Lloyd Ketchum from Liberating Technologies (a Microsoft partner) continues a debate that has been quietly gaining momentum the last couple weeks. In his words:
What in H.E. Double-Hockey-Sticks are people doing that has caused so many to have so much trouble running Windows Vista?
...
I just can't believe that we are simply lucky and for some odd reason that we cannot explain, our Windows Vista experiences have been so much better than what the online experts have shared. It's just too easy to verify things and Vista simply has too many instrumentation tools available to it for issues and questions to persist.
I trust what I see and what I see is a good Vista. I no longer trust our industry's experts - not because I disagree with them, but because I do not see any evidence of their use of expert tools. There is nothing to base trust upon and one "Snark Attack" after another, does not evidence make.
Lloyd, I have absolutely no idea either. Neither does John Obeto, who had an answer to Chris Pirillo's overly-emotional puff piece extolling the virtues of OSX over Windows. I think Chris is a great guy, and a good friend of mine... but I unsubscribed from him a long time ago. He hasn't had anything valuable to say about Windows in quite a while, which is unfortunate. He's a brilliant guy with a maddening attention to detail. But he started giving up on Windows the second I showed him the first Longhorn builds back in 2004. He's so OCD over nit-picky stuff like icon alignment that he misses the underlying beauty of how Windows Rally helps make wireless configuration easier, or the coolness of using Windows Media Center as the home's connected entertainment hub.
But Chris is not the only one. The problem is, I have run into a lot of everyday people that have negative opinions about Vista. It's hard to tell if these people's opinions are based on reading pundits who have turned their backs on Windows, or if they tried to upgrade an already overbloated and underpowered machine, or their OEM didn't pay attention to the end user's experience with their hardware.
I think the real reason is the changes that came with UAC, and the staggering lack of training from Microsoft built into the product on how deep that impact was. I remember the first time I installed Windows ME (to this day I think I am the only one that liked that OS) and how it forced you to sit through an intro video, and then explore some training before diving in.
With the changes in UAC, that video should have been mandatory once again. It should have explained how the threats online have changed, and how Microsoft made some painful changes that in the end would make them safer. It should have explained what happened when you saw one, and how, while annoying, the feature was there to protect people from themselves. And I'm really surprised that Video Professor and the like haven't stepped up with commercials specifically targeting cheap Vista training for the average user.
But I digress. This article on whether or not XP SP3 will slow Vista adoption is just another example of the seemingly concerted effort on the part of the media to create FUD about Vista. The article starts out by creating this air that Vista has a real problem, and in classic tech media fashion, waits until Page 2 to throw this quote at you:
Also, NPD's U.S. commercial point-of-sale data, a database containing sales feeds from value added resellers, shows that 40 percent of Windows PCs sold to businesses now ship with Vista, while the other 60 percent still ship with XP. But that mirrors the pattern seen after the release of other new operating systems, he said.
"While the Vista percentage may seem low, it is very similar to the trend we saw after the XP launch. Businesses have historically taken their time with new operating system rollouts, and the trend we're seeing with Vista is very much in line with previous trends," Swenson said.
Oh, so everything is really ok, following normal upgrade patterns over the last couple decades of computing, but if you hadn't taken the time to read the whole article, you wouldn't have known that.
In a followup, Lloyd calls Windows Journalism Snark-Infested Waters, and I agree. There are plenty of Windows enthusiast websites out there (I would LOVE to name names but I'm not gonna) that value wit over substance (and a rare few that can deftly pull off both). Now, I'm not saying Windows sites should be towing the Microsoft party line... but most have stretched well beyond constructive criticism and into the realm of Snarking for Dollars. There are too few journalists out there who really dig deep into the truth from a technical perspective (Ed Bott is the one who really stands out in my mind), and that is sad.
it's hard not to sound like a conspiracy theorist when I say this, but I think there is a concerted anti-Microsoft effort within the tech community, and it has crept up past the religious zealots and into the people that cover them. Which sucks. because if they took a step back, and took a look at Vista for what it was, they would see a flawed human creation (arent all human creations flawed in some way or another?) that is head and shoulders better than its predecessor.