Excuse my French, but sometimes 'blunt' is best.
From USA Today:
Online magazine InfoWorld is waging a Save XP campaign. More than 175,000 signatures have been gathered. "Why pull the plug on XP when there's clearly a lot of people who still like it?" says Galen Gruman, InfoWorld executive editor.
Influential analyst Michael Silver at research firm Gartner calls the Vista launch a "disaster." Other critics have been no kinder. CNet called Vista one of the "biggest blunders in technology." PC magazine chronicles Vista's "11 Pillars of Failure." The Christian Science Monitor likened it to Coca-Cola's disastrous New Coke experiment in the 1980s.
Vista — not Windows — is the butt of jokes in Apple ads.
And business owners agree. Example: William Weider is Chief Information Officer for Wisconsin's Ministry Health Care & responsible its for 14,000 computers.
"I wouldn't put on Vista if it was free," says Weider. "In the past, there's always been an important reason to upgrade, but XP (the previous version of Windows) is perfectly acceptable."
He's not alone.
~UPS' WorldShip software — used by 550,000 of its small-business clients to ship packages to customers — doesn't work with Vista.
~FedEx's Ship Manager software doesn't work with Vista.
~E-Geniuses, a Los Angeles-based PC consulting firm, recommends his small-business clients stick with XP.
~Harvard University's medical facilities, with 8,000 computers, has no plans to upgrade to Vista, says John Halamka, dean of technology for Harvard Medical School.
~My own one time business experience concurs. We run many machines for large format graphic arts productions, and our one upgrade to Vistas produced so many program/driver incompatibility issues that we wiped the new machine's drive and installed XP. Problem solved.
Beyond business-customer resistance, Vista home users have jammed message boards, such as VistaBanter.com and Support 4 Vista (support4vista.com), with complaints about sluggish performance.
Why? It's a hard drive / RAM hog and simply overloads even recent fast FSB/processor/ memory hardware purchases.
And sales tell the tale - last week, Microsoft reported a 24% decline in Windows sales in the third quarter. MicroSoft's response to all this obvious flaw?
Microsoft earlier this month said consumers will no longer be able to purchase XP as of June 30. The announcement and pending date have unleashed a firestorm of Vista angst.
I've always been a big Mac fan (no pun), but I don't make the hardware purchase decisions at my work, so I'm stuck with PC stuff for graphics. For once, I was impressed with something B. Gates did: Windows XP - the best reverse engineered, quasi-simulated macintosh GUI to date - something billy boy has been attempting for years. But Vistas is simply a 'rube goldberg' step down the wrong tech road - a road pocked with innumerable service pack mud holes.
No thanks.
