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What Really Happened with Vista
- xpaulbettsx 9y agoThis is an article as to why Longhorn failed. If you want to know why Vista failed, here's two big reasons: 1. In Vista, there was a completely new Antivirus framework that AV vendors had to use in order to support Vista. Good idea in theory, but because it was brand new (and because vendors had to write brand new code to support it), it had a fuckton of problems, mostly contributing to an enormous performance degradation compared to XP. Like, horrendous. And since every laptop you could buy in the store had 3rd party AV because that's how OEMs make $$, whoops every laptop is absolute garbage out of the box. 2. Windows Vista completely rewrote the USB stack, an extremely complicated, timing-sensitive component (like, add a printf, break a device kind of sensitive), and about 80% of the way through, the lead architect who planned the rewrite left the company. Meanwhile, there were a _ton_ of devices which weren't actually correct wrt the USB spec, but just happened to work with the timings that WinXP solely by accident would exhibit. A friend of mine made a lot of money in bonuses by slogging through bug after bug in the USB stack trying to make it right for Vista SP1. It's funny, because Vista shipped a ton of great features, that then got attributed to Win7 - it really set the foundation for the modern Windows OS until Win10 came out. So, if you learn anything from the story of Windows Vista, it's this: Performance is not a Feature, but it sure can make all of your other features not matter at all
- jayphelps 9y ago> the lead architect who planned the rewrite left the company. This alone explains a lot.
- farnsworth 9y agoWho was this?
- dandare 9y agoThat explains what exactly? You should never allow a culture where one employee departure can endanger the whole project.
- Zuider 9y agoIt suggests that Microsoft had such a culture, at least at the time.
- kpil 9y agoI think that in reality most companies (up to a certain size) or projects have people that are pivotal, enablers or highly influential. Not only charismatic leaders but also technical wizards, etc. They might not be irreplaceable but they might be hard to replace, and if they leave in the wrong moment, it could jeopardise everything. I guess having a management team made up of several Steve Jobs might arguably feel safer for the share holders, but it's probably hard to find them and make it work. There are risks to manage; For instance, treat them nice so whole teams won't quit in rage. Treat the unicorns even nicer.
- ethbro 9y ago> You should never allow a culture where one employee departure can endanger the whole project. And yet, in practice, that's how the majority of shops are run.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Jare 9y agoTell that to Apple. :) At certain level, very good people make a big difference day to day with their leadership, vision, political prowess, technical ability, etc. Losing them DOES damage that no plan B can cover.
- gundul 9y agoany reference i could read for this matter?
- quink 9y agoAnd a whole new graphics driver architecture - with Windows 7 getting the praise there too. But it was Vista with the teething trouble, and the third parties that didn't have their support together. The headline being "NVIDIA Responsible for Nearly 30% of Vista Crashes in 2007", but the perception of Vista being terrible.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIndeed. Unfortunately, no one cares how immaculate your suit is if you forgot to wear pants.
- ethbro 9y agoOr in other words, don't buy a bespoke suit jacket and vest, then pick up pants from Walmart right before your wedding.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoAlso was hated by admins since the transition to the new interfaces for automation was half assed and broke a ton of client scripts
- ethbro 9y agoMS always seems to have had a schizophrenic relationship with API-exposing automation. It's like they have "Make it easy to manage" as a priority, then don't talk to admins with non-MS experience, and then build features in a bizarre way.
- krylon 9y ago> It's funny, because Vista shipped a ton of great features, that then got attributed to Win7 I have heard that some people at Microsoft consider Vista a kind of public Beta for Windows 7. Maybe not intentionally, but that is the way things worked out on the road from XP to 7. And Windows 7 is, as far as Windows systems go, very nice. Very stable, decent performance on not-too-old hardware, I like the UI very much.
- Already__Taken 9y agoThat must be due to Vista being so late, all the oems had barely any lead time to get on board with it. Whereas by 7 rolled around it was old news.
- bbcbasic 9y agoI like it a lot. I declined the free upgrade offer. Why take the risk?
- webwanderings 9y agoI have Windows 7 on a 4GB maxed out IBM laptop for personal use. Don't see a reason to go anywhere, as long as I can. Although, XP was also fine.
- frik 9y agoMicrosoft's incredible journey with dotNet.
- digi_owl 9y agoThey also introduced a GPU accelerated desktop, iirc.
- jimmies 9y agoThere was also the sudo-UAC thing. I totally think it was the right thing to implement and improved the security for the power users a lot, but pisses everyone off for being annoying as hell (and it taught people to "approve" everything, which is bad). It became much less of a pain in the ass when it comes to Windows 7's implementation, but it was a step in the right direction.
- walterbell 9y ago> In fact, the OS innovations in iOS were what made it so clear in retrospect how wrong-headed the overall world view driving this work was. What were those OS innovations in iOS?
- skybrian 9y agoSmooth multitouch apps on a small, limited device?
- msh 9y agoSandboxing of all user apps being enforced.
- phr4ts 9y agoThe power hungry Vista forced millions to upgrade to newer devices with at least 1gb ram and faster processors.
