I had to chuckle at these comments from Microsoft’s VP for “Windows Consumer Product Marketing” Brad Brooks on what they’re going to do about Vista’s current image problem. He says all the bad things people are saying about Vista are lies:
“There’s a conversation in the market place right now and it’s plain wrong,” he claimed.
Ah, I see now Brad. As a paying customer I’ve bought several Vista licenses and been totally underwhelmed by what I got for the money, and have been far more engaged with OS X in almost the same period, but I’m just plain wrong. Thanks for clearing that up.
“Windows is awesome… Windows Vista is a good product.”
Gotcha. I was thinking the best adjective to describe Windows, particularly Vista, was ‘adequate’, but clearly I slipped up and used the wrong ‘A’ word. It’s an easy mistake to make, after all I am dumb enough to be fooled by all the lies in the marketplace telling me Vista isn’t the dogs bollocks. Doh! You might want to give your partners cue-cards, just incase they forget how totally awesome it is during sales pitches.
“Also, Microsoft needs to get partners familiarized with Windows Vista ahead of Windows 7, as that OS will use the same hardware specifications. When you make an investment in Windows Vista, it’s going to pay forward into the next generation of the operating system we call Windows 7,”
Gee, thanks for making the incentives clear for me there. You mean I can invest my time & money to deploy Vista, so that it’s easier for me to spend more time and more money on the next iteration? Here I was measuring software against how much return I got on my investment, when all along I should have been looking at it as an investment towards future purchases I can make from Microsoft. Sold! Just a shot in the dark Brad - did you sell extended warranties at some point in your career?
As my daughter said, the ‘truth will make us strong’.
Your daughter may be right Brad, but you have a rather strange notion of the word ‘truth’ - but then you’re in marketing, so that’s not really your fault. Feel free to patronise your customers a little more at the next event, I’m sure they’re loving it being implied that they’re just stupid for not realising how totally awesome Vista is.
July 9th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I don’t give marketing muppet wind-bags the time of the day. Like you, I’ll decide if the claims are a lie or not on my own, thank you very much. Don’t need mouth-pieces like Brad to tell me otherwise. Marketing monkeys in denial ought to shampoo my crotch.
“Windows Vista is a good product”. Yeah, I would finally go along with that(after a year’s worth of patches). But, many folks expected a “great” product, and MS marketed that it would be and it never lived up to the hype. I’ve been using it since December 2006 on three different PC’s and can only complement it in one meaningful way: it looks better on my LCD displays than XP. That’s it. Other than that, I’ve had to deal with broken/unsigned drivers, no surround sound, shutting off the fracking UAC, lockups, games crashing, BSOD’s, IE 7 driving me nuts with system locksups and plug-in errors, and I’ve had to spend money on RAM upgrade(first to 2GB, then added another 2GB when I went to Vista x64). Adding a dual-core CPU also helped speed things up a bit. Copyng files across a network is still sloooow compared to XP. I actually have XP running in VPC 2007 and it runs faster, especially copying files. Most of my Vista of my other issues have finally cleared up but it took over a year to get to that point. Although, IE 7 still locks up on occasion. I sure hope the next release of windows doesn’t break stuff all over gain, but why should I be convinced otherwise?
July 9th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
And now XP has been discontinued from sales - so what you can do is buy Vista ultimate or something and legally downgrade from that! Hail M$ for finally find a way to boost Vista sales.
July 9th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
*shrugs* I guess I’m one of the lucky few that loaded Vista on to my old Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop and have it just *work*, and be perfectly usable. Played the Spore demo on it the other day without a hitch, and it was under minimum spec for processor.
Apple have it right having such control on the hardware, means the drivers are more likely to keep in step I guess.
July 9th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Vista works on my hardware too (mostly - VS2005 is less robust under load and turning off UAC is a must), it just runs slower and uses more memory to do the exact same thing XP does on the same box, even if you turn off Aero. In return I get media centre features I don’t need and poorly designed knock-offs of a few OS X features. Not a great value proposition.
The best anyone I know can say about Vista is that it’s tolerable. Even developers I know who are surgically attached to .Net are decided muted about it. That’s pretty damn lame for a flagship product that took 5 years to deliver. The fact that a company can take that long to deliver a decidedly mediocre product, and yet still stay in business is a sad indictment of the effects of market domination by a single supplier. It doesn’t matter if it’s not very good, people will still buy it if it’s the easy / defacto option…
July 9th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
@Steve: I decided to go full Vista for that very reason, several of my larger clients were buying new PC’s with Vista pre-loaded and I had to be ready. It was inevitable, so I took the leap. It’s been a hassle at times, but not a disaster.
Thinking back to when I upgraded from Windows 2000 to XP Pro, I have to say that experience was much smoother and I could see the productivity gains immediately. I did have to upgrade my RAM for XP, but the whole system was clearly more responsive than Win 2000. The XP to Vista transition did not have the same impact.
July 9th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
I have 2 Vista machines but they’re just test boxes multibooted with other OS’s (OS X, XP and Ubuntu). In all cases Vista is the fat, wheezing OS on the drive - and that’s with a relatively clean install. Having a multiboot setup really does show up the poor like-for-like comparison on the same hardware.
I’ll have to upgrade my primary dev box sometime I know, but I keep putting it off. I’m sure I’ll want to upgrade the hardware afterwards just to regain my prior performance, which is wrong on so many levels. Dx10 is the main reason I’ll eventually do it, but even that’s seen very little demand from the clients I work for.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I don’t know how anybody could come to the conclusion that Vista is “awesome”. I’m glad I got my copies on discount.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:01 am
And here I thought the A-word of choice for Vista was “abysmal”. My mistake…
July 10th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Multithreading, image filtering, audio filtering in Vista are somewhat better according to my experience, but still it is a mediocre product forced on me. Eventually I have to use it, or well may be XP will do till windows 7.
And Yes where is the guarrantee that Windows 7 will not be mediocre.
Thank Microsoft, I was too much a fool not to see that Vista is Awesome till Brad declared it.
The A word of mine is “Amazing”, How could one can make such amazing inferior os after a uperior os and then Brag.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
And Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the amazing os I have seen. It is great and idiot proof. But it is amzing in the good way also. The first Linux I am really happy with and completely satisfied.
Great if they can give out of box Driver supprt for latest nvidia cards, on cd. I didnt find one for my 8800GT.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Vista will never get installed on my PCs at home. They’ll have either XP (refuse to upgrade), Linux or OSX, if we can afford to buy a Macbook.