Vista is the ugly duckling that no one wants

November 15, 2007 |

Vista is the ugly duckling that no one wants

By Jonathan Schlaffer

Vista is the ugly duckling that no one wants Once upon a time there was a beautiful operating system that no one loved. It was only pretty on the inside but according to many it was lacking the features promised that could have made it a true star, that operating system, is Vista.

Vista was called by one of my colleagues here at Blorge “a prettier version of XP” but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it is missing features that were promised in Longhorn, features that Microsoft failed to deliver even after countless delays. So the question is, what happened?

John C. Dvorak seems to think he has the answer and from other articles I have read, most of the industry agrees with him.

The failure, as he puts it was as simple as Microsoft not being able to deliver the product that was promised in the first placed. What we got was a stripped down version of Longhorn that included almost none of the features that made, Longhorn, Longhorn. Vista isn’t even really Longhorn, it’s an off-shoot of it.

Other issues include that there are too many product versions, confusing consumers and it’s overpriced. Of course, the lower tier versions of Vista are selling poorly because no one wants basic, it’s either Ultimate or Home Premium and most would prefer Ultimate (though to its credit, Home Premium is a good compromise).

Microsoft would probably find a way to roll out some of those “missing” items to Vista sooner or later but with Windows 7 just two to three years away, what’s the incentive.

As one of my colleagues here at Blorge pointed out, Microsoft realizes Vista is a failure and has done little to influence the market, why else would the company have made so much information about Windows 7 available and even demonstrating the core kernel of Windows 7.

I wouldn’t be so quick to call Vista the “ME of 2007″ but it’s hard not to draw that parallel.