Beyond School

If you’re buying into the full necessity for all aspects of User Account Controls, the Secure Desktop visual cues help you understand why the dialog is completely modal and effectively locks Windows down until a real person sitting at the computer answers the prompt. But when you’re seeing it a dozen or more times a day (I’m seeing it a lot more frequently than that because, apparently, I have a habit of opening dangerous things), it gets old real fast.

• Even more invasive than SP 2. Kenny and I will have headaches.
  - post by cburell

Microsoft’s new Problem Reports and Solutions utility, which relies on Vista’s welcome built-in diagnostics tools, keeps track of device driver woes and some software failure events. The tool automates the process of searching for online-based solutions to Windows problems. So far, I have yet to see it really do anything helpful for me. But it has logged numerous problems with all of my test machines. And I suspect its main purpose is to help Microsoft evaluate device driver problems. At this point, it’s hard to get past the fact that of the 21 problems recorded by Problem Reports and Solutions on one machine and 16 on another, not a single solution has been found so far. I expect that experience to change after Vista ships. But the issues, and the fact that there are no solutions, aren’t confidence-inspiring.

• Bugs with no fixes: same old Windows.
  - post by cburell

6. Media Center isn’t all there and falls flat.

I have no problems with the way Microsoft has implemented Media Center in Windows Vista Beta 2, except for one little detail: On my three-week-old Media Center test machine, the act of launching any kind of live TV in Vista Media Center brings down hard the device driver for the PC’s ATI X1400 128MB/256MB video card, which fully supports Aero Glass. The picture displays for a split second and then the screen goes black, which was not exactly the transition I was hoping for. The same PC displays live TV perfectly when launched in Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition. The drivers for the TV tuner and remote control and other Media Center goodies configured impressively and rapidly under Windows Vista. But if it doesn’t display TV, well, what’s the point?

So long as Microsoft gets you to do what it wants you to do, it doesn’t matter that it’s torturing the user experience in the process.

• Invasive, annoying: same old Windows.
  - post by cburell

1. Little originality, sometimes with a loss of elegance

Everywhere you look, Microsoft has copied things that Apple has offered for quite some time in OS X. The User Account Control features, especially with the Vista Standard log-in, look a lot like Apple’s user interface design. Too bad Microsoft doesn’t let you lock and unlock things (leaving those settings permanent) the way Apple does. More than 15 years later, Microsoft is still following Apple in operating system design and bundled materials. With some notable exceptions (including IE7+, where it copied Mozilla, and the Windows Sidebar, where it bests Apple, Google and everyone in user-interface design), Microsoft is belaboring the point by reinventing the wheel, often with an overall reduction in productivity and usability.

I have no problem with Microsoft copying Apple’s or any other company’s best interface designs. We all win when that happens, and I wish Apple would steal the best things Microsoft does right back. What’s really strange is when a company lifts good ideas and makes them worse, not better.

• Note: Reduced productivity.
  - post by cburell

The bitter end

After more than 15 years reviewing Windows operating systems, I didn’t just suddenly begin hating Microsoft or Windows. (Although I have to admit, OS X is looking better and better of late.)

• I’m reading this over and over in reviews. Case closed. No thanks, Microsoft.
  - post by cburell

19. Aero stratification will cause businesses woe.

The stratification of PCs based on whether they can display Aero will become a headache for IT managers. This problem is likely to grow over time, as more business-class PCs are equipped with 128MB or more of video memory.

It’s also intent on raising the bar to 64-bit architecture, driving the need for advanced video hardware and dual-core motherboards, and pushing the RAM standard to 2GB — all to help spur hardware and software sales over the next several years. Even though there are many great aspects of Windows Vista, taken as a whole, this next one could be Microsoft’s first significant operating system failure in quite some time — at least, as it’s configured in Beta 2.

Here are the 20 Vista behaviors and functionalities that could turn off Windows users. Windows newbies may not mind some of these things, but they will definitely try the patience of the millions of Windows users who’ve got real experience and muscle memory invested in Microsoft’s desktop operating system.

