Irremedial Suckitude

Evan Coyne Maloney on Microsoft Vista:

Computerworld columnist Scot Finnie has been running the latest pre-release version of Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system. He's compiled a list of 20 gripes with Vista, and draws this conclusion:

Where does Windows Vista fit among many of the PC-based operating systems of today and the last couple of decades? With Beta 2 running on multiple test units, I feel comfortable predicting that Windows Vista will not outpace Mac OS X Tiger for overall quality and usability. It's hard to beat Apple's top-notch GUI design grafted onto an implementation of Unix variant BSD. Mac OS X has excellent reliability, security and usability. That isn't to say that the user interface wouldn't gain if Apple adopted some other best ideas of the day, but Apple has the best operating system this year, last year and next year. It'll be interesting to see what the company delivers in its 10.5 Leopard version of Mac OS X.

Meanwhile, I'm placing Windows Vista as a distant second-best to OS X. I see Linux and Windows 2000 as being roughly tied another notch or two below Vista, with XP being only a half step better than Win 2000.

So, why is the year-old Mac OS X Tiger so much better than Windows Vista, which Microsoft won't even ship before January 2007? It isn't that Apple has put more effort into its operating system; Microsoft has mounted a gargantuan effort on Windows Vista. It's that the two companies have very different goals. I've come to believe that Microsoft has lost touch with its user base.

That last point is absolutely true. For more than a decade, Microsoft seemed to design products more to fortify its monopoly position than to address the needs of actual customers. This led to some short-term benefits for the company (Netscape Navigator once owned the web browser market, and now Microsoft's Internet Explorer does) but it has also led to long-term pain both for the company and customers (flaws in Internet Explorer made the product a major vehicle for delivering computer viruses, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security advises people to avoid the program).

And now, new revelations about Microsoft's sales practices show an outright abuse of existing customers:

[see Maloney's article for the egregious example]

In other words, Microsoft is using the implied threat of legal action against its own customers in order to coerce those customers into buying consulting services from Microsoft. Classy!

Windows Vista is still pre-release software, so it may yet improve. But they're going to have to start finalizing it soon in order to make the target ship date of January 2007. And considering Vista is getting panned by some of Microsoft's biggest cheerleaders, the operating system that's been six years in the making may end up being a disaster of Ishtar proportions. Of course, whether competitors would be able to take advantage of it is another story.

What would cause Microsoft to start failing? Has it developed such a corrosive corporate culture that it's simply incapable of developing products that customers want? It's hard to create great software when your design decisions are geared more towards stifling competitors than satisfying customer needs. Companies that lose sight of the customer do so at their own peril.