The fallacy of Vista's failure

22 October 2009
2:46 pm

windows7With the impending release of Windows 7, tech news media has stepped up the common refrain that somehow Vista was a "failed" operating system. Such sentiments are extremely common on websites like Gizmodo and Engadget and trickle down to similar sister sites owned by each blog's respective company. Big Download, in their "feature" entry about whether or not gamers should upgrade from Vista went so far as to say "Oh boy. First, we are sorry. Windows Vista has been one of Microsoft's worst OS releases in some time."

What's sorry is that this meme is total crap. It's bad enough when it's the regurgitation recycled over and over by end users complaining in forums, but when supposed news sites have picked it up and repeat it as fact that it simply becomes irresponsible.

While I'm not going to say that Vista's release was angelic out of the box, it's very, very important to recognize what the fault of Vista truly was. When Vista was released, XP was already five years old. Initially, Vista was intended to be much more thorough in terms of cutting loose the ties of past operating systems– early discussion intended to replicate what Apple did with the release of OSX and completely revamp the operating system from the ground up, throwing concerns about backwards compatibility to the wind. Unfortunately, as much as this honestly would have been a good thing for Windows as a platform, Microsoft wasn't in the same position to make this dictate with their operating system as Apple was with theirs. Unlike Apple, Microsoft is almost exclusively a software vendor. Apple only has to ensure that OSX works on a handful of system configurations that they, themselves, control, while Windows has to be stable on hundreds (or even thousands) of variations from many, many hardware vendors. When this idea was raised about cutting off support for the past, those vendors, software developers and even users complained about the ramifications. Even in Windows Vista you'll still find 16-bit code in some parts of the operating system, supporting legacy content that hasn't been used in modern computers for years. Nevertheless, despite the necessity, Microsoft conceded to pressure and scrapped their initial intentions for the upcoming operating system.

However, they did still make changes. In going over crash metrics from XP Microsoft saw that device drivers played the largest role in system lock ups. In particular, graphics card drivers were the worst culprit of this– like PCs, graphics drivers have to be coded for a myriad number of graphics cards being plugged into a myriad number of hardware configurations. By their very nature they're situated deep inside the internals of the operating system and when they are responsible for a problem, the problem would generally kill the entire machine– the infamous "blue screen of death." One of the improvements Vista brought was isolating these device drivers from the system kernel so that if a driver crashes it won't take the entirety of the system with it. If you've ever seen your screen blank black and then recover with this message, this is Vista rebooting only the graphics driver instead of crashing your machine like you would have seen in XP.

Obviously big changes like this were going to require hardware vendors put in some elbow work to update their stuff accordingly. Although developers were given copies of Vista in advance much earlier than they had been with XP, many of them did not have things ready for the launch. Creative, for example, was so woefully inept in updating their drivers that even a year after release their Vista drivers were in a half-functional crippled state missing most of the features available on the same hardware in XP. This was almost exclusively the only issue that Vista had at launch– sweeping improvements were made to the operating system and third parties were derelict in updating their products for them. While similar things happened with the release of XP, tech blogs seem to have forgotten this detail.

I would point out that similar problems have affected Apple's release of Snow Leopard, but that misses the point. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are responsible for updating the drivers for hardware they don't manufacture themselves. If you look over sites complaining about the Vista launch, overwhelmingly the complaints were about how one product that previously worked in XP no longer works in Vista. The operating system itself was fine, but other toys didn't work. Somehow this has been attributed as a failure by Microsoft, an incorrect misrepresentation that tech news sites seem happy to repeat as true.

This is probably also why Windows 7 is getting the glowing reviews that Vista did not. 7 did not need to be as much of a sweeping change as Vista had been, so backwards compatibility was easy to obtain– in fact, you can use the same drivers written for Vista in Windows 7 and you don't have any problems. Almost every piece of hardware and software that worked in Vista will work in 7. Developers of both have had three years to get their stuff working in Vista, and accordingly 7 will work as well. The incompatibilities that people faced with Vista are non-existent now, so this is for whatever reason being phrased as the success that Vista lacked when it's more of a case of third parties finally having their acts together. While I like 7, the biggest difference between it and Vista is the taskbar– in fact, 7 is so similar to Vista that I think the hype about how awesome it is comes down to some very strange placebo effect. Microsoft made the same point with their "Mojave Experiment" that showed most complaints about Vista came down to what people heard from others rather than what they saw for themselves. Windows 7 is a great operating system and it's already running on my computers, but given how close it is to Vista I have to wonder if someone at Microsoft decided to roll out the Mojave Experiment on a wider scale.

