new .NET graphical subsystem; and Indigo, a new communications framework. WinFS is in beta now, but delivers in a far different way than originally posed. Avalon, renamed Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF was delivered with Windows Vista and is available on XP. Indigo, retitled Windows Communication Foundation, is available in Vista as well. Initially, this lends some credence to the editorial, which suggests that it’s virtually impossible to name individual “missing features” from Vista.
But upon further thought, it goes further than “which feature is missing?” Because there are loads of things that are “missing” in the sense that they ought to be included. Ultimately, where Vista fails on a large scale is delivering on the promise it made. Microsoft, not only via promo videos, but also via their insiders like Scoble, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurott, started to lay the groundwork via conversations and ideas that promised a next generation operating system. A new OS, built almost entirely from scratch, almost entirely in managed code.
But they blew it. Big time.
In fact, they were so incapable of delivering that they infamously scrapped their work and rolled back to Windows 2003 SP1 in what would eventually be called the “Longhorn reset.”
Vista is an incremental change at best. This should come as little surprise, as Vista is pretty much, as described, XP enhanced twice over. Many of the changes that made it to the final version serve little purpose. The Aero interface is clunkier and less attractive than Apple’s. The Flip3D tool is cool, but ultimately, a toy. UAC is a disaster. WinFS isn’t there. Windows Mail received love under the hood, but is still second rate. The over-branding of every app and the un-customizable, dumbed-down UI is hatable. Pretty much everything about Vista is less appetizing than Windows XP, which is maturing really nicely.
Longhorn, on the other hand, was an idea. It was going to show us something new and exciting. It was going to be the best that incredibly talented engineers could come up with when they had unlimited budget, an amazing array of programmers, marketers, user interface experts, and powerful partners. But Microsoft collapsed under its own weight. They couldn’t commit to advancing things and making them work. Who could forget the Windows shudown crapfest article? This is likely a microcosm of the entire development of this OS: the lowest common denominator, the least offensive, the least problem causing thing won. And more often than not, it sucked.
This isn’t to say Redmond doesn’t count amongst its ranks, some of the best and brightest. It’s just that when you become that large, it’s hard to be nimble and stay on course. Microsoft’s newest utter failure is their foray into search — Microsoft has already lost search. I wonder if they will apply the same “we can do anything” attitude there.
The interesting thing is that Microsoft has pretty much admitted Windows Vista is a flop by feeding the press details about “Windows 7.” The very fact that they have already dumped Vista to focus on the next shining star is pretty telling.
Combine all of this with the dizzying number of “versions” of Vista, designed, as best as I can tell, to slowly extort money from you. There is no magic included with each version, you don’t get an extra disc, or more applications. You don’t get more at all, in fact, what you get is something simply less crippled. Microsoft intentionally sells versions of its own OS with features removed unless you pay more. This is the business behind the OS, and it is part and parcel of the problem – there is no respect for the client, either as a consumer or as a user. In short, they don’t deliver the best product they can, they deliver part of the product, and for more dollars, you can use some of what was there anyway. Since none of the version provide explicitly what I would want, I would need to buy the “ultimate” edition, which currently runs $329. That’s $200 more than Mac OS X Leopard.
So maybe I can’t name siginificant individual things left out of Vista besides WinFS. And perhaps the disappointment is not that the features are left out, but rather, that developers haven’t really leveraged them for fear that a Vista-only program is doomed before the first header file is included. But one thing is certain: Vista didn’t deliver on what most people expected, which was a new experience, a new OS, a new paradigm, a new adventure. Instead, they got a stinker that requires top-notch specs to perform half as well as XP. Microsoft may yet impress us with Windows 7. Perhaps their days ruling the roost of OSes have begun their long and painful wane. But one thing will remain forever clear when discussing Vista: what they “left out” was innovation and inspiration. And what we got is a flop.