- digi_owl 9y agoAnd a beefy GPU. Best i recall, Vista was the first Windows that used the GPU to accelerate the UI. And the prime example they had was the frosted glass effect of the titlebars.
- Theodores 9y ago...and for a small handful to move to Ubuntu. Vista was the last Windows I used. Plenty others went OSX. The public sector stayed on XP.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pacaro 9y agoFrom where I sat in Windows Security (I wrote much of the BitLocker UI) these are a couple of anecdotes: I remember one of the base team architects laughing and bragging about how and why they killed managed code and banned it from the OS — the technical reasons where valid, but the attitude was toxic. I think most or all of the generation of architects that had come from DEC have now moved on, but they also took tribal knowledge with them. I wonder how much they were encouraged to find other things to do because of this type of attitude (which not all of them had btw) Moving on The Avalon team appeared to be drinking their own cool aid. They had charts on the wall showing their performance goals and progress. All the performance measurements on those charts were annotated as "estimated". I remember an internal alpha that had strong polynomial execution time based on the number of elements in the logical tree. It felt like the design was good, but that the correspondence of the implementation to the design was missing. When Avalon was booted, we were told to write UI in a broken framework called DirectUI which had a convoluted history, an arrogant maintainer, and a weirdly mismatched documentation. Much was documented that wasn't implemented, the standard answer to missing features was "add it yourself", but if I pushed a code change to shell code (where it lived in the codebase) it would typically cause a forward integration from winsec to base to be rejected. Good times
- ayi 9y agoCan you talk more about that era? I'm really interested.
- pacaro 9y agoPeople rarely talk about what went well in Vista. There was an effort to componentize Windows. This was extremely hard to do, while the kernel itself had a very clean architecture, the layers on top - less so. "Longhorn Basics" this was a list of fundamental stuff that every team had to either cover or explain why they didn't (Accesibility, I18N, security, etc.) this was a great way of making sure that these cross cutting concerns where handled consistently across an enormous team Testing - it may be hard to see this from the outside, but the testing was off the hook. Hardcore static and dynamic analysis ran against everything Edit: also BitLocker!
- tehabe 9y agoWhat I thought was weird about Winodws Vista was the contacts folder. It had its own contacts application which didn't store the data hidden but directly in as vcards in this folder. The application got removed in Windows 7, like many other tools. But the folder is still there. I'm sure it is not the only one which isn't really being used anymore since then.
- hoodoof 9y agoFrom the outside world Vista just didn't look compelling. Yet another Microsoft OS with a fresh set of incompatible hardware drivers. There was no clear vision about what a modern OS should be. It felt bloated and clunky. Vista felt like it was trying to be everything to everyone and not really being anything much special to anyone. By contrast, OSX seemed to know what it was, and provided a cohesive integrated whole in which things just worked. Most importantly, Apple somehow managed to generally provide just one way of doing things. For example configuring networking on OSX happens in network preferences. On Windows, to this day, configuration seems to be all over the place, a bit here, a bit there, and many different visual and UI styles for the configuration. Made even worse by add in software for configuration from hardware vendors. Even now with Windows 10 I dread having to resolve ANY sort of network issue - where to start - which rabbit hole will the required setting be down? Windows had - and still has - problems that have never bee fully solved and they make the platform so unappealing. Shutdown of the Windows OS could never be relied on to actually happen without hanging for some reason. Hibernate mode when closing the laptop lid was equally unreliable. Constant application crashes. Multitasking that just wasn't - all the time the OS would become unresponsive due to the behaviour of some application, which leads to the next major issue was a seeming inability for Windows to actually force kill processes when instructed - that rarely worked. Even something as trivial as deleting a job from a printer queue - basically forget it. After Vista, Windows 7 seemed to clean things up a bit before they got even worse, with Windows 8 just being an absolutely definitive statement that Microsoft did not know what Windows was or where to take it - I mean for goodness sake - removing access to control panel? Crazy. The latest versions of Windows are better but no-one has had the courage to do what Windows really needs which is to get rid of the registry - that chewing-gum-in-the-hair-mixed-with-spaghetti central configuration settings black hole.
- Joeri 9y agoNone of the usability problems you mention have to do with the registry, so I fail to see how getting rid of it would materially improve the windows experience. The core problem with windows 10 for me is and remains the crappy driver situation. Drivers on windows are far less robust than on OS X, and OS and/or driver updates create many more problems. This isn't tied to any particular windows version, but W10 suffers from it more because updates happen with much less control over the when and where, which means drivers break in more awkward moments. An example from my own workplace is that a lot of my coworkers have had their laptop keyboard break after a W7 update. Windows reboots to update, and ctrl-alt-del no longer works, not on the built-in keyboard and not on an external one, so you're locked out. The solution is connecting via remote desktop and logging in once, after which windows update picks back up and fixes the problem, but that's not always a convenient thing to do. I bet that microsoft doesn't even see that in their metrics, because to them it's just a remote desktop login, so they probably think those updates don't have any problems (after all, the update gets installed and people seem to go back about their business).