The competition

Where does Windows Vista fit among many of the PC-based operating systems of today and the last couple of decades? With Beta 2 running on multiple test units, I feel comfortable predicting that Windows Vista will not outpace Mac OS X Tiger for overall quality and usability. It’s hard to beat Apple’s top-notch GUI design grafted onto an implementation of Unix variant, BSD. Mac OS X has excellent reliability, security and usability. That isn’t to say that its user interface wouldn’t gain if Apple adopted some other best ideas of the day, but Apple has the best operating system this year, last year and next year. It’ll be interesting to see what the company delivers in its 10.5 Leopard version of Mac OS X.

Meanwhile, I’m placing Windows Vista as a distant second-best to OS X. I see Linux and Windows 2000 as being roughly tied another notch or two below Vista, with XP being only a half step better than Win 2000.

This may seem extraordinarily obvious; after all, Apple has built an entire advertising campaign around the concept. But I am obstinate, and I have loved Windows for a long time. Now, however, simplicity is increasingly important to me. I just want things to work, and with my Mac, they do. Though my Mac barely exceeds the processor and memory requirements for OS X Tiger, every bundled program runs perfectly. The five-year-old printer that doesn’t work at all with Vista performs beautifully with OS X, not because the manufacturer bothered to write a new Mac driver for my aging standby, but because Apple included a third-party, open-source driver designed to support older printers in Tiger. Instead of facing the planned obsolescence of my printer, I can stick with it as long as I like.

And my deepest-seated reasons for preferring Windows PCs–more computing power for the money and greater software availability–have evaporated in the last year. Apple’s decision to use the same Intel chips found in Windows machines has changed everything. Users can now run OS X and Windows on the same computer; with third-party software such as Parallels Desktop, you don’t even need to reboot to switch back and forth. The chip swap also makes it possible to compare prices directly. I recently used the Apple and Dell websites to price comparable desktops and laptops; they were $100 apart or less in each case. The difference is that Apple doesn’t offer any lower-end processors, so its cheapest computers cost quite a bit more than the least-expensive PCs.

• Mac’s new processor (Intel) gives it equal computing power to PCs.
  - post by cburell

But the long-­predicted migration of software from the desktop to the Internet is finally happening. Organizations now routinely access crucial programs from commercial Web servers, and consumers use Google’s services to compose, edit, and store their e-mail, calendars, and even documents and spreadsheets (see “Homo Conexus,” July/August 2006). As this shift accelerates, finding software that works with a particular operating system will be less of a concern

• This shift to web-based applications is the next thing we should talk about in our school vision. It will require administrative attention and real listening. It could save hundreds of thousands.
  - post by cburell

But many of Vista’s “new” features seemed terribly familiar to me–as they will to any user of Apple’s OS X Tiger operating system. Live thumbnails that display petite versions of minimized windows, search boxes integrated into every Explorer window, and especially the Sidebar–which contains “Gadgets” such as a weather updater and a headline reader–all mimic OS X features introduced in 2005. The Windows versions are outstanding–they’re just not really innovative.

• Vista will require teacher training just like OS X will. But it just imitates OS X. This review is from M.I.T.’s tech review website.
  - post by cburell

My efforts to get Media Center working highlighted two big problems with Vista. First, it’s a memory hog. The hundreds of new features jammed into it have made it a prime example of software bloat, perhaps the quintessence of programmer Niklaus Wirth’s law that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster

• Big problem. Read on.
  - post by cburell

Although my computer meets the minimum requirements of a “Vista Premium Ready PC,” with one gigabyte of RAM, I could run only a few ­simple programs, such as a Web browser and word processor, without running out of memory. I couldn’t even watch a movie: Windows Media Player could read the contents of the DVD, but there wasn’t enough memory to actually play it. In short, you need a hell of a computer just to run this OS.

• This is hugely persuasive that Vista is not our solution.

  MIT is saying it’s a bad product.

