If people don't like Vista what would make them think they would like whatever else Microsoft comes

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. I am curious what people are thinking of when it comes to Vista and whatever Microsoft replaces it with in the future. It appears that things like the Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, and many other things that Microsoft has added to their Flagship operating systems is going to be added to and continue to grow in the future. Obviously computers are getting bigger in ram, disk space, monitor sizes, video card capabilities and so on and that will obviously continue. Surely I can see why most people will not upgrade to Vista on a four or five year old plus computer system. And obviously the economy will dictate how far the consumer in general will go anyway but, it surely seems some of the arguments for switching from one Microsoft operating system to another are kinda of strange in some ways anyway.

Look at Apple's OSX, they change it ever year since OSX was introduced and frankly either you buy it and keep current or you don't and you stay where you are at. But, OSX users are rarely complainers or the type of people who do not swear by the products that they love and use on a daily basis. Yes, you can surely have troubles with OSX as much as or sometimes more than any Microsoft OS but, the point here is that Apple continuely updates and produces new OS's on a yearly or so schedule. And for better or for worse they both seem to be going in the same direction in the end, and I guess thats what many are complaining about. As they either do not have a need for the way operating systems in general are evolving or they have just decided that they use their computers for they use them for and thats as far as it goes.

My point in all this here, is that operating systems will only get bigger in the future as they get newer technology in the computers themselves. Plus there will likely be changes on constant basis as time goes on. If XP was Microsoft's best at the time it was their Flagship product, then Vista will most likely turn out that way also. Just Vista sucks in my opinion only would not help me come to a conclusion as to whether or not I wanted it. And the fact is that I always want to try new things and or use them every day that I am on my computer, and thats really the way it should be. Of course this presents the age old problem of when you have finally had enough. But, for right now I see computers and operating systems both still changing on a constant basis and if one wants to play the game (so to speak only), then one needs to go with what makes the latest and greatest run right.

 

Even though I use Vista on a daily basis, am the Lead Moderator on this forum, and have been working and testing Vista for over a year and a half, that doesn't mean that I blindly support or agree with everything that MS does -- Vista being a case in point.



Running the risk of boring you with a story, many years ago, I worked for a computer peripherals manufacture in the HQ engineering department, and was asked to join this new project designing and building the next generation of hard drives. It started out a grand and glorious effort -- we were going to be the new leader in hard drive technology, not just hardware, not just software, but overall seamless enterprise integration. The team had decided to break new ground in virtually every dimension of enterprise-level mass storage - just like Vista (or Longhorn, as it was named back then) was going to break new ground.



To make a long story short, we failed to delivery adequately not because each new innovation was unworkable, but because we tried to do too many! So, instead of doing a bangup job on just one innovation, we did a half-hearted job on all of them. Within 12 months, the product failed and the company went bankrupt.



I see much the same problems, but worse, with Vista. MS tried to do too many innovations, and instead of "wowing" us, they disappointed us in several areas. IF they had picked just one (new security model, new video model, new audio model, etc.) they might have pulled it off. But while what they ended up with is genuinely better in a number of areas than XP, it's not the "blow your socks off" result that was planned.



Folks today forget that XP went through much the same growing pains as Vista is having now. It took two service packs for XP to garner the reputation is has today. I wouldn't be surprised if Vista requires the same.



Perhaps, Windows has reached the complexity that it's beyond the grasp of the MS developers to understand and maintain. What much of the public doesn't know, and appears to not WANT to know, is that the main thrust of Vista was really to migrate infrastructure architectural changes into the public forum. These changes were so widespread that some of them had to be included in SP 1. But instead, MS hyped the "WOW" of Aeroglass -- something that has become a primary basis of the lawsuit against them and Intel.



As to keeping current, the rule of thumb before Vista was "wait until at least SP 1 before cutting over your mainstream work" -- a rule that may have changed with Vista to SP 2 (given the serious problems that SP 1 has appeared to cause). From what I can see, more and more people are experimenting with multi-boot systems. That's what I recommend if you want to be an early adopter of ANY new MS OS -- keep your mainstream work in the "current" OS (you know, the one that is finally halfway decent after the second Service Pack), and boot up a different OS to experiment with the new version.

 

Wow,

no pun intended thats a better reply than I could ever makes (and why not it comes from someone who knows). Maybe we will as consumers just have to learn more about each new operating system we buy, that is if we choose to keep updating. Still I tend to like Microsoft's approach better, than Apple's (sorry) but, Apple's approach of updating their operating each and every year does get to be expensive. And what does someone really learn and remember when you are updating and changing on such a constant basis?

People always want something that does something more and though there always will be complaints, progress certainly appears to mean bigger. And so it goes on and on. Thanks for the reply it certainly explains to me more than I knew before.