- wanderr 9y agoThe first laptop I could afford was a used Toshiba Satellite that had Vista on it. A well off college student was having problems with it BSODing constantly, so she was selling it as "broken, maybe you can use it for spare parts?" For about $200. When I looked at the BSOD error and saw that it looked like a driver issue, I told her it was probably fixable she said she didn't care, she had already bought a MacBook to replace it. So I got it for $200. I immediately rolled it back to Windows XP and it worked perfectly fine ever since.
- zerr 9y agoNever understood the criticism towards Vista... during that time I made a switch from Linux (to Vista). It was quite slick & fast. Afterwards, when I moved to Win7, it was not that much different at all.
- krylon 9y agoThe way I understood it (not having touched Vista very much), the problem was that performance was kind of unpredictable. It could run very well on modest hardware, but it could also crawl along like a very lazy snail on top-shelf machines. I think SP1 fixed that significantly. In my current job, I had to install Vista twice, and I clearly remember that after installing SP1, performance became much better.
- wink 9y agoYeah, Vista was mostly hit or miss. For some people it wasn't a step down in usability and stability from XP, but for a good chunk it absolutely was. Drivers not being published, drivers crashing, slow, bloated. In no way better than XP, just "newer". My own experience was basically this: * 95 a - nearly unusable with the wrong kind of hardware (e.g. SCSI) * 95 b - pretty solid * 95 c - too few differences to b * 98 - kinda meh, but usable * 98 SE - finally fixed most of the 98 quirks * 2000 - first time I felt Windows could be called "very stable" * XP - pretty decent as well * Vista - horrible mess on ~10 machines, worked ok on ~2 * 7 - second time I am actually ok with using it (just still greatly prefer Linux for work as a developer)
- bonzini 9y agoI noticed you skipped ME... :-)
- quintushoratius 9y agoEven Microsoft skips ME nowadays.
- alkonaut 9y agoTL;DR- Microsoft old guard saw that C++, html, hierarchical file systems were stupid. They were right. They thought of some excellent solutions but were 1) ignoring what MS knows today about open source etc 2) wrong on the cost and difficulty by a factor 10 3) surprised by swift technology changes If the "new" Microsoft had materialized sooner and (e.g) successfully shipped .NET core in 2005 before betting on WinFS/Avalon then perhaps in 2017 we wouldn't be taping our backends together with javascript.
- enqk 9y agothis is a really misleading summary of the post.
- alkonaut 9y agoOk I started writing TL;DR and then wrote an opinion instead of an abbreviation - granted (too late to remove TL;DR)
- posguy 9y agoBetter Javascript than .Net
- WalterGR 9y agoWinFS/Avalon For those who may no know, Avalon was the code name (or perhaps just previous name) of Windows Presentation Foundation aka WPF - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundatio... - which was eventually formally released. WinFS released a beta and a "beta refresh" but the project was cancelled before it was formally released.
- skc 9y agoI was one of the lucky ones with Vista in that by the time I'd upgraded to it, it was pretty stable. Forgettable and boring yes, but plenty fast and stable on an old HP box that served as my workstation
- Hasknewbie 9y agoA clue that could tell the non-tech-savy audience that something was off with Vista was its laughable "wow" advertisement campaign: invariably depicting a starry-eyed person looking at an unseen and undescribed thing off-screen, and expressing "wow". No product features. No aesthetics. Basically just an industrial ad with a soundtrack. The only thing that was crystal-clear was the subtext: "we have no idea why we're selling this thing so we'll just say wow".
- based2 9y agoDidnt they demo it with flash...
- johannes1234321 9y agoIf one talks about failed Windows versions my favorite is still Windows ME ...
- cr0sh 9y agoMy favorite is Bob...everyone wants to forget about Bob.
- m12k 9y agoI always had the impression that the biggest gripe with Vista were the incessant UAC dialogs asking you to approve every little thing (I think Apple even poked fun at it in one of their 'Hi, I'm a Mac' ads). And that this problem was actually a consequence of the (sensible) change from having all programs running with full privileges to limiting them and asking users for escalations only when needed - but since most existing programs were not prepared for this, they caused UAC dialogs left and right, where they could and should have been avoided. And understandably it took a while for all the 3rd party devs to catch up to this and change their code to fit well within this more restrictive security model. But the way I see it, this is much like pulling off a band-aid that's been on too long - it'll hurt no matter what, so best just get it over with. I imagine that if Windows 7 had been released instead of Vista and at the same time (and AFAIK it has pretty much exactly the same security model) then it would have born the brunt of all that negativity stemming from all those UAC dialogs. In other words, Vista had to take that bullet, in order for Windows 7 to go on the scene later as the hero.
- draw_down 9y agoIt reeked of CYA to me- if something bad happened, well, you clicked OK in the dialog. Shouldn'ta done that. Except you couldn't do anything at the time without those dialogs constantly coming up.
- MR4D 9y agoIf I look at Vista and compare it to Apple's iterations through OSX, I see that Apple spread out the macro changes while MSFT tried to cram them all into one huge release. Given the results, it seems that Apple had much better leadership/management and maturity in their team. Apple's approach, while not perfect, clearly worked much better. I often wonder what it would be like if MSFT had taken that approach. I think the world would have been much better off for the last 15 years.