No I do not hate Windows Vista, I want it to fit the market

Businesssupplydemand01_002324I’ll be the first to admit that I have written a number of articles critical of different aspects of Vista, especially running on mobile PCs.  The reaction to some of these, including the one I posted yesterday, is understandably assuming that I hate Vista and have become a Mac fanboy.  Time to set the record straight.  I do not hate Vista, when it runs well it is a good user experience.  The problem sets in when it doesn’t run well, and the fact that it often doesn’t further demonstrates that the Windows ecosystem is horribly broken.  Why?

If you make a trip to a big retailer where lots of PCs are sold, like Best Buy, you will find that many of the name brand computers come with default configurations that will not run Vista as well as they should.  They will have too little memory (2 GB should be the minimum) or will be lacking good drivers for the components in the PC.  Based on my experience running Vista on many different PCs I know that the user is going to end up with a computer that doesn’t offer a very good user experience, if it doesn’t downright cause problems.  This is so very wrong.  Vista supporters will jump in and argue that it’s not Microsoft’s fault, the OEMs are trying to make a fast buck with cheaper systems.  My take on that is that even if that is the correct reason it’s still not a good one as it is Vista that will be blamed in the long run.  You can see Vista bashing all over the web and it always comes back to Vista as the source of all trouble.  The truth is that if Vista requires far more hardware than can be sold in the numbers that companies need to turn to stay viable then that is too much.  It gets back to that ecosystem.

I enjoy Vista running on the HP 2710p I am using.  It runs well and gives me none of the problems that I have run into on other systems.  Of course the HP has 2 GB of memory and really solid device drivers for all the components, and it comes at a big price compared to more budget-friendly systems.  That makes this the exception rather than the rule and that is Microsoft’s problem in the long run.  Vista does not do Microsoft any good if it is sold on units with configurations too poor to run well.  It doesn’t matter whose "fault" it is, it is Vista that will get slammed.  After all, if many PCs sold today are configured too poorly to run Vista well then Vista requires too much, doesn’t it?  It’s that ecosystem thing again, Microsoft doesn’t sell PCs so they must supply an OS that will run on the machines being sold at any given time.  That is just smart business and the fact it’s not that way is why so much Vista bashing is happening.  It’s supply and demand at the base level, and Vista fails in that.

That’s why I have appealed to Microsoft in the past to give us a "Vista Mobile" or "Vista Light".  Such a pared down OS would be able to run well on any PC being sold today, desktops, notebooks, and mobile PCs alike.  It is supply and demand to provide what is needed to fit the hardware being sold, if you don’t make the hardware and the OS like Apple then you must make the OS fit the current hardware.  That’s the big problem that Microsoft is having with Vista so why not fix it?  Sure in two or three years the system hardware may evolve so that it’s cheap enough to be the stuff put in pre-configured cheap (popular) PCs but given the bad press that is being garnered already that may be too late.  At some point the consumer or enterprise is going to say, hey we need to upgrade but not that much hardware.  Click your heels together two times and say "Redmond, wake up!"

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