Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?

An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet's News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on.

'Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'

My wife's new Dell laptop came with Vista. I helped her get some of it set up, but the basics of navigating around ("Where'd Windows Explorer go?") has proved increasingly frustrating to her. Not to mention the damnable prompts every time you try to run something ("Are you sure you want to run this?"). I'm about ready to wipe it and start over with my copy of WinXP Pro. At least her old laptop, now mine, I can install Ubuntu on and have a decent experience.

In related news, Microsoft has decided to extend XP's life by 6 months.

Despite Microsoft releasing Windows Vista more than nine months ago the adoption rate has not been as Microsoft hoped. Bowing further to pressure from OEMs and consumers, Microsoft has extended the life of Windows XP, which was due to end sale by OEMs on January 1 next year, to a new date of June 30. Asked if this was an indication of a strong demand for XP, a Microsoft representative sought to downplay the extension, stating 'We wouldn't term it strong, we would describe this as accommodating a certain element who needs more time.'

Pah, yeah right.