Ultimately, if Microsoft failed at anything with Vista it was not making sure third parties had their products ready when they released the operating system. But repeating this mantra that Vista itself was something someone needs to be "sorry" about using is completely ridiculous and takes the reason for its rocky release off of those people who caused it– which was not Microsoft.

bitching
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6 Responses to \'The fallacy of Vista's failure\'

    Hi Joshua. Insightful as always, especially the penultimate paragraph. I hadn't looked at the relationship between Windows 7 and Vista like that, but of course you're absolutely right. About that. As for your overarching theme (the "fallacy" of Vista's failure), I'm not sure. Yes, faulty or imperfect third-party drivers were the, er, driving force in a lot of Vista's problems, and you raise some good points. But I can't help but feel that Microsoft still shares some responsibility for releasing a OS with such poor support that in some cases (like mine), it renders the OS nearly unusable. Maybe my case is a bit extreme (my dad, by contrast, after some initial aggravation, has had no problems with Vista), but it was enough for me to switch to Linux (Ubuntu). It's hard for me to say an OS ISN'T a failure when I have to completely replace it because I can't even use it properly.

    I guess it depends on how you define unsupported. I pointed out that developers were provided a RTM copy of the operating system before the same period previously that they had access to XP (I think it was a full month early), to say nothing of the publicly available RC that everyone could obtain months before the launch. They worked hand-in-hand with people to a much higher degree than they had for XP, but there was still very much a "wait and see" approach to Vista. Given the monumental changes to the OS, vendors wanted to see how Vista was adopted before they went through the effort of supporting it. Unfortunately that attitude was absolutely what caused problems for the launch. Microsoft certainly learned their lesson with 7, both by making a public beta and RC much more accessible for the average person and by ensuring the new OS would work with Vista-compatible things. But given how much Microsoft bent over backwards prior to Vista's release, I think any failure by vendors to get on the ball can't really be blamed so much on Microsoft.

    My experience with Vista initially wasn't a lot of fun. I had hardware that didn't work, a woeful gaming experience because Nvidia took so long to update, and lots of peripherals that were incompatible. These were issues that weren't adequately fixed six months after launch, and for some things even a year didn't cut it. It was frustrating, but at no point did I ever think to blame Microsoft for it. If I refresh a company's driver download page and the last update was a month before Vista came out, there's only one group to blame for that in my opinion.

    I can't speak to your problems but I've had Vista on probably six different machines by this point and have found it significantly more stable than XP ever was– to the point that when I had to set up things for my last entry about the XP virtual machine, it was such an exercise in teeth-gnashing that I was thankful for how far Vista and 7 have come.

    I'm ultimately just annoyed seeing supposed journalists froth themselves into excitement about how amazing 7 is while in the same breath call Vista some travesty; for all intents and purposes they're the same operating system, and when I see people act like 7 is great while Vista is awful it makes me wonder if the person saying that actually ever used the other OS or they're simply repeating a common refrain they heard somewhere else.

    Amusingly enough Ars Technica has run a review of Windows 7 today; their recap of the history of XP and Vista (the first page of the lengthy article) more or less reads exactly the same as what I said days ago.

    http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/reviews/2009/10/windows-7-the-review.ars

    Ha! I actually came back to post that link myself. Clearly I have my own background with Vista, which informs how I read media coverage. Since reading your post, I have been more conscious of the tone of the coverage, and it's interesting how much the measured tones of Ars' and your pieces differ from others.

    The other thing to consider is that when Vista was launched, a lot of systems were badged as "Vista Capable" – which were very clearly NOT all that capable.
    There was also an interesting article on SlashDot showing how they made the 'Vista Capable Requirements' less than ideal.

    I think these two additional points, along with what you wrote above, all add to the reason why Vista had the issues it did.

    I'll concede the Vista Capable thing was pretty smarmy, although in many ways that was also the fault of third parties– when Microsoft got sued for it, internal documents showed that Intel had been pressuring them to lower the requirements so their 915 graphics chipset (which is really only intended for mobile devices in the first place) would still be considered "capable." Your Slashdot link mentions that as well.

    Still when it comes to fancy stickers and tiered licensing I've never considered that to be a Microsoft strong suit. But when you have so many third party hardware developers about to have their products made obsolete by the introduction of a new operating system that will be incompatible with them, stuff starts getting hectic.

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