My brother runs a facility that is doing Vista Beta testing and here's what he told me "So far we haven't found much that WILL work with Vista; basic things like Virus protection, GroupWise and Novell for example. Many of the cool features like Aero won't run without a 128MB video card minimum so we just end up with an unfamiliar desktop that can't support our applications. Other than that Vista's great!"

I didn't realize October was even a possibility. I keep hearing January at the earliest, maybe later.

I think the October reference is either to when business customers were to get Vista or when they need to start the manufacturing process to make the January date for the consumer version, or both.

Vista is not ready. Anyone see the demo of speech to text that is on Youtube. That was a hillarious total failure and totally embaressing to Microsoft in front of a full press core.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV1kqthZf2g&search=windows%20vista

I think the October reference is either to when business customers were to get Vista

What business NEEDS vista for anything? What exactly does it do?

The October reference means ready for disk duplication at the factories.

and reading what the Windows users are saying. I see Apple and OS X mentioned more than once in a positive light, and that is something I have never seen in the Windows-centric community. Seems folks are none too pleased with Vista. I have to confess it makes me laugh. My favorite comment:

'That’s why Mac OS X 10.5 will be out soon. Think of all the different versions of OS X that have come out while Microsoft can’t get Vista right.'

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algr wrote:
What business NEEDS vista for anything? What exactly does it do?

A poor imitation of Mac, of course!

What I see is this. I think Vista will indeed have some great stuff and even some things we'd want in OS X, but I also believe MS will stay MS and will not be able to deliver a complete logical and orderly OS experience. To achieve that you need a different philosophy and a different CEO, for that matter.

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algr wrote:
What business NEEDS vista for anything?

That's the common attitude around here. With all the features they've stripped out, Vista is looking more and more like XP with all the patches and a new user interface. Plus, I've talked to a lot of sysadmins, myself included, who have a hard and fast rule; No MS software until SP-2. Whether Vista comes out in the first half or second half of 2007 is not really that important. We'll be transitioning somewhere around 2009. Heck, we're just completing the transition to XP from Win2k.

My brother just moved back from Redmond, having worked for Microsoft for a while. He's taking a HUGE pay cut to leave a very ugly company.

He worked in a department that tested Windows. He described it as methodically breaking Windows, in a way that they could document and repeat until they tracked down the problem. Talk about job security. Anyway, he has the same evaluation of Vista. Every time they spend 2 days tracking down a bug and then go to the department that wrote that part of the code, they would report that it's not a bug, it's a feature. Seriously, they actually said that. Certain parts were designed to break to prevent other things from breaking or even to prevent certain other software from working at all.

Even if that is their business model, they would do well to document their work. If the one department had simply made a record of that "feature" they could have saved another department days of work trying to find out what was wrong.

He says that Microsoft is the best/worst (depending on your perspective) example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Nothing is coordinated, and nothing is communicated.

He says he'd rather make less money on a project he believes in. For the record he has a Toshiba laptop loaded with Linux and a Mac Mini for the family. No Windows at home.


- Jon

P.S. He has a big stack of discs of the new beta for MS Office. He says it's the largest, most complicated (and eventually expensive) virus he's ever seen. But if anyone wants a copy I can hook you up!

The horror ... the horror.