Vista is Microsoft’s Waterloo


Yes, reviewers and users have always bitched about new operating systems from Microsoft. But this time it feels different. This time I think Microsoft really has blown it, and they know it. Try, if you can, to remember the launch of Windows 95, when the excitement began building six months to a year before the product launched, and when people really did line up at stores to get their hands on it, and early adopters were racing around raving to their friends about all the cool stuff you could do with it.

Then look at the Lee Gomes article in the Journal today. For a free snippet see here. Lee says it took nearly 20 minutes for him to open some “music” (read: porno) folder with 3,500 sub-folders and tens of thousands of files. That’s better than on his XP machine, which couldn’t open it at all. But on a Mac the same task took 30 seconds.

For more amusement, go read this article by Jim Louderback, a hardcore Windows fanboy. The problems he describes are amazing. You sit there with your jaw hanging open as he describes one nightmare after another. What’s most amazing, however, is this quote: “Still, despite the problems, I do love Vista. It’s absolutely the wave of the future.”

That would be depressing, if it were true. But it’s not true. I believe that in ten years we will look back at Vista and say that this was when the tide turned against Microsoft.