One of the not so good things about living out in Snoqualmie Ridge is that we share an exit with the north end of 18, a bypass around Seattle and frequent location for traffic backed up onto the highway, which has actually led to a number of accidents and I believe a few deaths. The government has done a lot of work on the exit, making everything two lanes, having left versus right turn lanes, etc. However the problem of all the traffic heading south on 18 from Eastbound I90 remained and cutting over at the last minute could get you some nasty honking and a ticket. Until a couple days ago that is. Thanks to some quick work, the right lane of the highway is exit only with the next lane an optional exit directly into the left turn lane.
Day: November 2, 2007
They are just more critical these days
Since the launch of Vista, I’ve simply been amazed and the frequency and severity of criticism Vista has received. I humbly accept the places where the complaints make sense to me (Performance/Compatibility; and in many cases I grok the reason compatibility was broken), but much of it, like the DRM hype is just astonishing to watch. Worse, there are many features and improvements that I’ve yet to see Vista get credit for. Anyhow, I’ve been collecting theories of what happened:
- Security trumped compatibility in this release. (Most of the things that Windows could do without breaking stuff was done in XPSP2)
- We didn’t focus on compatibility like we did in Windows 95
- We shipped new Networking, Audio and Video stacks in Vista, and that will cause application compatibility issues and it’s going to take a while for drivers to catch back up to the level of optimization we had before.
- Too many little features, not enough big ones.
- Broken planning, dependency tracking, etc.
- Ship everything at once mentality, instead of incremental improvements
- There wasn’t enough architectural oversight of the product
- Too many shifting and impossible to follow through “Basics” (Don’t worry if you don’t get this one)
- Vista wasn’t selfhost-able until way too late in the product cycle
- Since the product shipped late, expectations were set to negative by default
- XP brought the reliability people were screaming for, XPSP2 brought the security people were screaming for. Vista just meet a fundamental need the way XP did.
- The big stuff people were promised didn’t show up (WinFS and ???)
- This is really the same thing XP went through
- ABMs (Anything But Microsoft) people are more are listened to more and more effective with FUD then in the past.
- They are just more critical these days
I must admit, I didn’t get the last one when I was told it, but I’ve been warming up to it. Enough people are computer savvy now that they no longer blame themselves when things break, they blame the hardware and software people. Well actually, most people just plain blame Microsoft, but give it a couple another decade and people will get better at blaming individual hardware/software manufacturers. While none of the the list is self sufficient as a reason, the recent criticism around Apple’s Leopard release is giving more and more credit to the theory.
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