Vista SP1 Beta released to 12,000 testers – Mike Nash responds to Vista critics
By Michael Pietroforte | 5 Comments | Permalink | Trackback | Previous | Next12,000 private testers received Vista SP1. Although there is much stir in the blogosphere and on the news sites about it, I must admit it isn’t really that exciting since there are no revolutionary new features. More interesting is an interview at Channel9 with Mike Nash, corporate vice president in charge of Windows client operating systems product management. His interviewer, who is also a Microsoft employee, was cheeky enough to ask if Vista is a failure.
His question was in relation to the bad press Vista has been getting since its release. Mike Nash responded in a quite relaxed way. In his view, many of those who are dissatisfied with Vista had problems with compatibility issues. When Windows XP came out there were not as many different hardware devices and not as many applications. So it takes longer now to make everyone adopt Vista.
I believe, even more important is that many changes in Vista are under the hood and therefore not so obvious. Microsoft changed the architecture of Windows fundamentally which makes it more reliable and secure. These changes will only pay off in the long run. I fully agree with Nash here. These facts are often neglected by Microsoft critics. If you are interested in this part of the interview, you can skip forward for about 15 minutes.
Of course they also addressed Vista SP1 and its changes in the interview. It is interesting to note that Nash admits that for bigger companies, it might make sense to wait for SP1 under certain circumstances.
I should also mention that The Windows Team Blog has an experience report about Vista SP1. However, the experiences described there are more or less just the new features of Vista SP1 which has been known for some time already.
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[...] Vista SP1 Beta released to 12,000 testers – Mike Nash responds to Vista critics Lots of SP1 Beta discussion around the web today… (tags: SP1 Beta ) [...]
Time index at which the interviewer asks if Vista was a failure?
Well, every new OS by MS gets bad press and has compatibility issues at 1st…
Also, I’d say “everyone” knows not to deploy before SP1.
So, nothing new.
“When Windows XP came out there were not as many different hardware devices and not as many applications. So it takes longer now until everyone adopts Vista.”
Lets keep this in perspective…nothing is said regarding how large of a team there was for Vista compared to XP as well as any changes made to how they compiled the info they needed and how it was all implemented. This is all relevant. Their excuses for delaying and still not getting it all right are rather amusing.
Basically I’m calling them out on this as it’s been widely known about their compatibility problems with well known products like different video cards. It would be hard to believe that they put more effort into getting older or rarer products to work better than some of the newer or more popular products.
I agree wholeheartedly that in the long run Vista should be a much better OS than XP was. The same was said about 2000 and XP as well though. Nothing new except your basic PR BS.
All in all I see Vista with alot of promise but don’t have much confidence in MS fullfilling that promise. The problem is the company, not the OS.
Lars, time index 14:50: “Being a Channel 9 staff… there seems to be this perception that Vista, you know, sort of was a failure in the sense that eehhhm, I don’t know, it is hard to say. I wouldn’t use the word failure…”
Leonardo, you’re right. If Microsoft’s operating systems were so bad as many journalists think, then they were already bankrupt.
Jim, the point is that drivers come from third-party vendors. You can’t blame MS for their sluggishness. The same applies to third-party applications. It is unbelievable how many software vendors still have problems with Vista after such a long beta period. And don’t you think that Windows 2000/XP were indeed better than Windows NT? Don’t you remember the daily bluescreens with NT? XP is the first Windows that is really stable. Unfortunately, it is quite insecure. It seems that with Vista, they solved this problem, too.