Cyberbaguioboy

Here’s an article I wrote about my hands-on experience with Vista.

Microsoft Windows Vista was launched to consumers today here at the country’s biggest mall. The software company promised to create a spectacle, a big bang hoping to generate more interest in the new operating system. This morning I saw people lining up to get goodies in a big bag. In another part of the mall, Microsoft gathered its business partners and distributors to introduce the new operating system.

According to published reports, people are not impressed with Microsoft’s new operating system. So am I. I took the new operating system for a spin and came back, well, frustrated. More on this later.

But if you would go through the reports published and the reactions to the new operating system, it appears that I’m not alone.

Computerworld wrote an interesting article, Windows Vista: The ‘Huh?’ starts now, which is a play on Microsoft’s Windows Vista: The ‘Wow’ starts now. Excerpt:

Microsoft is losing consumer operating system market share to Apple for many reasons, but most of those reasons can be oversimplified thus: Mac OS is simple, and Windows is complicated. That’s why it may be such a costly error for Microsoft to make the Vista upgrade such a confusing mess. Until today, even experts couldn’t tell you off the top of their heads the differences between each of the many Vista versions — or even how many versions there are — or what the basic requirements are for the Upgrade versions. Ordinary consumers are baffled to the point of paralysis.

I also agree with the Computerworld article that there are just too many Vista versions that were released.

When Bill Gates launched Windows 95 a dozen years ago, consumers understood what they were getting. It was a brand-new Windows, vastly superior to Windows 3.x, and came in exactly one version. PC users could just go to the store and buy it, take it home and install it, and they didn’t need a doctorate to figure out how to do all this. Fast forward to this week. Windows Vista launched with 10 — count ‘em, 10 — versions. Instead of giving us a simple new upgrade path to the future, they instead gave us a homework assignment.

These are the versions: 

• Windows Vista Starter Edition
• Windows Vista Home Basic
• Windows Vista Home Basic Upgrade
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Windows Vista Home Premium Upgrade
• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Vista Business Upgrade
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade
• Windows Vista Enterprise Edition

This week, it was also reported that the speech recognition feature of Vista might be exploited by crackers to gain access. More on this story here. So as we move on, I hope there will be less of these type of news.