My response to "The top 5 reasons why Windows Vista failed"

I just finished reading Jason Hiner's article on ZDNet titled "The top 5 reasons why Windows Vista failed." While I have plenty of criticism for Microsoft, I couldn't help but think what an incredibly biased article this was.

You can read the article here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10303

Either Jason Hiner fell off his rocker or he is cleverly trying to create the perception that Windows Vista is this horrible thing.

5. Apple successfully demonized Vista

Sure Apple has done a great job with their ads, but why are you comparing Apple ads to the demise of Vista? You only show the Enterprise adoption rates which are ALWAYS slow and I am quite certain were impacted very little by Apple. I think if you compare the consumer markets you might have a more accurate idea of what is really happening.

4. Windows XP is too entrenched. I agree, but is this a surprise for an OS that has been around since 2001? Microsoft screwed up in my opinion by waiting sooooo long between XP and Vista. Also, what research do you have that says all netbooks will be running XP and that somehow netbooks are going to take over sales of normal laptops / desktops? And how did you predict that netbooks will never have the power to run Vista?

3. Vista is too slow - Really? What year is this? I noticed your benchmark link was from 2007. Sure you may need more resources to run it, but wouldn't Windows 98 fly on a P4 or Windows 95 fly on a P3 (Assuming it would operate). Vista is quite fast on my machine. I would understand if you were trying to upgrade your old machine to Vista, but isn't this really the start of a new platform, really meant to run on new computers? If you are going to say XP is faster than Vista, why don't you elaborate? Don't you think you need to consider that most drivers at release time may not have been tuned as well as they are now and that future performance will only increase on Vista, most likely far surpassing XP in gaming and other intensive areas? Isn't Leo Laporte's Ultimate Gaming Machine running Vista 64 because that was the consensus of many people in the know (like NVida and ATI) as being just as fast?

2. Windows Vista failed because there wasn't supposed to be a Vista?

Is this like Letterman saying "no number 2, writer stuck on Jet Blue?" Microsoft has been talking about a subscription based model for a long time. Will they get there? I don't know, but I expected to hear something about Windows Live Mesh. That seems to be some coherent concept moving in that direction. I wouldn't say they dropped it, they are just slow at getting there. I'm not neccesarily defending them here, but I say again, how is this a reason Vista failed (your words, not mine).

1. It broke too much stuff

You mean it broke some stuff. And some of that was due to wating on vendors to upgrade drivers. Since you are focusing on enterprise again for this point, isn't it always the case that enterprises don't adopt right away because they know it takes time? How is this any different than any other release of Windows with enterprise wide adoption?

Bottom Line:

You said "Microsoft needs to abandon the strategy of releasing a new OS every 3-5 years and simply stick with a single version of Windows and release updates, patches, and new features on a regular basis." So maybe we could all be running Windows 95 with 13 years of patches from Windows Update? Cool. Sign me up.