By of
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
From Robert McLaws and his blog : FunWithCoding.NET – Windows Vista Edition A .NET Developer’s Perspective on the Windows Vista Experience.
I’ve been defending Microsoft’s ship schedule for Windows Vista for quite some time. Up to this point, I’ve been confident that Vista would be at the quality level it needs to be by RC1 to make the launch fantastic. Having tested several builds between Beta 2 and today, I hate to say that I no longer feel that way.
Beta 2 was a disappointment on many levels. It was nowhere near as stable as it should have been, and was a huge memory hog. Later builds have improved stability and performance, and have introduced visual tweaks and enhancements that make Vista feel more like a finished product. But several events are conspiring to make life a lot more difficult for beta testers, and I foresee problems if they are not addressed.
Several teams are scrambling to get code checked in on time. I hate to use the Media Center team as an example, because they’re moving extremely fast and working very hard to get their product out the door. But I have to. Media Center has a ton of enhancements in Vista, and is being developed for technology that probably won’t even be on the market by the time Vista ships. They are working like crazy to meet their deadlines, and I don’t think that it can happen without sacrificing the quality of the product. Unless they plan on updating Windows Media Center frequently after RTM, it’s just going to cause problems. But don’t come down on that team… several events in the cable industry have hampered some of their work. And don’t kid yourself into thinking that the WMC team is the only one scrambling. They’re just the easiest example.
We Say: Well, I would hope they would delay it and make it better, I’m not going to use it until at least the first service pack anyway, and our organization will hold off as long as we can, until Windows XP is no longer an option. What do you beta testers think?
Added: Scoble says the same thing . If this ships in October, I will recommend not installing it and waiting for the first service pack. There’s no way the quality will be high enough to trust it if it ships early. I hope Microsoft takes the time to do this right.
It’s certainly no where near where it needs to be. I’d be shocked if larger corperations are going to jump to Vista as soon as it’s released. (If it remains on it’s current schedule.)
Personally, I’m going to stay far away from it once/if it’s actually released. In fact, Vista is so dissapointing, OS X is starting to look REALLY good now a days.
HAHA…Vista SP1 is probably 3 years away….at least. The problem with OS X is you are really limited to the hardware you can run it on unless you want to jump through hoops and run some hacked up piece of crap on PC hardware or you buy one of those overpriced blobby white all in one plastic thingies that the style limited think are the aces.
More and more I’m just booting into Linux for my day to day computer needs. Just installed Suse 10.1. I’m not an anti-Mac zealot, but just someone that likes the idea of having real quality hardware and control over every piece that goes into the box. I like the thinnest most minimal display I can get which pretty much leaves out parking one of those big thick Mac monstrosities on my desktop.
Ok so people rag on MS for postponing Vista’s release. Then they bitch if they think MS is rushing to meet a deadline.
It’s so cool and now to bash MS around. It sells ads and gets a lot of page hits. But it’s not like you guys at RTN are sticking your necks out when you do what every other lapdog of a blogger is doing. Just shut up and wait. Or don’t wait. Stick with XP. Switch to OSX or Linux. But just please quit this.
Gord