Is Vista a good operating system or not? A year and a half after its release, the opinions about Microsoft's current operating system are as varied as they could possibly be. Now, before I go any further, I must tell you that I have never used Vista, so I can't give you my opinion. But that is not my point here. I only want to talk about perception and reality...perception being what the majority of people think, and the reality being what might really be the truth.
First...perception. In general, Vista has the perception of being too slow, too buggy and not much of an upgrade over Windows XP . So who's fault is that? I blame Microsoft. They sat back for well over a year and let critics and Apple hammer them without really fighting back. For many early adopters of Vista, it was buggy, slow and not user friendly. To this day, many new computer buyers who are forced to use Vista, still purchase and downstep to Windows XP to get back what they are used to...and they get the majority of the publicity. Let's face it, we live in a time when negativity gets far more ink than any positive stories.
And, of course, Apple has been running ads featuring Mac vs PC, strongly implying that Mac is better. While these ads are cute, they are, in fact, hit pieces against Microsoft. Combine that with the strongly implied perception that Vista is not very good, the majority of us come away with the opinion that Vista is not a good upgrade....and Microsoft has done almost nothing to change our minds.
Mostly, Microsoft's reaction has been nothing but standard public relations output saying how great it is and how many millions of product they have sold. Tech reporters and, indeed most of the public, can spot standard PR statements and take them with a grain of salt.
Now, finally Microsoft is starting to fight back. They have budgeted $300 million for an ad and PR campaign to promote the values of Vista and reclaim their reputation in the world of operating systems. They have even hired comedian Jerry Seinfeld to be their spokesman (who, by the way, formerly did some ads for Apple and used a MAC on his long-running TV show). Look for these new ads coming soon to your TV soon.
So the bottom line for perception is that Vista has too many problems to be considered a good choice for an operating system. And, as well all know, perception today is reality.
But, now, let's look at the real reality (if there is such a thing). Many, many people in the tech media, whose opinion I trust, say that Vista is a good operating system...and some of these folks are avid Mac users. They also report that while Vista looks the same as XP, what is under the hood is so much better, especially in the area of security. Their change of opinion came after the release of Service Pack 1, which fixed a lot of Vista's negative issues. But SP1 took a year to get to market...far too long. And many software manufacturers took a long time to upgrade their products to run on Vista...as did many hardware manufacturers who needed to write new drivers for Vista. So again, Vista took a perception hit.
But all tech journalists (including me) agree on one point: do not upgrade your current computer running XP to Vista. For me, his has been the rule of thumb for quite some time...upgrading do a new operating system will not only cause you problems, you will notice a slowdown of you computing performance.
But, if I ordered a new computer today, I would not be afraid if it came with Vista...as long as my new system came with a dual core processor and about 3Gb of RAM. The sad thing is that I probably would not see a much of a performance improvement over my current dual core computer. I have always said that Intel and AMD are always inventing faster processors and Microsoft always finds a way to slow them down. That is reality.
The bottom line may be that Vista is a good product today, as long as its running on a new high speed computer with lots of memory. But, I honestly believe that Microsoft will never get its reputation back until possibly the release of Windows 7, their new operating system scheduled for next year. If Microsoft puts in a super-human effort to make it good, they will again reclaim their reputation...because most of us really want them to. After all, most of us are running PC's and we want better.
The other thing they should, but won't, is come out with two very different versions of Windows, one for consumers and one for business. They claim to do that with Vista, but the differences between the two are extremely minimal. There is so much stuff they could take out for business users to make it a slimmer (and perhaps a faster) operating system.
