PC World has an article quoting Acer president Gianfranco Lanci that “The whole industry is disappointed with Windows Vista.”
This article gets to me. Why? Because in my experience, it’s not simply “Vista” that’s at issue here. For me, I’ve had the greatest issue with Vista drivers. I’d place this issue squarely at the hands of the manufacturers. I have no first hand experience with Acer and Vista in this case, but I’ve had “issues” with several others. Take my Toshiba Tablet, for instance. It runs terribly on battery. My Samsung Q1 which has a lot less horsepower handles Vista just fine on and off battery. Sure the hardware is different, but my guess is that the drivers are the issues. Blue screens tell the story. The drivers have been getting better from what I’ve seen, which is a good sign. It’s not up to the level which I would have liked. The one thing I’d say is that next go round, Microsoft needs to look at drivers differently–particularly because more and more computing devices are not all that expandable. I expect things to just work. Drivers and all. If Microsoft has to limit which hardware future, first-iteration versions of Windows runs on, fine by me.
Now in terms of performance. This can be an issue, especially for great mobile experiences. Generally, I’ve turned off as much extra stuff as I can to improve things. Yeah, I miss the gadgets. I’ve disabled indexing. I don’t use the UAC–it gets in the way. I don’t find the mail, calendar, Meeting space, and so on that much useful–I want more in terms of ink and mobility in all of these apps. In addition, I turned off IE 7’s extra pop messages. And, yes, if you can’t guess, sometimes I wonder if XP isn’t just fine. Then I go back to XP and I realize that overall Vista is just a better experience. It’s an improvement. The shell is better–particularly on a Tablet. The handwriting support is better. The fact that I can move windows around that have embedded video in them and the video window doesn’t stay behind or turn to black—oh, how I hated that in XP. There are lots of things I like much better in Vista.
Now if someone could merge the performance efficiencies of XP with the things I really like in Vista, then maybe I’d stay with XP. Without that, I’m content in moving on to Vista and I imagine more and more people will be doing the same too. It may just take time. Time for the drivers to catch up. Time for people to be ready to upgrade. Time for the hardware to catch up.
My concern though is that so many people are becoming mobile that Vista has a challenge ahead of it: Windows needs to become even more mobile friendly. Moving between WiFi and WLAN needs to be better. It’s still not easy enough to just work in small ad-hoc groups with others that are running Vista. Whereas I can use OneNote to talk over ideas with someone remotely, I don’t understand why a feature like this shouldn’t be more native. The shell is generally fine, but try running Media Center on a small screen with just touch. And IE needs some rethinking in one critical area–it needs to support much better offline experiences.
I’ll put it another way. There’s been lots of talk about the growth of the industry and “the next billion users.” I’m guessing most of them will be “mobile, heavily networked” users. For most, desktops are not as competitively efficient in either regards. If I’m correct in my prediction that the next billion users will become “mobiley connected,” then this will have a huge impact on what people expect in Windows. As a developer this is what I’m watching for.