A few days with Windows Vista
I finally got around to seeing The Godfather Part III for the first time a few weeks back. Having loved the other two since high school, I'm not sure why it took me over sixteen years to see the third one, but that's life. Anyway, I had always wondered in the back of my head whether the universally negative reviews Sofia Coppola received for her portrayal of Mary Corleone were accurate. After all, she couldn't be that bad, right? Talk about lowered expectations, which is usually the time when one is pleasantly surprised (think of the Rocky Balboa reviews—after Rocky V, all Balboa had to do was not suck too bad, and it didn't, so it got nice press). So I finally got around to Netflixing The Godfather Part III, and after watching it, the reviews were right. Sofia Coppola gave an atrocious performance, and there's just no other way to spin it. Now, I feel badly for piling on after so many years, but she's gotten a measure of revenge by becoming an acclaimed director, so I don't feel all that badly.
Anyway, I had that recent GFp3 viewing in the back of my mind while spending the last few days taking Windows Vista around the block. Many of the reviews I've seen have run the gamut between unflattering and downright harsh, balanced with a smattering of "the greatest OS ever invented" pieces from the usual MS loyalists. So Vista is Sofia Coppola, and I'm in the position of thinking, yet again, that it can't be as bad as folks are saying it is. Now, I had a free copy of Vista Business mailed to me a while back for watching a couple of videos on that Power Together site, but it's done nothing but sit on my shelf and gather dust ever since I got it. However, now that the Adobe CS3 Design and Web suites are shipping, I figured it was time to put Vista on my backup PC and see 1) how Vista is and 2) how the various CS3 apps ran on it. Since #2 isn't the point of this particular entry, let me get it out of the way by saying they all run just fine—fast, responsive, all good. Point #1 is what I'd like to address, albeit somewhat briefly, today, so here are my initial thoughts:
In a nutshell, Vista's ad slogan shouldn't have been "wow," it should have been "meh." It's not so awful to the point that it's generally unusable, but it's definitely not in any way an improvement over XP. Many of the annoyances I have with it can be worked around or switched off, so that's generally good. But the overarching question I have is this:
In five years, is this the best Microsoft could come up with?
Punctuated with a "wow," of course. Now, I'm a Mac guy at heart, but I've also used XP off and on over the past few years, and it's generally been fine. I have no real quarrels with how XP acquitted itself (save for the shameful security situation). To switch from the Coppola metaphor to another one entirely, I'd describe XP the same way Jerry Seinfeld described the male body on his eponymous TV show (which I'll paraphrase): it's utilitarian; it's for getting around. XP is for getting around. Now comes Vista, which smacks of desperately trying to be something it's not. Vista is not Mac OS X, though it's trying to be with the Aero interface. Apple's Aqua interface is getting a little long in the tooth itself, but Aero doesn't even come close. Aero actually takes the egregious misstep of getting in your way at times and preventing productivity rather than enhancing it. Waiting .2 seconds for a menu to fade in gets very old, as does cycling through the lame Flip3D feature just to find the window you want. Plus, it's nasty looking. And don't even get me started on things like the "improved" search and that UAC garbage popping up all the time.
Not that it's all bad—I do really like the thumbnail previews of windows in the Taskbar as well as the Alt-Tab window. I also really like the "breadcrumb" feature in the Address bar. The built-in firewall is actually pretty easy to configure (once you find it) to enable only certain programs to have outbound access, though outbound access is inexplicably allowed by default. There is some good along with the not-so-good, and from what I've seen, much of the not-so-good (like Aero) can be rolled back to approximate XP behavior.
I'm not going to take Vista to task for feeling incomplete at this point. If you recall the Windows 95, 2000, and XP launches, they all felt incomplete as well. Device makers were late with drivers, application compatibility was an issue, and it took a while to sort that stuff out. Vista is no different. I've had QuickTime problems, I've had Nvidia driver issues aplenty, and there are a few apps that won't run on Vista at all. It's par for the course, and while it's not optimal, it is also business as usual.
But what I will take Vista to task for is for not really offering anything of real value. I've heard stories about how the under-the-hood stuff in Vista is much better for developers, but that doesn't (or shouldn't) mean a whole lot to the person sitting in the chair in front of it. Continuing the metaphor from earlier, If XP is the male body (the utilitarian, gettin' around type), then Vista is that one guy at the Halloween party who always shows up dressed like a woman. Putting balloons in your sweater and a wig on your head does not a woman make, and rearranging things for the sake of it and slapping an ugly Aqua clone over top of it does not an improved OS make.
In short, if you're a creative pro, yes, you can probably use Vista right now and be fine. I would recommend holding off if you can, as I suspect future updates will smooth out some of the rough spots. But while you can use Vista, why you would want to is another question entirely. Too bad Microsoft is effectively forcing upgrades as quickly as possible, meaning that XP will be shoved out the door faster than a deadbeat uncle if MS gets their way. While Vista isn't as bad as Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III, it ain't winning any Oscars either, and it'll be back to XP for my Windows needs for the foreseeable future.
Posted at 11:55AM Apr 23, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Software | Comments[0]