  - post by cburell

Second, users choosing to install the 64-bit version of Vista on computers they already own will have a hard time finding drivers, the software needed to control hardware sub­systems and peripherals such as video cards, modems, or printers. Microsoft’s Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor program, which I ran before installing Vista, assured me that my laptop was fully compatible with the 64-bit version. But once I installed it, my speakers would not work. It seems that none of the companies concerned had written a driver for my sound card; it took more than 10 hours of effort to find a workaround. Nor do drivers exist for my modem, printer, or several other things I rely on. For some of the newer components, like the modem, manufacturers will probably have released 64-bit drivers by the time this review appears. But companies have no incentive to write complicated new drivers for older peripherals like my printer. And because rules written into the 64-bit version of Vista limit the installation of some independently written drivers, users will be virtually forced to buy new peripherals if they want to run it.

• This is a nightmare. Imagine teachers, students, parents, Kenny, and me having to troubleshoot all of these driver problems.

  It would ruin the whole 1:1 initiative.

  - post by cburell

Struggling to get my computer to do the most basic things reminded me forcefully of similar battles with previous versions of Windows–for instance, the time an MIT electrical engineer had to help me figure out how to get my computer to display anything on my monitor after I upgraded to Windows 98. Playing with OS X Tiger in order to make accurate comparisons for this review, I had a personal epiphany: Windows is complicated. Macs are simple.

• From MIT itself, what I’ve been saying all along:

  “Windows is complicated. Macs are simple.”

  - post by cburell

Opinion

All this adds up to make using Vista, look much more like a Faustian bargain, giving in your freedom and rights to Microsoft for “premium content” that you probably won’t be able to play on your hardware anyway.

Hopefully hardware manufacturers will put their foot down, and tell Microsoft “no way”. And the media companies should really consider if they want to put all their trust into Microsoft allowing them to run their premium content on Vista as “once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel”. And Microsoft has shown that when it is a monopoly, it certainly likes to abuse that power.

Lots of home users are also going to be bitten by this - and will warn others away from Vista. They will look at other solutions, such as Linux which will allow them to play whatever they want, however they want.

I think (and hope!) Vista will be the unravelling of Microsoft’s desktop domination - Various non-IT people I have spoken to lately (in particular small/med business owners) are going to avoid it as long as possible, because of the high cost of upgrading all their computers AS WELL as the additional problem of getting legacy applications to work on the new Vista, and having to perform staff training for the new releases of programs.

Linux is becoming a smarter alternative for the desktop every day now. And when people have to move from Windows XP, it is very likely we will see a massive uptake of Linux. Virtualisation and emulation technology will also make it far easier to deal with the issue of legacy windows programs.

MacOS is also a very nice alternative these days as well and the hardware is relatively affordable (and damn nice!), although MacOS could have DRM pushed into it should apple decide to do so, as it does contain a lot of propietary code.

Back to the book analogy, its as if the book will not open and let itself be read unless you can prove to the publisher that you are keeping the book in a locked room so no one else will ever read it. And it is Microsoft who has enabled this, by providing the the tools to do so in their operating system. Remember the fallout from Sony putting spyware, err copy protection, in their CD’s — turns out that that event was just a dress rehearsal for Windows Vista.

As Rosoff’s statement implies, many of Vista’s DRM technologies exist not
because Microsoft wanted them there; rather, they were developed at the behest
of movie studios, record labels and other high-powered intellectual property
owners.

“Microsoft was dealing here with a group of companies that simply don’t trust
the hardware [industry],” Rosoff said. “They wanted more control and more
security than they had in the past” — and if Microsoft failed to accommodate
them, “they were prepared to walk away from Vista” by withholding support for
next-generation DVD formats and other high-value content.

Microsoft’s official position is that Vista’s DRM capabilities serve users by
providing access to high-quality content that rights holders would otherwise
serve only at degraded quality levels, if they chose to serve them at all. “In
order to achieve that content flow, appropriate content-protection measures must
be in place that create incentives for content owners while providing consumers
the experiences they want and have grown to expect,”

Nope, no arrogance here.

Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at research firm Directions On Microsoft, asserts that
this process does not bode well for new content formats such as Blu-ray and
HD-DVD, neither of which are likely to survive their association with DRM
technology. “I could not be more skeptical about the viability of the DRM
included with Vista, from either a technical or a business standpoint,” Rosoff
stated. “It’s so consumer-unfriendly that I think it’s bound to fail — and when
it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to
impose.”