7 posts tagged “windows vista”
Gigaom highlights this theory for why Windows 7 is more popular than Windows Vista.
Whoever at Microsoft decided to open up the Windows 7 beta and release candidate testing program to anyone wishing to try out the new OS deserves kudos.
By opening up the testing program Microsoft has increased the number of testers and chances of finding edge case bugs. Successful open source projects highlight the benefits of a large set of users whose use uncovers bugs that formal testing did not or could not find. I know of several people who have used Windows 7 as their primary operating system for over 2 months. All six of them are quite impressed with the quality of release candidate and have preordered Windows 7. This shift from user to purchaser is also a mainstay of the open source business model. Although, one could argue that the Windows 7 model is more related to the shareware model than an open source business model. Fair enough. But I’d argue both models rely on adoption led marketing.
Except though, Windows Vista also had a public beta period where anybody could download the beta, and two release candidate versions. I know -- I downloaded, and had shipped to me the beta and the first RC version. All just as public. And all reports were that MS acted less on feedback on Seven than on Vista. Vista was plagued by a way too public viewing of its development process which saw many features jettisoned, a miscalculation of the direction of the PC industry (laptops started becoming the dominant computer during the time of development, ending the free gains in performance by ever increasing hardware specs), and essentially the consequences of breaking changes -- similar to problems that Apple suffered when Apple transitioned from "Classic" Mac OS to Mac OS X. (Remember, OS X 10.0 was so reviled, that Apple released 10.1 about six months later and for free. And most people would not consider OS X a stable platform until 10.3!)
Who can first release Yahoo Messenger for Vista so that it runs on the 64-bit version of the OS, Yahoo Inc., or some anonymous yahoo? Oops, too late. Anonymous yahoo won.
Tragic, isn't it.
(credit: Long Zheng)
Well, credit should be given to Yahoo. They released their update to get it installed on x64 systems, today.
Honestly, I thought their developers were long since deceased. But after eleven months, Yahoo managed to release some evidence of work on Messenger for Vista. I don't know why they're celebrating, as even they admit that it isn't feature complete. Nor beta-stable. In fact, as long as it took to develop makes me wonder about the viability of WPF as a UI language. Likewise the slowness in some areas. Though then again, it may just be Yahoo themselves. The Mac client is glacial, as are the frequency of updates, too. At any rate, after leaving us in the ice about its progress for 11 months, it is getting rather frosty receptions. In my case, relaunch left it frozen as a frosted pane of glass.
And a box with Bill Gates' signature isn't "ultra-cool".
Had I known that free computers could be had, I would have actually done this blogging thing.
Though there seems to be an ethics debate over this. I wonder how critics or academy voters do this with those screener DVDs?
Thanks to a little prodding from Joel Spolsky, Moishe Lettvin tells us exactly who is to blame for the broken "power button" in Window Vista-- or, why I have to dig around through a labyrinth of switches and knobs1 in the Control Panel to get the power button to do what most of mankind has agreed that the power button should do: to turn something that is on off! I hope they got hundreds of bug reports for that idiotic design decision. I sent in my share.
Between this, and the nice steady stream of class action settlement letters I keep getting by virtue of the great hardware of the machines I purchase (come back tomorrow for that posting -- but as a preview, take a read at my earlier luck with computers), maybe I should risk it with another manufacturer.
But only if that Dodgeball kid is fired as their promotional spokesperson. He's just so smug, I'm almost inspired to write a If I Did It... book myself!
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1. I'm not kidding! It's a nine-step operation to make the off-button act right!
Feedback left for Microsoft Windows Vista RC2.
Issue: By default, the icon in the start menu that looks like an I inside an O, which typically stands for the power toggle switch (a slightly different version, with the I breaking the O at the top appears to the right), does not toggle the power completely, which it does for Windows XP. Rather it sends the computer into sleep mode. The shut down option is hidden in a submenu to the right of the "padlock" button. Ironically, Windows XP uses the icon to the right as the symbol for sleep mode. In other words, Microsoft is redefining the symbols many people have come to understand with slightly different definitions.
It seems much more polished, less buggy and faster than Beta 2... However, Much of the Control Panel is too complicated and unintuitive. For instance, I feel it is a mistake to have the "power symbol" on the Start Menu default to putting the computer to sleep, but it isn't obvious how to change that setting. Right clicking the button brings up the "Start Menu" properties which don't have that setting. Going to Control Panel and (completely guessing) selecting "System/Maintenance" reveals the right possibility "Power Options", but it is downhill from there. Using the most logical "Select what the power buttons do" don't bring up the option for the Start Menu's power button. ot even when clicking on "Change settings that are currently unavailable" makes this option discoverable. Where do I go to change the behavior of the Start Menu's power buttons? Unbelievably, I have to choose either "Choose when to turn off the display" (!!!) or "Change when the computer sleeps" (!!!) to bring up the page which offers the option to "Change advanced power settings" which is where the settings for the Start Menu's power buttons are saved! If you can't see what is wrong with that, I don't know what to say!
