Ballmer announced that Microsoft is releasing a beta version of Windows 7, which will be available for download beginning Friday. The news suggests the world’s largest software maker may be giving up efforts to rehabilitate its often-maligned Vista operating system, which was released worldwide in January 2007.
“We are on track to deliver the best version of Windows ever,” Ballmer told an audience of several thousand tech professionals and journalists inside a cavernous ballroom at the Venetian hotel. ^
The problem is not Vista, it’s that the Windows ecosystem is broken. This ecosystem, comprised of everything from Microsoft corporate culture to a media-fed computer illiterate audience to the Windows 95-XP business model, doesn’t work any more. It worked at another point in history, when just having a stable OS that had free and commercial software available in a stable, ongoing fashion (backward compatibility) was of the ultimate priority. That’s not true any more.
Vista is a fine operating system. It’s from the same codebase that produced the superlative Windows Server 2003 and 2008 frames. But, it’s not designed — with its heavy graphics load, code that tries to do everything for everybody, and RAM-hungry default configuration — for the average user. It pretends to be, because they put a pretty face on it. But a pretty face doesn’t obscure deep internal problems. The foremost of these is how the computer arrives to the end user.
Say I go down to Best Buy and pick up a Dell or HP. Like it or not, that’s how most people buy computers. It will come with Vista installed on a machine that doesn’t have enough memory. Worse, that machine will have junkware on it: every driver comes with a “manager” that doesn’t do anything of note except warn you to buy more ink, there’s lots of trial ware and spyware-like applications preinstalled, and then there’s helpful idiotware that pretends to keep track of your passwords, make your system more secure, and check for viruses, but mostly what it ends up doing is slowing the machine down to half of its normal speed. Further, the default configuration of the operating system includes vulnerable applications, too many applications, and lots of services running that the end user doesn’t need.
This means that the user gets a slow machine, has to fight off the junkware which often conflicts with the software they want to install, then has to deal with security problems, and only finally can get around to configuring the machine as they’d like it to be. Believe it or not, most people do this, even if it’s only changing around visual effects. Then they’re at the whims of the idiot gods of junkware, who ensure that a virus scanner stops legitimate program installations but doesn’t notice hostile embedded browser objects, that windows pop up all the time with sales pitches, that the system runs slowly and that competitor’s products don’t work.
Then, imagine you want to fix something. Open the Windows directory — there’s one hundred folders and two thousand files in the root alone. Nothing is organized. Pictures, sounds, programs, log files, and other program components are scattered chaotically through the installation. There’s no sense that there’s one place you can go to fix anything. It could be anywhere.
If they’re really unlucky, they call the geek help services (which we don’t name here) who will charge them $200 to install Microsoft Word and remove a virus, then will claim the motherboard is broken and hit them with another $500 for a new one.
That’s what we mean by the Windows ecosystem being broken. The consumer is viewed as a sacrificial pig and all companies involved are taking a bite; this worked when having a stable computer was rare, but now stability is the norm, and people see it for how parasitic it is. Microsoft needs to realize that its operating system is as it is presented to the average person — a baffling, chaotic ball of contradictions managed by predatory and incompetent servicepeople. This is why they like Apple: one manufacturer makes the computer, the software, and sells the repair service. Simple and no guesswork.
Vista is a scapegoat. When people are hopping mad at Vista, what they’re saying is that they don’t want another broken ecosystem computer, and that the HP they just bought with 2 of the 4 GB it needs to run correctly is a disappointment because it’s not better than Windows XP — it’s just prettier, which makes us think it’s a Macintosh clone designed to fool us like used car salesmen repaint junkers.
It’s not hard for Microsoft to fix this, but it requires they stop finding scapegoats and start thinking about the user experience as the average person encounters it.
[...] an earlier post calling for this change, among other things, I’m delighted that Microsoft is making this change: Have you ever [...]